A city-state frame of mind - San Francisco

William A. Rusher

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."

Yet here I was, being told by my Los Angeles friend that "none of this is real"!

Believe it or not, I can see what he means. The filet of San Francisco is a pie-shaped wedge of land with City Hall as its apex, Market and Van Ness as its sides, and the curving bayfront as its crust. Within that wedge lie Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, the financial district, the Civic Center, Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf, the Tenderloin, North Beach, Union Square, the Embarcadero: most, in short, of what San Francisco is famous for. This choice segment of San Francisco and the Bay area isn't so much a city as a state of mind: a set of images, sounds, odors, sentiments, and experiences. To some extent these are "real," in that they survive and have their functions today. But to a very large extent they exist (if at all, outside the realm of recollection and imagination) only by virtue of successive heroic acts of municipal sentimentality.

Take the famous cable-cars. They were positively made for me. They will take me from my door to almost any destination in the heart of town where I might want to go--and do it, moreover for just 15 cents, so fond is San Francisco of us geezers over 65. (For you, buster, the charge is two bucks.)

And yet there is really no excuse for the cable-cars whatever. Frequent municipal buses carry many more passengers faster and farther (and even retain the 15-cent fare for "senior citizens"). No San Franciscan under 65 in his righ mind will pay two dollars to ride a cable-car if there is any reasonable alternative; they are obviously priced to exclude everyone but the elderly and the invaluable free-spending tourists.

And yet, when the citizens of San Francisco faced the choice, a few years ago, of scrapping the cable-cars or repairing them at huge expense, they didn't bat an eyelash. The cable-cars were rehabilitated without the slightest visible change, and are now ready to rattle and ring up and down the hills of San Francisco for another hundred years.

They are, you see, San Francisco's gondolas: a ridiculously outmoded form of transportation, but one with a unique charm and an unbreakable link to the history and meaning of the city.

And it is to Venice, I think, that we must look for the true analogy to this relatively small but very select portion of San Francisco and the Bay area. Venice, to be sure, is much further along their common road, but the similarities are plain. Both once counted for more in the great parade. Both chose to yield their place in it to others, in return for something they valued even more. Both, moreover, forsook it for the same ideal--one that Los Angeles has never even heard of. It is the only ideal that has ever seemed more seductive to men than power: a dream of charm, and grace, and almost implausible loveliness.

COPYRIGHT 1990 National Review, Inc.
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