The crack in the bay window

Well, everybody’s talking baseball today, so let’s wish the Giants luck and the pennant and change the subject …

“Never look back, says the wise man glibly, “there’s no future in it.”

True, slick, neat, and all that — but in San Francisco one has to look back to find the key, at least architecturally. The question before the house is simply this: is San Francisco to become a sort of unlikely parking lot for concrete blockhouses and balconied bath houses, traversed by the freeways they in some ways resemble, or will some attempt be made to preserve the character of the last “different” city in the country? Or, to put it another way: which sings the song of San Francisco more strongly — the cable car, literally rooted to the heart of the city, or the Jack Tar Hotel?

I don’t wish to be cruel about the Jack Tar. The Texas gentleman who financed it spent many millions to make it just what it is, and, being an Anglophile, I’m pleased to see the nickname for a British sailor up in revolving lights on Van Ness (a Jack Tar IS a British sailor, isn’t he?). It’s just that the Jack Tar is a symbol of things to come, and presumably the day is not far distant when the storied hills of Baghdad-by-the-Bay will be covered with lively replicas of its South-landish bravado.

After all, if we weren’t fortunate enough to have the most beautiful City Hall in the land and had to build a new one, it would undoubtedly look like the new Hall of Justice — a monumentally bare slab that needs only watch towers and guards with machine guns to complete the grim picture.

“The trouble with San Francisco,” Lucius Beebe once said, “is that it’s trying so dreadfully hard to live up to a legend that never existed.” R.L. Duffus of the New York Times offered almost the same observation: “San Franciscans know there’s a magic about their city, but they are no longer quite sure where it is.”

Well, we know where it isn’t. It’s not in lopping off hills and uprooting trees that were old when Adolph Sutro was young, it’s not in freeways advancing like monsters across the ruins of houses that escaped the Fire, it’s not in rows of glassy-eyed new apartment building staring open-mouthed at each other, it’s not even in fuming buses filled with fuming people being jolted along to their look-alike houses.

I know this is an idle observation, but perhaps it’s mildly illustrative to recall that the Ferry Building, in the prime of its hustle-bustle of scuttling passengers and ferry toots and neverending one-reel movies in its waiting rooms, was grandly exciting — and to step out of it into the encircling bell-clanging roar of Market Street was unforgettable. Its present-day counterpart, the drab, bus-clogged Bay Bridge Terminal, is somehow one of the most depressing places in town.

Some of the “magic” that Mr. Duffus wonders about lies in San Francisco’s continuity with a past that, no matter what Mr. Beebe implies, was as colorful and memorable as that of any city 10 times its age. But that continuity is being destroyed in our frantic eagerness to tear down. Irreplaceable (if sometimes horrible) Victorian examples of an era that gave birth to the very image of San Francisco are disappearing daily; one by one, the bay windows are being smashed — the windows that formed the shining, unique face of a city.

Tear down a Silas Palmer mansion (and replace it with a motel) and you lose a link in a legend, you blur a city’s picture of itself. Tear down an Izzy Gomez’s (sure, it was only a saloon) and you destroy the living memories of the William Saroyans and the Dong Kingmans and the whole crazy, wonderful crowd that contributed to a city’s neverending need to be special. Tear down an old bank that knew the likes of Ralston and Sharon and pretty soon nobody remembers the Ralstons and Sharons and some of the flavor of a city is gone forever; it might as well be Keokuk.

Where is the magic, Mr. Duffus? A lot of it is (soon, I fear, to become “was”) in San Francisco’s hodgepodge helterskelter make-up — the very thing that is giving the Planners so many headaches today. The city just grew and, by some mysterious alchemy, it grew beautiful, wandering up and down the hills, along winding alleys, clinging by its fingernails to improbable precipices. Nobody could have planned it that way, but when the whole glorious mess was thrown together it came alive — yes, magically, Mr. Duffus — and turned a bay-windowed face to the matchless Bay and sang and danced and smiled at the world.

Of course, all is not yet lost. The Zellerbach skyscraper is a noble addition to the skyline, and the John Hancock Building, with its polished granite façade and its entrancing archways, looks at home amid the Corinthian colonnades and modernized Gothic of the financial district. But on the other hand consider the proposed designs for the Golden Gateway. They are all neat and efficient and expensive as hell — and they look about as much like San Francisco as Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle or the La Brea tar pits. Why does it have to look “like San Francisco,” and what do I mean by that anyway? I mean the San Francisco that George Sterling epitomized as “the cool, grey city,” the city that looked like no other city in the world because it wasn’t the city of the elusive magic and the legends (not myths, Mr. Beebe) that made it unique.

Well anyway, good luck to the Seals. I mean, the Giants.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on April 12, 1960.