The San Francisco Seven

“San Francisco has no single landmark by which the world may identify it.”

—FEDERAL WRITERS PROJECT GUIDE TO SAN FRANCISCO, 1940 (p. 174)

Landmarks can take a while to announce themselves. First opened in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge rates only a couple of artful paragraphs in the guidebook before you, compared to fully 25 pages for Golden Gate Park. Plainly, there'd be no getting away with that ratio today. Like the bridge itself at first, this Federal Writers Project guide has gone remarkably unappreciated since its publication in 1940—read to tatters by a dedicated cadre of writers, lefties, and urbanists, updated without glory once, yet never truly celebrated for the indispensable navigational beacon it is. To explore the Bay Area without a copy handy is tantamount to steaming through the Golden Gate without a depth chart. Far from having “no single landmark,” San Francisco, between 1937 and 1940 got two.

A few years earlier, on July 27, 1935, President Roosevelt had signed legislation authorizing the Federal Writers Project. Part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, the Project recognized that scribblers, no less than stonemasons and bridge builders, needed work. For any reader, the crowning glory of the New Deal will always be the American Guides, a series of travel companions to 48 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other wonders—all created to “hold up a mirror to America.” John Steinbeck navigated by the American Guides to write his perennially underestimated Travels With Charley, in which he called them “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.”

Fun with classification: The San Francisco guide is just one product of the American Guide Series, which, in turn, were only one endeavor of the larger Federal Writers Project (FWP), which also turned out a raft of invaluable studies, including oral histories of freed slaves. The FWP, meanwhile, was but a single arm of Federal One, which also included the music, art, and theater projects that gave Orson Welles, among other artists, their biggest sandbox to date. And Federal One—stay with me here—was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which belonged to a whole Scrabble rack of acronyms that came out of the New Deal. Finally, the New Deal was shorthand for all the programs devised to fight the Depression under the leadership of the most effective monogram of them all: FDR. He wrote this guide or nobody did.

Reading the San Francisco guide is the second-best cure for homesickness, short of a ticket, that any shanghaied Northern Californian could ask for. (And if you're rusty on the etymology of shanghai, page 122 is there for you.) For locals and newcomers alike, transplants and tourists both, a copy of San Francisco in the 1930s belongs in every pannier of every rental bike the whole Bay round, and the glove box of every Zipcar besides.

I. POTRERO HILL, BARD THEREOF

Casual readers may at first question this guide's amiably eccentric structure. Soon enough, though, the WPA guide to San Francisco resolves into four very roughly equal parts: I. Gateway to the West; II. “The City”; III. Around the World in San Francisco; and IV. Around the Bay. The inner pair supplies essays and walking tours around San Francisco proper. Of the outer pair, the first furnishes background essays on the Greater Bay Area, and the fourth suggests driving tours around it. The overall effect starts to look like a close-up of a pair of hands warmed within a larger pair—as if a native in 1940 had met a chill-chapped Easterner's aeroplane at Mills Field, and they'd clasped hands before embarking on an adventure.

Not to sound like an auto mechanic reflexively running down the work of his predecessor (“What kind of ignoramus told you that, lady?”), but about the only thing wrong with the original WPA guide to San Francisco was its preface. In it Walter McElroy, project supervisor for California and unmistakably a gifted editor, says little about the book itself before unburdening himself of two solid pages of undifferentiated acknowledgments. I'm probably prouder than anybody alive to read that “Joseph Henry Jackson, Book Editor, San Francisco Chronicle” pitched in as an expert reader, but I'd be even happier to have some inkling as to who wrote or edited what here.

According to Jerre Mangione's invaluable The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935—1943, the great San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth did plenty of both, but how much, and which parts exactly? Circumstantial evidence points at least to the subsections called “Wild Life,” “Centers of Learning,” “Argonauts of Letters,” and “Metropolitan Scene” as Rexroth's, plus maybe a whole lot besides. When we read that “the inglorious past is slipping fast from Kearny Street…cocktail bars are marching northward against the tawdry remains of an era of architectural horror and moral obliquity”—one of Rexroth's pet words—it's hard not to hear the signature incantatory swing of the Bard of Potrero Hill.

You don't have to be a Rexroth buff to want to know just how much credit for the guide belongs to the author of “Requiem for the Spanish Dead”—whether drafted by him for others to water down, or by others for him to punch up. But until some scholar with the tenure to undertake it can locate the San Francisco FWP office's elusive manuscripts and tissue-type the actual prose, we'll just have to ascribe authorship to one of those shadowy literary composites, like Homer, or J, or the Pearl Poet.

