San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ferry tale: best views of city’s holiday lights
San Francisco looks its best in the holiday season, especially just after dark when the lights come on. It’s as luminous as an ornament on a Christmas tree. The city is best seen from a distance. Up close, it’s a different story.
But this story requires only a modest voyage from San Francisco to landings around the bay. With a little planning you can make a round trip in a single evening from the Ferry Building to Oakland, Alameda, Sausalito, Larkspur or Vallejo, leaving at dusk when the light starts to fade and returning after dark. Every San Franciscan needs a reminder of why we live here. Try this one and see.
I try to make the trip at least once in December mostly because of the holiday lights. When I was a small boy and thought the city at night was full of magnificence, I relished a night ferry ride. If I close my eyes, I can see it again the way I saw San Francisco from the forward deck of an ferryboat years ago: the city rising on its hills, the lights in the windows of the downtown office buildings, and two big red neon signs. One said WELLMAN COFFEE, in capital letters; the other advertised SherwinWilliams paint, with an outline of the world covered over and over by neon paint.
I’ll bet you a cup of Wellman coffee that the world isn’t like that anymore. And it isn’t. But the sense of that city seen from the bay is still there, like an illusion.
Port cities look best from the water: think of New York City from the Staten Island Ferry, or Hong Kong from the Star Ferry. Or San Francisco from the bay.
There was a break in the rain the other afternoon, just in time for the 4:05 p.m. Golden Gate Ferry boat to Sausalito. Ferry service was cut back in the worst of the virus lockdown as more and more commuters decided to work from home. Back in the good old days — two years ago — the lines of customers waiting to catch ferry boats stretched around the Ferry Building. Not anymore. Though Golden Gate Transit added a new schedule with more service to Sausalito on Dec. 13, the word hadn’t gotten out yet and the 4:05 boat was nearly empty.
The boat was the motor vessel Sonoma, and we backed out of the dock on time and turned north. There was less than an hour left in the day. Some remaining rain clouds caught the light.
The shadows get long on a December afternoon, and the winter solstice is nearly upon us. The low angle of the sun gives a special quality to the light. “The changing light at San Francisco is none of your East Coast light, none of your pearly light of Paris,” poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote. “The light of San Francisco is a sea light, an island light. …”
The ride takes only 30 minutes, plenty of time to look out toward the Golden Gate, to stare at the grim onetime prison island of Alcatraz, and to watch the hills above Sausalito get a bit closer. Just past Alcatraz, the wind and the swell from the ocean makes the ferry take a small roll, rocking and pitching just a bit, a reminder that we are sailing on an arm of the sea.
Before the pandemic, the Sausalito ferries had a small bar, where the regular commuters would gather on the ride home. It was like a little floating club, complete with stories about commute and office adventures, music they’d heard about on the Oakland boats, deckhands who knew everybody’s name, the perils of seagull poop, even talk about floating romances with happy endings, like ferry tales.
But the bar and snack service has been suspended, waiting for a better day. It’s a loss.
We landed on Sausalito right on time. The commuters heading home got off and we took on a load of new passengers, including a dozen or so who had ridden bicycles across the Golden Gate Bridge and were riding the ferry back to San Francisco.
A different crowd. Not commuters who see each other most every day, but tourists, out to see the sights. They were lucky that day. The city put on a show.
By now the sun had set, but it was still light enough to take pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge with clouds behind it. Anna Capille and Jo Ann Garbutt, both British Airways flight attendants in town for an overnight layover, had taken the ferry just to ride and take pictures. They had been all over the world. They said the early evening ferry ride was something they especially liked to do on their trips to the West Coast. “It’s wonderful,” Capille said.
It was dark as we sailed toward the city. The red light was turned on atop the Transamerica Pyramid, and a white light on the highest point of Angel Island. These are holiday lights. Once a year.
After about 20 minutes, the San Francisco skyline began to dominate the horizon.
Ferlinghetti spent much of his long life in San Francisco. He’d heard a lot about the city; he thought it would be a good place for poets, took the train headed west. He saw his new city for the first time from the deck of an Oakland ferryboat on a winter morning in 1950. “And San Francisco looked like some Mediterranean port — a small white city with mostly white buildings — a little like Tunis seen from seaward. I thought perhaps it was Atlantis, risen from the sea,” he wrote.
But as the ferryboat Sonoma turned toward San Francisco the other evening, it looked like Manhattan.
The Embarcadero Center towers were outlined with 17,000 lights, the thousand-foot-high Salesforce Tower glittered, the boxy glass high-rises that mark the skyline were lit in their holiday best. The lights strung on the cables of the Bay Bridge moved, like the strings of a harp. The venerable Ferry Building was lit in the red and green colors of Christmas. The lights of the city were reflected on the dark waters of the bay.
The small white Mediterranean city that Ferlinghetti remembered is gone, like the ghost of Christmas past. But sometimes, when the holiday lights come on, the city we have now is impressive, especially at a distance aboard a ferry on a wintry night.