My San Francisco

I was born in San Francisco and lived all my life within an hour’s drive of The City (as Bay Area natives call it) till I moved to to the Northwest in 1997. I never lived in San Francisco itself after my first six weeks in an incubator there, but it always felt like my city, and I’m protective of it and of my memories of its most beautiful and special places.

I love Coit Tower—the WPA-era murals inside it, the views of the bay and San Francisco from its apex, even the shape of the building itself. I remember when Union Square still looked like it does in Francis Ford Coppola’s great thriller, “The Conversation.” As a child, my mother and I would go into The City at Christmastime to stare at the gorgeous windows around Union Square and visit the City of Paris building (demolished by Neiman-Marcus in 1981, the bastards), a lovely beaux-arts-style landmark. We filled our tummies on the great soups at Salmagundi on Geary Street before seeing Peter Donat or Philip Anglim on stage at ACT across the street, and I savored the thick coffee milkshakes at Bill’s Place on Clement Street. Years later I went back to Clement to spend endless happy hours browsing art and design ideas at Green Apple Books.

During my college years I loved dancing at the I-Beam in the Haight (as did Rock Hudson when he was in town) and shopping for neon plastic sunglasses, watches and funky New Wave everything at the Headlines stores on Polk Street and Castro Street, each nestled among sex shops and leather bars and populated with adorable twinks. During the nineties I got married in the exquisite San Francisco City Hall building (Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio did the same thing in the 1950s), and had some of the best meals of my life at Greens, the famous vegetarian restaurant in the Marina district. I loved having afternoon tea in the Fairmont’s Cirque Room to celebrate a special occasion, or meeting friends in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel before showing them around my favorite parts of the city.

I even miss freezing my tuchis up at the Marin Headlands just across the Golden Gate Bridge and looking down at spectacular views of San Francisco (please, don’t ever call my city Frisco) while gusts of cold wind blew my hair straight back and turned my ears first red, then white with cold. (And that was in the summer; in winter it felt positively polar up there.) I wish I could duck into the Musée Mechanique just below Cliff House and enjoy 80-year-old mechanical fortune tellers and player pianos for a few bucks’ worth of quarters again, but it’s moved to Pier 45 at Fisherman's Wharf. I'm glad it still exists, but in its old location, under the boardwalk, it seemed so pleasingly down-at-the-heels. Fisherman's Wharf, while no longer as skanky a place as I knew (and avoided) from childhood, still boasts enough seedy spots to remind me why I've never liked it.

One of my favorite (and most frequent) San Francisco destinations over the years was Golden Gate Park, from its lakes to the elegant glass domed Conservatory of Flowers (one of the world’s largest) to the meadows full of tiny daisies. My father took me there with VW-loads of his hippie friends in the 1960s when I was very small. I remember passing through the Haight-Ashbury district to get there in the late sixties and early seventies and knowing even as a little child that the Haight, and the U.C. Berkeley campus, which my father also took me to, were the places to find hippie culture. (My parents were both students at Cal when they met, and my mom followed the more traditional Cal values while my father took the other road.) I think our sojourns to the epicenters of the counterculture were his attempts at balancing out what he thought was his daughter’s overly mainstream, white-bread, suburban world.

I always felt out of place when visiting my father and hanging out with his scruffy friends during my infrequent visits with him. I felt weird because of my comparative lack of weirdness among these people. At least during Dad’s visits we were were often hanging out in attractive city parks full of impressive things to see and interesting people to gawp at. My father wanted me to see hairy, lefty urban culture as an antidote to what he saw as sleepy, conservative, stultifying suburban values. Sadly, he and his friends and their choices emphasized all the scarier aspects of hippie culture instead of showing me the fresher, freer, more positive aspects. They may have loved countercultural values for their anti-war, anti-establishment elements, and I can admire those aspects, too, at a nearly forty-year remove from the experience. But what I saw and shrank from even as a very tiny child were physically dirty folks with stoned expressions who made a lot of jokes about sex that they thought I didn’t understand, and a father who picked up stray hitchhikers and invited them into his succession of coughing VW Beetles while he drove down foggy streets on dark nights whether I was in the car or not.