2. EXCELSIOR HEIGHTS, OR THE CITY SPEAKS

Ironically for a region as cussedly individualistic as the Bay Area, the best prior history of the region relied on assembly-line methods and thankless contributions, too. Hubert Howe Bancroft's histories of California emerged from a system so communalist, it makes the MGM Writers Building look like Wordsworth's Lake Country. When the WPA guide says of Bancroft, “One of the pioneers of mass production methods in literature, he directed a large staff of anonymous collaborators,” you can almost hear the commiseration from scrivener to scrivener across the decades.

But as someone whose professional life has dwelt suspiciously on the recovery and championship of lost voices—of West Coast writing at the San Francisco Chronicle, of screenwriters in my first book—I hope it's not out of line to note that there's a definite speaker audible here, no less distinctive for going unnamed. What you hear in these pages, loud and clear as a sonic boom during fleet week, is the voice of San Francisco. From Bret Harte's roaring ’49ers to Allen Ginsberg's full-throated howl, from the buzzing of Ambrose Bierce's Wasp to the struck-porcelain clarity of Jade Snow Wong's stories to the singing wires of Thomas Pynchon's Telegraph Avenue syncopation, there's always been a headquarters-be-damned vitality to this voice, transcending the stylings of any one singer. Compounded of braggadocio, tomorrow-we-die swagger, underdog empathy, bumptious wit, arrant knowit-allery, polysyllabic excess, and gollywhomping beauty, the San Francisco voice is what's left in the prospector's pan after all the slurry of ego and era drains away.

Voice is hard to anatomize, never more so than when it belongs, not to a single speaker, but to an unruly office full of them. If we could run the WPA guide through the old voiceprint machine at the Exploratorium, what spikes and troughs would the spectrogram betray? Here are just a few signature crotchets of that vox sanfranciscensis, proof against all of Federal One's increasingly exasperated efforts to housebreak it:

Superlatives. In its entry for the Palace Hotel, the guide calls San Francisco “a town reared on superlatives,” and it's a hard point to argue. Few pages pass without at least one, and three to a paragraph isn't unheard of. Mere lines apart, we learn that the Great Highway is, over one stretch, “the widest boulevard in the United States,” and that the Fleishhacker Swimming Pool is said “to be the world's largest outdoor plunge” (p. 324). When hearing such claims in person, a good fact-checking reflex is always to ask what the second-widest boulevard, or the second-largest outdoor plunge, might be. Absent corroboration, though, let's take the original guide editors’ word for it. They are, as a San Franciscan might say, the best.

Periodic sentences. These stately constructions wind heroically down the pages of the guidebook like a parade, with the main clause fetching up at last near the end, like a grand marshal. Just one relatively brief example: “Through narrow Carquinez Strait, six miles long, joining San Pablo Bay with shallow Suisun Bay to the east, pour the combined waters of California's two greatest rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, which drain the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada's western slopes” (p. 7). They don't write ’em like that anymore. All that's missing is the fife-and-drum corps.

Sesquipedalianism. The WPA guide to San Francisco is inevitably, gloriously, a guide to English as it was spoke and wrote on these shores circa 1940, with all the verbal vividness that entails. Fecundate. Bagnio. Obliquity. Amygdaloid. If using a word readers may not know is a crime, call out the vocabulary constabulary. But if nobody ever used a six-bit word for fear of intimidating us, how would our vocabulary ever grow? And let's not forget the words everybody knows now, but didn't always. Would anyone write a San Francisco guidebook today in which the word Victorian appears just once—and that referring to a mansion, rather than an apartment building? Makes you wonder what future landmarks around us today we're ignoring, just as the FWP office ignored all those Victorians.

3. LOS PECHOS DE LA CHOLA, OR THE BREASTS OF THE INDIAN MAIDEN

There are other, less appealing voices here, too, underneath the first. It helps to listen for them, and even then pages can go by without so much as a whisper. But read through waterfront entries especially, like this one on the city of Alameda, and you can hear them ticking as patiently as a bomb: “Long used as a repair yard, [the Bethlehem Steel Company shipbuilding division] (“no visitors”) is being refitted to do its part in the Government's 1940 naval expansion program.” Can you hear the voice now? It's the one that says, “Millions of GIs and war workers are about to turn your quaint little guidebook into a curio overnight.”

But it gets worse. All too often we glimpse flashes of what an identity politician might defensibly call racism, what a tenured bluestocking might lazily call “a historical narrative”—and what a literary journalist just calls dated, dehumanizing, bad writing. That we read how “the Indians timorously kept their distance, prepared to make—if necessary—proper obeisance” (p. 13) to Sir Francis Drake, and how the Californios waxed “grateful for the luxuries brought to Yerba Buena Cove by foreign traders” (p. 22) (this in a chapter called “A Frontier to Conquer”) would be bad enough. But we also learn that, “though the padres occasionally lost patience and punished petty crimes with rawhide when sweet words were of no avail, they did not generally ill treat their converts” (p. 20).

