To call it “Frisco” is in and out itself a retro act of defiance. I don’t know anyone today who calls it Frisco, though Jack Kerouac, Mr. On The Road, did decades ago. Go to Google, type in "Frisco" and you get Frisco, Texas, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. Type in Frisco, California and you get San Francisco. Columnist Herb Caen, who coined the word “Beatnik” soon after Sputnik went into orbit, insisted that no one call it “Frisco” or pronounce the name “San-Fran-Cis-Co.” Herb’s words were the law.
Not long ago when I was writing for The Examiner, back when Tamara Straus was an editor, and published almost everything I sent her, San Francisco was referred to in print as “The City.” Both words capitalized and as though it is, was and always will be the one and only city anywhere.
The City, or alternatively the city, is a retro kind of place that tends to inhabit the past, perhaps because it doesn’t like its present, and doesn't care for its current Black mayor, London Breed, who might not be reelected in November when citizens go to the polls to vote. Indeed, they can choose from seven other candidates, including Aaron Peskin, the current president of the SF Board of Supervisors with whom I have had only one significant interaction. Years ago, when I asked him to please pass a resolution declaring June 3, “Allen Ginsberg Day” he kindly obliged. That was a retro move on my part and on Peskin’s, too. Allen Ginsberg lives on and on.
City Lights Bookstore sells current best sellers, but it is best known for keeping the Beat flame burning brightly. The alley, named after Kerouac, that sits behind City Lights separates it from Vesuvio, a retro bar if ever there was one, though it is not the oldest bar in the city. That designation belongs to Old Ship Saloon founded in 1851 and that’s still in business. My brother, Adam, a San Francisco private eye, who models himself after Dashiell Hammett’s retro detective, Sam Spade, took me to the Old Ship where we knocked back a few boilermakers, which apparently originated in Montana in the 1890s and that has not lost its popularity in Frisco.
Adam has been in the business of finding lost souls and tracking down criminals since 1980. He’s a rather retro character and also my landlord at Ocean Beach, a neighborhood with no big box stores, no Starbucks, and no Subway, though it doesn’t have Playland anymore, either. That amusement park opened in 1928 and closed in 1972. Not every ancient building or every historical site has survived the passage of time, though the Cliff House, once a popular destination for locals and tourists, still sits on the cliffs just north of where I live, and inside Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Closed since 2020, it’s supposed to reopen soon. The retro building has had too much glamor associated with it to be left unoccupied and unclaimed as a place for nostalgia to take root and flower.
Indeed, when you stop and think about it, you realize that Retro with a capital R is a kind of brand that some people sell and other people buy. It’s built into the capitalist system and maybe into every political and economic system that has ever walked the face of the planet. After all, to long for a lost paradise is part of the human condition. Retro is us. I’m told that in Russia, comrades are nostalgic for the days of Stalin, and that in Germany neo-Nazis are eager to bring back the wonderful days of Hitler. In Dixieland, some white southerners want to revive the Confederacy, lynch a few Blacks and make slavery rise from its ashes. Even a little nostalgia is a dangerous thing.
(Jonah Raskin is the author of the retro novel, Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955.)
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