San Franciscana

Oh, it's a city, all right. Idle statistic: San Francisco has some 800 buildings over seven stories tall, more than the rest of California combined. Places like San Jose, Sacramento and possibly Cucamonga have a tendency to grow out, rather than up, into a series of shopping centers, featuring fast food outlets with heartburn and diarrhea to match. At last count, San Francisco's chefs could cook in 47 languages, all of them lying drippingly on the tongue, and more Vietnamese cooks are arriving every hour on the hour.

The view from Kite Hill, one of the northern flank of Diamond Heights. Off to the right, Potrero Hill floating above a bay studded with empty oil tankers, riding high. Bernal Heights, a name almost as old as the city itself, staring down at the site of the old Union Iron Works, where ornate battleships once came to life. The peak-roofed flatlands of the Old Mission: what was there about this area that once produced major leaguers and world champion fighters and then suddenly went fallow?

Downtown, Newtown, forest of high-rises, anonymous square tops all in a row. From Kite Hill, you get the proper juxtaposition of Transamerica Pyramid and Bank of America World Headquarters. (The latter title is impossible to say without hearing the sound of distant trumpets.) At sunset, glittering white point up against black mass, an urban blockbuster.

A city, yes, but the scale is still possible. The hills of Marin and everybody's favorite mountain, Tamalpais, are visible across the dispiriting rooftops. In between a luminosity: the fog is crawling in, catching the last rays, creating a definitely Japanese aura. The most beautiful bridge in the world hunches one shoulder out of the oriental mist.

A good town, the Sycamore is now green along Market, over the brick sidewalks that will spew Irish confetti in all directions when the next big one strikes. Tourists with double-knit faces buying orchid corsages from sidewalk stands thick with carnations and daisies and irises; so who needs orchids? Old Number One, the newest cable car on the Powell line, leaves the turntable, kids pelting themselves against its sides. Knock the Muni all you want, but dedicated craftsman built this blue, white and maroon beauty from scratch — without much scratch to work with, as usual.

Cherry blossoms in Japantown where ugly new buildings, not at all Japanese, are replacing irreplaceable Victorians. Sukiyaki palaces next to chop suey lunch counters. In Chinatown, chop suey has all but disappeared, but now the aroma of hotdogs and coffee floats through the streets that once sniffed only Jasmine tea and dried fish. On Stockton in “New Hong Kong,” old women squat on the sidewalk selling snails and clams while in the nearby gutter frogs strain hopelessly to escape from their wire prisons. The fat man selling them looks like a frog who will never turn into a prince.

The serendipity that brightens the eye of a city stroller: the Francisca Club's impeccable doors. Always gleaming white paint, polished brass fittings. In Stevenson Street far downtown, the editorial offices of the 'California Farmer' magazine are topped with an imperial eagle atop a bronze globe, very early Hearttian. Mammy Pleasant's own stand of eucalyptuses, waving in the zephyrs at Octavia and Bush where her dark mansion once stood. (Her grave in Napa is cracked and falling apart, covered with poison ivy.)

In the midtown at supermarkets, more and more genteel impoverished oldsters are buying dog food for the pets they don't own, so you know they are eating it themselves. At the same time more and more people are letting their dogs go because they can't afford to feed them. Does this mean that killer packs of starving dogs will soon range the city streets, or am I having nightmares again?

Near naked bodies turning down brown on the Union Square greens, Thomas Star King's tomb at First Unitarian, an oasis of tranquility alongside the racetrack rush of Franklin and Geary, the Montgomery Streeters in their time warped 1950s uniforms — narrow brim hats, baggy three-piece suits with the pants flapping around the ankles over gunboat cordovan brogans — campy now!). The last of the all-time boot blacks stands whose “boys” still snap their rags and whisk-broom your shoulders, the foreign newspapers outside Harold's, next to David's on Geary, and David standing outside of Harold and…

Oh, it's a city all right, up one day, down the next, but moving, always moving.