Gee, What A Crazy Town [1957]

Historic parks being sold down the drain for a mess of parkage, bearded beatniks seeking peace of mind by chewing Zen-Zen, grown men fighting like kids over a multimillion-dollar stadium dedicated to a child’s game. Gray Line buses hauling gray-faced tourists through the gray city on a gray day, a City crew washing the Broadway Tunnel as the rain splashes outside, Chinese selling Japanese trinkets to South Americans carrying German cameras...Gee what a crazy town.

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Police cars bearing “No Riders” stickers prowling around in search of some baddy to pick up, a splendid example of Greek Revival architecture (the Old Mind) being used for little more than a pigeon roost, Tom Sawyerish kids washing a fire engine while the coffee sipping firemen lounge against a wall, derelict buildings being town down along Skid Road to leave the cold and homeless even colder and more homeless, fur-clad women huddling under umbrellas to peer at resort clothes in the downtown shop windows ...Golly, what a mixed-up place.

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Two hundred people standing in a row at the Zoo to watch four Teddy-bears from Down Under chew dully on eucalyptus leaves, a cable car waiting in a lot at the foot of Hyde like a windup toy whose key has been lost, an $85,000-a -year baseball star searching in vain for an apartment to rent at any price, $7,500 cars parked outside all night because their owners’ $500-a-month apartments have everything but garages, Coit Tower going dark at midnight because that’s late enough now in the city that once stayed up all night...Jeepers, where do we go from here and what do we do next?

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Crippled newsboys cheerily shouting the headlines of tragedies less poignant than their, bay-windowed beauties of the Western Addition disappearing to make room for concrete blockhouses that will solve the population explosion in explosions of monotony. Symphony musicians standing around the rear of the Opera House after a concert like kids with no place to go when school’s out, at 6 p.m. the flowers hanging their heads in the sidewalk stands as though they know it’s time to call it a day... Wow, so many bits and pieces of nothing and everything adding up to the whole which is equal to the sum of the encircled squares.

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Jobless men killing time by watching afternoon shows designed for women in the window of a Market St. TV shop, a blind man humming a tune as he taps his way along Montgomery with a transistor radio plugged into his ear, a dear old lady (bedridden) living all alone in a 14-room Fairmont penthouse across the street from a mansion that was once her home, the world’s greatest disc jockey doing his bit for culture by promoting a Haiku poetry contest whose winner will get a trip to Japan, ships from the seven seas neatly filed away for the night along the Embarcadero—their deck lights on as though afraid of the dark...Endless odds and ends of the endlessly odd wetropolis under the rainy skies of Drabuary.

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Stone cold new Hall of Justice standing bare and square against the freeway running wild with lawbreakers, little old Chinese land teetering up the California St. hill on one-bound feet to feed bread crusts to the boundless seagulls, Sterling Hayden’s romantic schooner lying tethered to the shores of Sausalito like a free soul brought back to earth, the sea lions back from their mating at last and sprawled in brown blobs on Seal Rocks—every now and then slithering into the icy water to escape the warm tourist stares from the Cliff House...Animal, vegetable, mineral in the soaring city built on stone and dredged-up dreams. 

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Well-clipped poodles walking, well-polished chauffeurs along the well-manicured pathways of Lafayette Square, Beniamino Bufano doodling a pat of butter into a tiny masterpiece of a statue while lunching at Veneto’s, enchanted natives gazing with ah-struck eyes through the windows of Top o’the Mark while the visitors they’ve brought along glare around for a waiter, the Zellerbach building looking as delicately flimsy as a house of glass cards as it teeters on its stilts against its concretely staid neighbors, the old men of Union Square sitting rain-soaked on their benches with soggy newspapers over their heads and soggy squabs at their feet... Ah, Baghdad-by-the-Bay, where the living is easy for pigeons who get their Square meals from Union men.

* * *

A bored cashier yawning a gum-sticky yawn in the lobby of a Market St. movie palace festooned with photos of nude ladies who look even more bored, a Filipino barber on Kearny sawing away on his fiddle in the window as though to lure in a customer for a trimming, a few cars parked forlornly on the lot that once held the Montgomery Block’s thousand priceless memories, dead seagulls strewn in nightmare profusion along Candlestick Way while their more fortunate mates hover in a ravenous cloud over the dumps lining the way to the magic city whose towers shine in the distance... look away, look away from the death and debris—look ahead to the gate of Paradise.

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The timelessly San Francisco smell—clean and right—of wet eucalyptus in the presidio that guards the past, two jet fighters climbing fast into the murky sky to guard the present that is always tense, midnight lights burning high in the downtown skyscrapers as yesterday’s trash is cleared away in readiness for the future that will soon rise out of the East Bay Hills...What a town. Gee, what a crazy town.