FINDING SAN FRANCISCO: PART I

 

At first glance San Francisco appears an odd and somewhat mismatched marriage between east coast structural design and Pacific coast appreciations. It’s a peculiar creation, an on descript ambiance that leaves uncertainty in response. It is easy to say that San Francisco is simply a city like no other, which is perfectly true, but that does little to define its essence.

Of course, a lot of this I knew going in and was precisely what drew me to the city. I have visited southern California several times since 2013 and the furthest north I’ve been is Yosemite Valley. But I’ve long known San Francisco as the oldest city in a state that in part due to its need to adapt to extreme natural elements and in part due to its history and culture is in a constant move for the modern. San Francisco was modeled very much then like Boston and New York; tall Edwardian era buildings, narrow streets, immigrant quarters and designed around public transportation unlike, say, Los Angeles in which an automobile was already a necessity as early as the late 1920s.

After the Spanish, the Jesuits and the prospectors either left or settled, much of California was built to welcome the migrations west after the Reconstruction era when the industrializing northeast was becoming overcrowded with migrants from the South and new arrivals from Europe. Many families, entrepreneurs and land developers began making the track westward in a way that would be repeated, infamously, by Okies much later during the Dust Bowl. California, with its fabled sunny skies, warm weather and wide-open land was the new Canaan for millions of migrants who, rather than duplicate the bustling tight cities of the east began instead ot work with the land, buildings fruit groves, ranches and began to rethink housing with this new found space. By the early 20^th century William Mulholland had found a way to bring down water from Owens Valley for the needed irrigation.

Of course, with the easing of travel after WWI California began to attract a different sort of settler. The businessman, urban developers, hotel magnates and, finally, the film industry. And so the cities like Los Angeles and San Diego bloomed from sleepy towns into “new cities” in many ways unlike anything seen or that could even be accommodated in the east.

In time, European immigrants began finding their way to the Pacific Coast from Ellis Island. Anaheim, for instance, became a German stronghold (interestingly, the early German immigrants seemed to be drawn to the southwest with communities taking root in Santa Fe and other cities).

The completion of the Pacific railway in the latter half of the 19^th century likely inspired these migrations and it was its construction, in fact, that made California a haven for a new set of immigrants arriving now from China and Japan.

As the diversity of its population and the varied climate across the wide state would imply, the infrastructure of the state became widely varied and distinct from huts to bungalows.

Recent decades have brought immigrants from around the world, students and entrepreneurs from all over the country and the new needs and developments have also influenced the housing from the first ranch houses, modernist architecture and homes with special consideration for wild fires and earthquake proofing.

While much of the rest of California has evolved into its own individual identities (Silicon Valley, Beverly Hills, Oakland, etc.) the look and even atmosphere of San Francisco has remained rooted in the golden age of American building.

That’s not to say it stood still. It could not, in fact, after the devastating earthquake of 1906 which, along with the ensuing fires, leveled much of the city. In a rush to bring the city back to prominence as an international port of commerce Mayor Eugene Schmitz made a point of downplaying the scale of the disaster to encourage reinvestment in the city.

San Francisco was quickly rebuilt. In less than a decade there were virtually no signs of a major natural disaster having devastated the area, but the haste with which the city was brought back up from its ashes meant a criminal compromise in the soundness of the infrastructure.

Nonetheless, the city returned to its vibrancy, its industry and even its seediness with its red-light districts.

As the decades passed on San Francisco’s reputation changed from a mariner’s delight with the saloons of the Barbary Coast during the turn of the 20^th century to the mecca of the counter culture sixty years later, a utopia of free love, drugs, music and flower children as encapsulated by Scott McKenzie.

More than any other city in California, San Francisco reflects its long and colorful history with features telling different stories from its varied past. I’ve heard it compared to Boston and it shares with my city a long episodic and sometimes turbulent history. But just like Boston and New York were shaped by fragments of many stories overtime into unique metropolises so San Francisco became a place like no other. It is a city with a voice, a mind, a story and a heart all its own.