Live like a local
Going nude in San Francisco
It’s not a look I would get away with myself. A pair of leather sandals with little white socks down south, and then a third sock, slightly north, snugly encasing the family jewels. Elsewhere, nothing but skin, baby.
But here in San Francisco’s out and proud gay enclave of The Castro, this is a look that’s not uncommon. The nudist in question is in his 60s, and by no means a gym-honed hard-body. His buttocks jiggle like bread dough as he passes.
Not everyone approves. ‘‘Put some damn clothes on!’’ yells a young guy from across the street. But it’s this intolerance, rather than the nudity, that seems most offensive in this setting. Several passers-by chastise the teenage abuser.
‘‘Shame on you!’’ says an elderly woman waiting for a bus. Others shout support to the strolling nudist. ‘‘More power to you, man’’ yells a slim, elegant black man. ‘‘You go, brother.’’
If I’d arrived in San Francisco a few years ago, no third sock would have been required. As with many other social movements, this city was at the forefront of a ‘‘body freedom’’ revolution, with The Castro considered ‘‘clothing optional’’ until a controversial ban on public nudity in 2012.
Now activists of all body shapes walk the streets, protesting their right to be naked if they so desire, but with a little jiggling sock strategically in place so they don’t get arrested.
I’m just a few hours off the plane and already it’s clear: San Francisco is my kind of town. Relatively compact, gloriously eccentric, full of intricately painted Victorian buildings marching up the hillsides, it feels like a place I could easily call home. This hilly little metropolis that has welcomed weirdos of all stripes from around the world now opens its loving arms to me.
I’ve been brought over on Airbnb’s dime to check out the city where the company began, staying in a well-appointed Airbnb apartment in Pacific Heights. The idea is to become a living embodiment of the company’s new motto ‘‘Live like a local’’, avoiding the usual well-worn tourist traps and investigating farflung neighbourhoods instead.
I’m delighted to be here. It’s a famously bohemian city, a former gold-rush town where freaks and outcasts, artists and poets, writers and musicians and revolutionaries came, established communities and changed the world.
San Francisco has been a seat of creativity, compassion and counter-cultural energy for the best part of a century. From samesex marriage to green cities, universal healthcare to organic food co-ops, medical marijuana to a liveable wage, many ideas bedded in here before spreading outwards around the world.
The place was ground zero for the beat writers of the 50s and the hippie movement of the 60s and 70s, and more recently, it’s been at the vanguard of cultural change of a very different sort, leading the digital revolution.
Google, Apple, Hewlett Packard, Dropbox, Yahoo, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb and a dozen more worldchanging companies have their headquarters nearby, with hundreds of newer tech start-ups clustered around them.
That iPhone in your pocket? Might never have happened if Steve Jobs hadn’t wandered around this city, dreaming digital dreams after dropping acid in Golden Gate Park.
Now I had a week to wander around this city myself, without the aid of strong psychedelics. My plan was to hang out in neighbourhoods tourists usually missed in their haste to ‘‘do San Francisco’’, only to find themselves traipsing around the same over-priced spots amid huge selfie-clicking herds of other tourists.
Forget Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz Island, the arid malls of Union Square. I had no interest in hopping on a cable car, or tramping across the Golden Gate bridge, or beating my way through a herd of buskers and mimes and five-minute-sketch artists to eat seafood chowder from a bowl of hollowed-out bread.
I wanted to go where the locals went, and get a brief sense of what it might be like to live in such a storied place. So each morning I set off for a different neighbourhood and rambled around with no particular plan in mind, to see what I might see. I was struck, first of all, by the beauty of the place.
Its geography makes San Francisco endlessly enigmatic, the 49 hills within the city boundaries ensuring that even a slight movement up any slope markedly changes your view of all the others. The light, too, was everchanging, the weather veering from clear blue sky to light rain to dense sea fog within just a few hours.
The Mission, Haight Ashbury, Telegraph Hill. The Castro, Nob Hill, Pacific Heights. The Presidio, Potrero Hill, North Beach. Russian Hill, Twin Peaks, The Embarcadero. There’s a mysterious poetry to the inner-city place names, and each has a distinctive character. ‘‘More than any city I know, San Francisco is made up of discrete neighbourhoods, like quasivillages, each with its own unique aura’’ writes Salon.com founder Gary Kamiya in his marvellous 2013 book Cool Gray City of Love, and he should know – he spent years driving cabs here.
So I headed off, into the unknown, just following my nose. I dodged street kids panhandling for change outside the hippie head shops of Haight Ashbury, tucked into piquant duck dumplings in Chinatown, tried on luchador wrestling masks in the Mexican backstreets of The Mission, and rifled through dusty record stores all over the city.
I ate a flaky croissant from the famous Tartine Bakery while gazing out over the golden city from Dolores Park. The site of a huge refugee camp after the 1906 earthquake that devastated the city, it’s now a magnet for winos and weed smokers, sunbathing gay couples and buff new-agers practising tai chi under the trees.
I took an ‘‘alternative walking tour’’ (wildsftours.com) with Mazin, a local musician wrapped in a long black shawl. We ducked down alleyways famous for their political murals, strolled past the earliest feminist collective in the United States, visited the oldest building in the city, the Mission San Francisco de Asis, a whitewashed adobe church built by Yelamu and Ohlone Indian slaves in 1791.
Next door was a little cemetery where the city’s most pious early settlers lie buried, later a backdrop for a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in which Kim Novak shows signs of losing her mind.
