The walking Caen

Fantastic city. At high noon the smog was thickly-sickly yellow enough to blot out Twin Peaks, but by 5 p.m. wet fog dripped from the leaves in Sutro Forest, stole through the Presidio’s green corridors and snaked across the Gate Bridge to flatten out on the Bay. White sails and spinnakers were gobbled up, Alcatraz (how nice that we no longer have to worry about Alcatraz) disappeared, the East Bay continued to shine fitfully in what was left of a May day of many moods. The foghorns began calling to each other in their patiently irritable way. Beacons glowed dimly as dazzling sunset light shone on a distant corner of Marin. A ghostly aircraft carrier emerged for a few minutes along the Marina shore and then vanished toward the open ocean on this day that began small town hot and gradually became timeless, a gray San Francisco experience suspended between invisible sea and sky …

I looked around at the city, first broiling under the early sun, then shivering in the cold, a creature of San Francisco, never dressed quite right, always fascinated by the changing patterns, marveling at the infinite variety produced by the westering breezes — the lovely, maddening breezes that fill the streets with debris as they sweep the skies clean …

San Francisco: ghost town forever, and what wonderful ghosts, visible only on foggy days — clipper ships and robber barons, blowsy B-girls and big busted dowagers, Jack London in a rowboat and Bill Saroyan on a bicycle, Lucius Beebe fastidiously dusting off a seat with a silk hankie before setting down at Izzy Gomez’, fistfights over tarts and artists in the Black Cat as Ned Greenway called the social shots — and Templeton Crocker? He was high in his penthouse and all’s well with the world, especially for Crockers, Floods, Huntingtons and whatever’s Fair, Tessie. In the world’s best saloons, pink Virginia ham on hot biscuits with a dab of honey, absolutely free! Not to mention all the Bay shrimp you could eat with both hands, turning them this way and then that to shell them. The Bay would never be empty of shrimp, the ocean would always be filled with crab and we would never run out of the days of our years, cheering for Bert Ellison and Ping Bodies as we went.

The old sentimentalists keep trying to find their way back to the heartbeat of San Francisco, to where it was, whatever it was, before the big black buildings came. Sniffing the air for that unique blend of salt, coffee, sourdough, steam beer and crushed eucalyptus leaves — whatever it is that produces the Sanfranciscaroma. Once there was Signor Ghirardelli’s chocolate, and, along Folsom, a smell of coffee so thick you could drink it. Spices in Chinatown alleys and drying fish on rooftops. On lower Broadway, liplicking smell of hot raviolis being canned, just like Mama Mia used to make. But there is still Freed Teller Freed on Polk and here and there the doughnuts that always smell better than they taste, rising above the noxious obnoxious fumes of the cars. And the buses spewing their carbarn monoxide …

The fog was in and the fever was on me. I walked slowly through the Flood building lobby, savoring the heavy marble, the soaring ceiling and the brass fixtures that weigh a ton and are worth a fortune. God bless you, Mr. Flood, and your lavish old hand! At Fifth and Market, the bricklayers were at work, laying maybe one brick every four minutes for the new “ornamental” sidewalks. All so peaceful and days-of-yorish, the pile of bricks on the board over sawhorses, the wet mortar, tap-tap-tap of trowel as the brick is eased into place. You could fall asleep watching it, right there alongside the omnipresent woman selling “Awake,” and in your mind’s ear you hear horses clip-clopping toward Lucky Baldwin’s hotel, an Iron Monster streetcar grinding along, blast of ferry horns from the distant Bay, white SP racing orange Key, as a wizeguy newsboy hollers, “Wuxtry, Market Streets runs inta da ferry!”

Walking through the past and present on a long and foggy afternoon. Past the “Sliced Before Your Eyes” beaneries with their chickens revolving on spits, torturing hunks of beef hanging from chains and dripping in the hot lights (the chef must be Torquemada, cackling and skewering). Hopeless sights on hopeless Sixth: barbers sprawled in their own barber chairs, staring at their own emptiness reflected in the mirrors of infinity. Old queens grown fat, old beauties grown thin, old men grown crabby as they shuffled along, muttering to themselves. Your heart goes out to them: the city is cruel to the weak, deaf to those who love it, subservient only to those who are wrecking it; like all neurotics, the city hates its friends and loves its enemies.

Night falling, this night in May or December, now or never, palm trees dying at great expense in the Mission, the day’s wash flapping over hidden backyards on Guerrero, slick Chicanos strutting along their 24th St. turf and the wind making you shiver as you think of a great city’s past … and future.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle May 21, 1972.