Still tempted to make excuses for the guide as “a product of its time”? Check out this endearing chestnut:

The mission founders knew privation, struggle, and opposition. To Christianize the Indians, who sometimes fought against preemption of their land, it was sometimes necessary to use the sword and the whip. The natives often rebelled against the hard, monotonous work forced upon them. During church services guards equipped with long goads moved among the congregation, prodding natives who assumed other than a kneeling position. For outstanding work, however, the Indians were rewarded with beads and gaudy trinkets. (pp. 432-433)

This passage is either oblivious to the point of schizophrenia, or ironic past the threshold of black comedy, or heavily rewritten by multiple hands. I still can't tell which.

4. GOLD MINE HILL, OR ASSAYING THE BONANZA

The WPA guide to San Francisco can still tell you a great deal about how to get the most out of the Bay Area, but rather less about how to make the most of the guide itself. Readers have to figure out for themselves, for example, that the type size shrinks a few points whenever a driving tour shifts from the main drag into another of its wonderful shunpike side excursions. The way most people enjoy a book (i.e., reading it front to back) is plainly contraindicated. It's a guidebook, after all, and most readers will want to tackle it from the outside in, looking for a general topic in the table of contents, or maybe a particular one in the index, and then jumping to the appropriate page. This works well for readers who know what they want, but less so for browsers and grazers.

My advice for readers new to the American Guides, leisure permitting, might be to interleave the expository chapters up front with the open-air tours in back. Too much unrelieved swotting is bad for the circulation. Besides, for the true bibliotourist, visiting a landmark before reading about it is just as much fun as visiting it afterward. They're coequal joys. The only difference is, those who prepare for a journey as if studying for a test always have to do some mental work to forget their imaginary vistas when confronted with the real thing.

If only as a demonstration project—what gold miners might call a core sample, and data miners a search term—let's follow the arbitrary keyword Chronicle from the index to two distinct and, in their own ways, quite delightful places. First, in a historical chapter titled “Bonanza (1856—1875),” we learn that San Francisco Chronicle owner-editor Charles de Young once drew iron on the Scots-Irish minister and mayoral candidate Isaac Kalloch and “blazed away.” Later the wounded Kalloch's son, only naturally, had to avert “further damage to his father's battered reputation by fatally shooting De Young.” This bloodletting won't come as news to amateur students of Bay history, but even for those who've heard the story before, the antic, antique cheer of the language polishes it to a new sheen. The capper comes when, with “public sentiment in his favor, young Kalloch was acquitted” (p. 105). Everybody loves a journalist.

In these parlous times of newspaper buyouts and layoffs and fadeaways, it's oddly reassuring to happen across a second reference to the Chronicle 75 pages later, when the newspaper's offices claim their august place on a walking tour between the Emporium department store and “one-third of the Nation's entire gold reserve” over at the U.S. Mint. There in the guide, the Chron's enduring three-story pile at 5th and Mission is accurately dismissed as “Industrial Gothic.” Somewhere, the shades of Isaac Kalloch and his trigger-happy son are smiling.

5. LAUREL HILL, OR THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA AND THE TRAPDOOR

A listing for Laurel Hill Cemetery clarifies just how bloody Bay Area politics used to be. Local history mavens may recall that State Supreme Court Justice David S. Terry killed Senator David Broderick in a pistol duel in 1859, but do they know that California's first-ever congressman, Edward Gilbert, fell to the pistol of General James W. Denver, for whom Colorado's capital was named? California politicians who bristle at term limits would do well to remember there have always been, from the very first, worse ways to go.

That the Chronicle Building and U.S. Mint still stand, albeit with less of their very different kinds of capital inside, is more than one can say for the Emporium. Such a .667 slugging percentage for architectural survival is about par for these tours. It's anybody's pigeon which is more fun to read about: all that bygone civic furniture, or some of the eyesores still out there hulking down at us. This gets at the nut of how best to enjoy the guide: Is it for visitors or habitués? Is it a portable encyclopaedia norcaliforniensis for today, or a trapdoor to 1940?

If you don't know by now that the answer to such rhetorical choices is always, always both, then reading modern American essayistic nonfiction must be a never-ending cavalcade of surprises for you. Of course the WPA guide to San Francisco is as indispensable today as the day it was published—both for the reliability of what hasn't changed (the Chronicle Building still looks like the top three stories of an undistinguished buried skyscraper) and the compulsively readable enormity of what has.

