Mr. and Mrs. San Francisco are drawn irresistibly to the sea on a sunny Sunday.
They drive in droves through Golden Gate Park, straining for that first glimpse of the water. They spread out along the Beach, they cluster in the Cliff House, they stare at Seal Rocks with anguished eyes as though they wish they could frolic there too. They range along the Marina and look at the sails in Yacht Harbor and lose themselves in Mitty-like dreams of galleons and doubloons along the Spanish Main.
For San Franciscans, all of them—the clerks, the housewives, the bookies, the bankers—are sprinkled ever so slightly with salt spray, and on Sunday they go down to the sea in cars to fill their lungs with the tang of their heritage.
In a way, it’s the traditional Sunday in Baghdad by the Bay. The guy with the hangover gulping down a creamy New Orleans fizz at the Cliff House, the broker rolling up the pants legs of his Montgomery Street business suit to wade in the surf, the chorine flexing her handsome legs as she pumps a bicycle through Golden Gate Park—these characters are not necessarily of 1949. Their counterparts were doing exactly the same things in 1889.
How do I remember that? I’m a San Franciscan. I was born with memories.
But there’s more to Sunday in San Francisco than the weekly traffic jam caused by people with a single thought in thousands of automobiles. And in my own perverse way I like the other side of the picture— where time stands still in the hush of a deserted street.
I enjoy the Sabbath silence of the financial district, noisy with a new dimension of unpeopled space. Along the empty sidewalks only vagrant scraps of paper scud before the wind that, on other days, toys with men’s hats and women’s skirts, The imposing skyscrapers suddenly look lost and childish without the people who make them tick between long weekends. What is more uscless than a skyscraper on Sunday? Even the Russ Building, so domineering and dignified, broods alone, like a big plaything cast aside.
In the produce district the timeless shadows lay long over the squat old buildings, and only a cat prowls slowly between the neatly stacked boxes. On block after block of San Francisco’s larder Sunday has hung its padlock. Vanished are the trucks, gone are the workers. Only the buildings slecp there, showing their age and the cracks in their surface as the unbroken sun beats down. Suddenly it seems like a city of the dead—this city within a city that feeds the city six days a week.
Sunday is quiet and kindly on the Embarcadero. The. big ships doze at the end of their lines, as though the water were tepid enough to make them sleepy. The saloons are empty and the bartenders stand outside the doors, talking to children. Only the Ferry Building seems unaware that this is the Sabbath. Every day is Sunday now, for this sad old pile of gray—dead and useless except for the clock that goes ticking on when all else is gone.
Along O'Farrell, Eddy, and Ellis the pasty-faced people who are chained to tiny apartments venture out to the sidewalks, like prisoners at the end of their short ropes. From their kitchenettes they drag little white chairs, and there they sit in the sun, close to their front doors, as though they might have to dart back into their holes at a moment’s notice. The oldsters squat on the stone stairs, blinking and uncomfortable, and gaze down at the warm pavement, for deep inside they know the sun is only for the rich.
Only in Fillmore’s “Little Harlem” are the sidewalks teeming with people in their Sunday best and worst, lounging, talking, standing in busy knots. A tenement is bad enough during the week, but on a sunny Sunday it is unbearable.
Sunday in the far reaches of the Mission and Visitacion Valley and Butchertown have a special flavor—not of San Francisco, but of any small town in any era of the American story.
On street corners and between houses the kids lazily throw a baseball while little girls in pink dresses watch from their porches and follow the flight of the ball, back and forth, back and forth. In the distance you can hear the oddly nostalgic clatter of a lawn mower. Under a shade tree a man and his wife are washing their ten-year-old car until it gleams. A boy on a reluctant bike moves past in a dream. The only thing missing is the bang of a screen door, and your ears strain for it until you remember: there are few flies in San Francisco.
Here and there on the Mission hillsides you see the old houses that stand as mirrors for your memory. The shingled roofs, the plate-glass window that marks the “front” room, the wide porch where ghosts sit and rock on wicker chairs, the brick chimneys—monuments, all, in today’s cemetery of white stucco cubicles.
And suddenly you remember with a strange sharpness the old, unhurried days, when these houses were fresh and new. When there were wide-open spaces for more houses you thought would never come to crowd you in. When the peace and quiet of a sunny Sunday didn’t come just once or twice in a year of weeks—but seemed to hang heavy and sweet over the world every day.
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