A city-state frame of mind - San Francisco

A City-State of Mind

'IT IS, OF COURSE, a dying city," my friend said. We sat on a bench in Nob Hill's Huntington Park, enjoying postprandial cigars amid some of the most elegant architecture in America's most beautiful city, and at first the shock of his rhetorical offensive sent me reeling.

"Its population is diminishing," he went on. "It's no longer the great banking center it used to be. And let's face it--" he waved his hand in a semicircle that encompassed Grace Cathedral, the Huntington Hotel, and the Pacific Union Club--"none of this is real."

Having just two months previously shaken the dust of forty years in New York City from my heels and crossed the continent to take up residence in San Francisco, I wasn't prepared to accept any such broad-brush indictment. Besides, I realized, my friend wasn't exactly an unprejudiced witness. He is, in fact, a dyed-in-the-wool Southern Californian, based in a town about an hour's drive east of Los Angeles (that vast metastasized parking lot), and what I was getting was pretty obviously a canned speech crafted, at one or two removes, by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.

So there! Nevertheless, his sly digs stuck in my craw, and during the following days I found myself wondering whether there was any truth to his indictment.

A discreet check of census figures confirmed that San Francisco is indeed losing population. And yet his cleverly constructed picture of citizens fleeing a dying metropolis in despair is the opposite of the truth, being based on a freak of political geography.

The City and County as San Francisco, which are congruent, are simply the square tip (about four miles on a side) of the San Francisco peninsula, which juts northward between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. The metropolitan area over which they preside, on the other hand--the so-called "Bay area"--includes notable municipalities like Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, San Rafael, San Mateo, and San Jose, not to mention such lush suburbs as Marin County. Taken together, they comprise the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States, exceeded only by New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

San Francisco, in short, is analogous to New York City's Borough of Manhattan (which has also been losing population), and neither can be understood without reference to the vast hinterlands that surround, sustain, and are sustained by them. Nor does it prove anything, incidentally, that San Jose has recently become the largest city in the Bay area--any more than it proves anything that Manhattan's population is smaller than that of Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx.

A Manhattan or a San Francisco loses population, not because it is "dying," but because it is sacrificing superfluities to its true function. Both, in the past, sheltered large numbers of people who simply lived there, as one might live today in Oakland or Brooklyn. But as each has increasingly assumed its role as the cultural capital of its milieu, large areas that were once essentially residential have been taken over for other purposes. Their residents have, for the most part, sensibly moved to the surrounding "bedroom counties"--greatly expanding the population of these and reducing that of the central city.

The San Francisco Bay area, in other words, is a howling success, and growing (forgive the pun) like the Green Bay Tree.

But what about San Francisco's relative decline as a business center? Here my Los Angeles friend was indeed on to something. It is undoubtedly true that San Francisco has largely lost its old hegemony to Los Angeles. (Historians may yet conclude that the day the money-men of Los Angeles put their dough on Barry Goldwater was the day Wall Street lost its exclusive grip on the financing of American politics.) But even financially we are speaking in strictly Western terms. Wall Street may no longer be the whole story, but it is still most of the story. And if we look beyond finance to the broader culture--especially politics and communications--it must be admitted that America is still largely run, neither by Los Angeles nor by San Francisco, but by the "Bos--Wash Corridor."

That, apart from the coincidences that affect every life, was the main reason I lived in Manhattan for forty years. My career was in political commentary and, to some small extent, in the backroom aspects of national politics. Washington was close enough to be observed carefully, visited frequently, and even, for a brief time, lived in. As for "communications," during most of those forty years they were a New York monopoly. All three commercial TV and radio networks, both major news magazines, both wire services, and two of the nation's three most important newspapers were headquartered there. (In recent years there has been a distinct tilt toward Washington in the matter of news reportage and commentary, but that only validates my point.)

It was therefore only when I stepped down a year ago as publisher of NATIONAL REVIEW that I felt free to consult my own longstanding inclination and move to this lovely, hill-studded "city by the Bay." From here I shall continue to muse on politics, but without any illusion that I will have much influence on the conventions of 1992. In San Francisco, I will be seeking something else. As James (as he then was) Morris once wrote, San Francisco "proves how gracefully Western man might have learnt to live, were it not for the preoccupations of war and power."