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…
Posts published by “Herb Caen”
I remember when the spitball was legal and when Three Finger Mordecai Brown had five fingers and when the 1929 Seals had a club that could have beaten most of the majors and when the…
"Where do you run?" The question was propounded by the editor of one of San Francisco's most distinguished underground newspapers, and as I struggled to sort out the language, he amplified: "I mean, where is…
No, I don't know what it means. “The season of the witch” — neatly printed in white chalk on the wall opposite Fifth at Market. This is the wall of graffiti that first gave us…
I was lounging at the corner of Fifth and Mish', minding anybody's business, when along came Ken Kesey, the successful author ('One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion), who has opted out…
“If you don't like opera, why do you go?” People have been asking me this over the years because of this tendency I have to make fun of it. It so happens that I like…
A thousand miles of trolley wires, five thousand miles of telephone cables, ten thousand miles of neon tubing, four hundred thousand telephones, eight hundred thousand people — and a million and one pieces in a…
A distinguished magazine asked me to write about San Francisco's irresistible attraction for hippies and beatniks. I declined the offer for two middling good reasons. First, in the manner of the most distinguished magazines, the…