A splendid city — but who even has a minute to notice?
Midweek, San Francisco on the edge of spring. A beautiful day, if you have time to notice.
The 11 o’clock meeting started late and it went on longer than expected, and now you are late meeting a pal for lunch in the Financial District. No cabs, no Uber either, so you duck into the Muni Metro subway, just catch an inbound car, hustle up the steps at the Montgomery Station, take the wrong exit, hustle up Sansome Street, up to Montgomery, making all the green lights, moving as fast as you can go.
Then you notice: Everyone else is walking as fast as you are, fast as a New York minute. Everybody looks like they are late for something. How can that be? Everybody is laid back here on the Left Coast. That’s what they say in New York anyway.
Something has changed in our junior Manhattan by the bay. Everything seems to be moving faster, except for the traffic, which is moving slower. There is more noise, there are more sirens, more bikes, more everything. More people, for sure. Our version of the subway seems more crowded; jam-packed, people scowling. Maybe the city will hire some subway people pushers to jam in more passengers at rush hour, like Tokyo.
The pace has picked up; you can’t help but notice. But it’s casual haste. The men look rumpled, as if they just fell out of the clothes dryer. In the Financial District, neckties are as rare as pay telephones. The women, however, have that springtime freshness, short skirts, long legs. The women, at least, are keeping up San Francisco standards.
There are beggars on the Wall Street of the West and at Montgomery and Market. Some young men with signs and leaflets warn that President Obama will get us into a war with Russia, if we are not careful. The crowds flow past, like a river in flood. No one stops or even slows down.
I run into another native son on Montgomery Street and remark about what I claim is the mad vitality of the Financial District. This is nothing, he says: “You should see what’s happening in SoMa.” SoMa? He must mean South of Market. What’s a scion of an old San Francisco family doing South of Market? And where’s your tie?
Of course, I’m dismayed, but only for a moment. I don’t have time to be dismayed. San Francisco has a new energy. It’s humming with electricity, like those power plants up on the Sierra rivers. It’s the high tech invasion, of course, but it is more than that. We are in some kind of amazing age. San Francisco is in the national news all the time these days — the place is full of new money, new ideas, new people.
A lot of old San Franciscans hate the new San Francisco. “It’s not the city I remember,” they say. “It’s changed.” Of course it’s changed. And not necessarily for the worse.
I am reminded of the essay E.B. White wrote about another city. “There are roughly three New Yorks,” he wrote. “There is first the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable.
“Second there is the city of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out by night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities, the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.
“It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.
“Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion ... ” Each new person, White wrote, “embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer.”
I am reminded of my grandmother, who was born in Ohio and came to San Francisco as a girl when there were still horsecars and Emperor Norton roamed the streets.
“I remember the first time I saw the city,” she told me when she was a very old lady. “I was so glad, I wanted to run up Market Street. I never wanted to leave.”
She never did. But she did complain, sometimes, about all those new people.