Dad also took me to graveyards for picnics occasionally; this scared me at the time, but I wonder whether my own penchant for old cemeteries grew out of these odd al fresco afternoons. On my few overnight visits, Dad thought it funny to have me sleep on a daybed made up under a bookcase that featured a real human skull as a decorative element. My father and his friends had no clue what was appropriate behavior around a small child, listened to me only sporadically and then laughed at whatever I said without explaining to me why my opinions or questions were so funny. I felt lonely among them, and just as much a misfit among hippies as I did around the suburban folks I grew up among.

But I always loved visiting Golden Gate Park, whether with my dad and his deadhead pals, with my beloved uncle on a trip to the Steinhart Aquarium, or with my mom on our way to the de Young Museum. The Japanese Tea Garden had (and still has) koi ponds, melt-in-your-mouth almond cookies and an impossibly steep Japanese bridge to climb, and there were free opera and band concerts at the band shell between the aquarium and the de Young. I enjoyed the whole park, but oh, how I loved the de Young. That’s where I first saw King Tut’s golden mummy case, treasures from the time of of Alexander the Great, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and so many important visiting exhibitions. Even when there wasn’t a blockbuster show there, the de Young was like a visual sampler platter of art, craft and design through the ages. Like other grand old art collections in grand old buildings around the country, one found rooms full of elegant furniture, hallways lined with vitrines stocked with porcelain and fine silver pieces, small portraits and sweeping landscapes, all in a building that had a history and a personality of its own.

Visiting the de Young felt kind of like stepping into an eccentric old aunt’s mansion, but one built in a distinctly Californian style, not like the darker, heavier mansions-based art museums of the East Coast (which I’ll admit I also love). When I was little, the best part for me was going into the central hall lined with suits of armor and banners. It was like a grand baronial space, a dramatic fantasy place where I stepped out of time. The museum was welcoming and of its time, and I loved it.

The de Young that I loved so was a gracious Spanish-style building built in 1919 with a lovely tower built in 1921. It had a simple stucco exterior and flanked by palm trees and a stood behind a pond. Its style was very Californian. A number of buildings on the Mills College campus in nearby Oakland, including my beautiful dormitory, Olney Hall, were built in the same simple Californian stucco, beam and tile-roofed architectural style around the same time. This 1910s and '20s Californian version of the Spanish style has always appealed to me as carrying a number of the elements and proportions found in the Arts & Crafts bungalows built at the time while also incorporating some of the state’s Spanish mission and rancho past. Architect Julia Morgan (most famous for designing the much grander Hearst Castle) used it to good effect in several buildings on the Mills College campus, including the Margaret Carnegie Library, where I worked part-time in the Albert M. Bender Rare Book Room during all four of my years at Mills. This style is unpretentious and it fits into the Californian landscape, and even when built on a grand scale, its simplicity keeps it from overwhelming its occupants. It was a lovely and elegant complement to the art of the de Young.

And now it’s gone.

The huge Loma Prieta earthquake of October 1989 damaged the de Young so profoundly that it was eventually found seismically unsafe. Retrofitting the building didn’t make financial sense to San Francisco voters, and in 1998 they voted to demolish it and replace it. It was torn down and the new de Young’s construction began in 2001. And then some lurking evil force settled into the brains of those in charge of the new design like a malevolent worm. It somehow ate away at their good sense and at any desire they might once have had to create a welcoming public space that both enhanced the art-viewing experience and invited the visitor to linger and appreciate the space itself. Gone were gracious details, human-scaled spaces, architectural echoes of the region’s design history or cultural history, and architectural context for historical pieces. The museum’s designers, architects, directors and private funders instead described the old de Young’s design with sneers and scorn. They couldn’t wait to rip it down and erase any visual reminders of it, save the palm trees that used to surround it. Considering it outdated, tired and ugly, they stated that their new building design sought "to communicate diversity; it is an embodiment of the open-ended concept of art fostered by the museum. It expresses the distinctiveness of different cultures and, at the same time, it is a place of common ground, where diversity meets and intersects, where otherwise hidden kinships between divergent cultural forms become visible and tangible."

Oh yeah? Could have fooled me. It’s the ugliest museum I have ever seen.

I’ll write more about it soon.