Perhaps she was merely haunted by the dark history of this place? A little further afield, under streets now paved and thick with traffic, lie the bodies of 5000 Indians who succumbed to diseases brought by the invading Spanish.
That night, under a clear, starry sky, I ate at a restaurant called the Foreign Cinema in Mission St while an ancient projector whirred beside me, showing art-house movies on the courtyard wall.
I took an Uber out to Land’s End, a wild, rocky promontory where a chilly wind threw up huge breakers and the Golden Gate bridge stretched like a necklace across the bony shoulders of the distant bay.
The following day, I headed for North Beach, the city’s biggest Italian neighbourhood, and had breakfast at Caffe Trieste, a place that’s remained unchanged since 1956, when it was the first espresso joint on the West Coast.
Right at the heart of beatnik culture in the 1950s, the Trieste was the former hangout of writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso. Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for The Godfather while sitting in the back corner, wired on too much caffeine.
Everyone from Bob Dylan to Luciano Pavarotti has made pilgrimages here, and beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 97 and the founder of the reknowned City Lights bookstore just around the corner, still drops in for his morning espresso.
‘‘Welcome to the gay-bourhood’’ said Adrian Santos the following
morning, pointing out landmarks from the roof of his home in The Castro. Santos hosts Airbnb guests here, many of whom arrive hoping for a holiday fling. ‘‘Men would rather be here, in the heart of the action, than some hotel downtown. They want to know where the local gay bars are. I just say it’s all of them!’’.
Six foot tall, squeezed into a tight white singlet with arms that aren’t so much guns as heavy artillery, Santos is a former flight attendant turned computer programmer. As he showed me around the place he called ‘‘the centre of the gay universe in America today’’, he turned heads everywhere. It seemed apt to take his picture in front of a neon sign offering ‘‘Hot Cookies’’ at a local bakery.
Later that night, I was back in the Haight to have dinner at a famous modern Mexican taqueria called The Little Chihuahua, set up by New Zealander Andrew Johnstone. At the dive bar next door, I met a fairly tragic soul, stubbly and drunk, wearing an ancient striped shirt that had frayed in long vertical lines down the stripes so that thin strips of pale flesh bulged through.
Between hefty slugs of beer, he held forth on a vast variety of subjects, scattering his conversation with literary quotations. He recognised my accent, and told tall tales of adventures he’d had in Oamaru, Timaru, Hokitika.
‘‘I’ve been in 52 countries, and all over New Zealand,’’ he slurred. ‘‘Where you from?’’ The top of the South Island. ‘‘Blenheim? No? Ah, okay, Nelson. Give my love to Kaiteriteri Beach!’’. The trick to enjoying a new place, he said, was to shun the beaten track.
‘‘That’s what I did in New Zealand, and that’s what you should do over here. Places like Fisherman’s Wharf are bad for your soul. If you go out to Oakland, you might get shot, but at Fisherman’s Wharf, they just bore you to death!’’
Later that same night, in a raucous biker bar called the Toronado in the Lower Haight, I met a fellow journalist. He made his living writing about beer, and shouted me pint after pint of delicious local brews.
‘‘Man, you got here just in time’’’ he yelled over a punishingly loud soundtrack of punk and metal records. ‘‘When you write your story, tell people that if they’re coming to San Francisco, they better come soon, before the rich have totally ruined the place. If they leave it much longer, all the people who make this place so interesting will have moved a coupla hours away so they can afford the rent.’’
San Francisco now has the highest rents in the US, he said, to the extent that some had taken to calling the place ‘‘Manhattan West’’. For this, my companion blamed all the highly paid dot.com workers who had colonised formerly low-income neighbourhoods, the poor now being squeezed out by a new elite of Stanford graduates, cashed-up code crunchers and Silicon Valley tech moguls.
He made the point that these were times of high irony. The very things that had attracted the flood of hip young techies to the city centre – its diverse cultural mix, its progressiveness, the cheap eateries and gritty dive bars and anything-goes creative vibe – were being eroded by all the new money they brought with them.
Certainly, it felt like a city undergoing rapid change. Everywhere you look, gentrification was jammed in high gear, with older businesses displaced by artisan bakeries, single-origin coffee joints and upscale hipster hangouts.
The next day I met Raphael, a local with a very different point of view. We collided by chance in a bar beside the famous Fillmore, the venue where local legends Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Sly and The Family Stone once played to tie-dyed trippers during the late-60s Summer of Love.
‘‘I used to ride my bike around this neighbourhood,’’ said Raphael, one eye fixed on the baseball on the TV behind the bar. ‘‘Then I had my own family, so we moved out towards San Jose to make a better life for our kids.’’
He was a ‘‘money manager’’, he said, and what we were witnessing in San Francisco was just modern capitalism in action.
‘‘In recent years, there’s been a huge influx of both capital and creative people from outside the city. It’s changed the place forever, but that’s just the way capital works. Limited land, increased demand, rents go crazy. This was always a gold rush town, and it still is. It’s just a digital gold rush now.’’
Yes, a lot of lower-paid people had been forced to move out and rent somewhere cheaper an hour or so away, he said, but there was no point hating the tech crowd for that.
‘‘They’re just scapegoats, really. San Francisco costs a lot because it’s a special place, and there aren’t enough houses to go around. Tennessee Williams once said: ‘America has only three cities: New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Everywhere else is Cleveland.’ That’s really true. You’d have to add Austin and Portland and Seattle, but in this whole huge country, there’s only a tiny cluster of truly magical places like San Francisco where people will pay big money to live. All the rest is just churches and flyovers and Starbucks.’’