In one chapter, we learn that “Oakland's tempo of living varies with the time of day: by dawn commuters are on the move, feeder highways to the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge are alive with speeding cars…” Speeding cars? Can any reader today look on those words and not weep? Is it any wonder California is broke, when no modern Bay Area patrolman could write a speeding ticket between the weekday hours of 6 and 10 a.m. if his life depended on it?

So maybe the WPA guide isn't the ideal tip sheet to your morning commute. That's what we have nextmuni.com for. But as a wormhole from your seat on the N Judah into 1940, the guide is well nigh unimprovable. Like any decent time capsule, it's really a time machine.

6. MCLAREN RIDGE, OR THE MAN WHO PLANTED REDWOODS

But who wants a time machine stuck in reverse? Luckily, every page of this guide doubles as an exhortation to study the Bay around us, and envision the San Francisco of 70, years from now in its place. According to the fascinating chronology of the Bay Area that follows the text, at least three noteworthy ribbon-cuttings took place in 1940: (1) the Funston Avenue approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, (2) the Bay's first low-cost housing project, at Holly Courts, and (3) the return of the Golden Gate International Exposition to Treasure Island. Is anything opening in 2010 that competes? We're celebrating plenty of anniversaries these days, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's for one, but of grand openings, not so many. And what could imaginably open 70 years from now, in 2080—by which time even high-speed rail will look like the mass-transit equivalent of a not-very-cherry Hispano-Suiza? The WPA Guide to San Francisco represents, among so much else, an open invitation to discuss these very questions of bygone ambition and comparative modern modesty.

The life of “Uncle John” McLaren, who gets a loving page in the Golden Gate Park chapter, is a reproach to dreamers of small dreams. Named park superintendent as “a sandy-haired young Scottish landscape gardener” in 1887, McLaren was eventually “exempted…from enforced retirement” (p. 331) by an act of the Board of Supervisors in 1922. Still at his trowel when the guide went to press 17, years later, Supt. McLaren was planting redwood seedlings well into his 90s. Some of that same posterity-mindedness must have animated the makers of this guide, so sturdy and shade-giving all these years later.

Yes, writers tend to get misty-eyed on the subject of the Federal Writers Project, like grown men reminiscing about a daft uncle who used to give them candy. This is natural, even forgivable, but not especially useful. A government recently disinclined to guarantee its soldiers body armor seems unlikely to promise its writers much anytime soon, except material. But if we can't reconstitute the Writers Project in anything like its original form, at least we can take inspiration from that gloriously collective voice.

The word collective fell a bit differently on 1930s ears than it does on ours, redolent of the leftism for which the FWP was eventually red-baited out of existence by a Congress that had never much liked it in the first place. Yet collective this guide's voice most assuredly is—the conjoined sound of an entire region, majestic as the hills and salty as the bay. It's as if the city itself is talking to us across the years, telling its story and daring us to believe it. Few stretchers got past the project's prodigious fact-checking apparatus, but San Francisco has always told its true story as if it were a lie, or at least a myth. The overall effect resembles that of an impeccable historian trying to fake a polygraph into recording a false positive.

7. DIAMOND HEIGHTS, OR STOCKTON HOUSE REBUILT

San Francisco in the 1930s reads, as it should, like the streaky autobiography of a seismic boomtown. Its historical chapters teem with juicy anecdotes from the depression of 1854, the panic of 1873, the crash of 1893, and so on, up to the Great Depression that midwifed the book in the first place. That's the dirty secret of this city: its topography and its history are different cars on the same rollercoaster. You can't get from beach to bay without using all your gears, any more than you can get from 1849 to 1940, and beyond, without overusing a few superlatives—and pejoratives. Any landing is, at best, only a breather from which to contemplate the next cliff, or chasm.

Fittingly, the guide ends with Stockton House, the last point of interest on the San Jose driving tour: “one of a number of houses cut to size and brought around the Horn by Commodore Robert F. Stockton. It has a wide veranda and, rising from the central gable, a square balustraded turret.” As last lines go, not exactly “I been there before,” but look closer. In the battles of Rio San Gabriel and La Mesa in 1847, Commodore Stockton all but captured California for the United States, and became its first governor. Prefabricated in the commodore's native New Jersey, Stockton House traveled thousands of miles in the belly of a ship—its brothers jettisoned overboard for ballast—to fetch up at the south end of San Francisco Bay. There it stood for just shy of a century until, a little extra research reveals, it finally fell to make way for San Jose Airport. Named for a conqueror, built with no feel for its eventual site, and demolished for a purpose its builder never foresaw, this California landmark has survived only as two anticlimactic sentences in a book that slept for 70 years.

Now the book has resurfaced and you've picked it up, like a tiny, shiny fleck in a millrace. Heft it in your hands. Assay it, even. It's heavier than it looks.

David Kipen       

Los Angeles, 2010