Bay Curious: Exploring the Hidden True Stories of the San Francisco Bay Area 9781797214368, 1797214365

Citation preview

Exploring the hidden

True S t o r i e s o f t h e

San Francisco Bay Area By Olivia Allen-Price

The host of the Bay Curious podcast produced by

For Sullivan, the most curious little dude I know

Copyright © 2023 by Olivia Allen-Price. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. ISBN 978-1-7972-1436-8 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-1-7972-1639-3 (epub) Illustrations by Alexandra Bowman. Design by Jon Glick. Allbirds is a registered trademark of Allbirds, Inc. Balenciaga is a registered trademark of Balenciaga Corporation. Esprit is a registered trademark of Esprit IP Limited. Everlane is a registered trademark of Everyone, Inc. Gap is a registered trademark of Gap (Apparel), LLC. Levi’s is a registered trademark of Levi Strauss & Co. Old Navy is a registered trademark of Old Navy (Apparel), LLC. Rothy’s is a registered trademark of Rothy’s Inc. Star Trek is a registered trademark of CBS Studios Inc. Star Wars is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. Winchester Repeating Arms is a registered trademark of Olin Corporation. Zenith Wire Wheels is a registered trademark of Coker Tire Company. Chronicle Books LLC 680 Second Street San Francisco, California 94107 www.chroniclebooks.com

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

ON OHLONE LAND: The First Bay Area Locals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 THE STORY OF MARY ELLEN PLEASANT:

The Civil Rights Heroine of Victorian San Francisco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

EMPEROR NORTON: America’s Emperor, San Francisco’s Treasure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 THE BAY AREA’S HOLLYWOOD:

How Charlie Chaplin and Silent Films Flourished in the East Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Movies Set in the Bay Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 THE PORT CHICAGO 50:

How a Deadly Bay Area Explosion Led to the Integration of the Navy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

FRIDA KAHLO’S SAN FRANCISCO:

How “The City of the World” Helped Shape an Icon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

MEET CHARLEY PARKHURST:

The Gold Rush’s Fearless, Gender Nonconforming Stagecoach Driver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

THE HARLEM OF THE WEST: The History of Jazz in the Fillmore District . . . . . . . . . . 52 HELLA OAKLAND: The Origins of the Bay Area’s Most Notorious Slang Word . . . . . . . . . . . 57 A Guide to Bay Area Slang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 420 STARTED IN THE BAY AREA:

How Five High Schoolers in San Rafael Started a Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

THE OAKLAND COMMUNITY SCHOOL:

The Legacy of the Black Panther Party’s Women-Led Elementary School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

THE WHITE HORSE INN:

Is This Unassuming Spot in Oakland the Nation’s First Gay Bar? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Compton’s Cafeteria Riot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 SPINNING RIMS, SPINNING CARS: The History of the Oakland Sideshow . . . . . . . . . . 78 NAKED BY THE BAY: Nudity in San Francisco, Uncovered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 JEANS AND SNEAKERS: How the Bay Area Came to Be a Hub for Casual Style . . . . . . . . 88 WHEN BREEZERS GOT ROLLING: How Mountain Bike Racing Got Its Start in Marin . . . . 93

THE WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE:

The True Story behind San Jose’s Infamous Haunted Mansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

The Iconic Bay Area Spots That Locals Don’t Visit . . . . . . . . . . 105 THE COLMA CEMETERIES: How a Town Became San Francisco’s Modern-Day Necropolis . . . .107 THE RISE AND FALL OF DRAWBRIDGE:

The Island Ghost Town in the Middle of San Francisco Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

Interesting Bay Area Place-Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 WHAT’S THAT THING OFF 280? The Origin of the Flintstone House . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 TREASURE IN THE BAY:

How FDR and the World’s Fair Gave Us Treasure Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

THE FOUNTAIN AT THE CIRCLE:

The State Capital Almost Moved to Berkeley, and All It Got Was This Sweet Bear Fountain . . . . 125

Notable Public Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 THE ROBIN WILLIAMS RAINBOWS:

Why Are There Rainbows on the Tunnel between San Francisco and Marin? . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

EYESORE TO ICON:

How Sutro Tower Became a Defining Feature of the San Francisco Skyline . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

SUTRO BATHS: The Lost Glass Swimming Palace for the Public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 The Golden Gate Bridge: Your Questions, Answered . . . . . . . .

145

GREEN GODDESS: The San Francisco Origins of a Beloved Salad Dressing . . . . . . . . . . 150 ROCKY ROAD ICE CREAM:

How Two Oakland Ice Creameries Claim to Have Invented the Depression-Era Treat . . . . . . . 153

SAN FRANCISCO SOURDOUGH:

The Microbes That Make the City’s Favorite Bread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 BRINGING BACK OLYS: The Story of the Bay Area’s Native Oyster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 MAKING THE MAI TAI: Yes, Your Favorite Tropical Drink Was Invented Here in Oakland . . . 165

Cocktails of the Bay Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 THE FILLMORE APPLES: How Bill Graham’s Nazi Escape May Have Inspired

an Enduring Symbol of Rock and Roll in San Francisco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

TEA GARDEN FORTUNES: Unwrapping the Bay Area Origins of the Fortune Cookie . . . . . 175

THE GOLDEN GATE HERD: What’s with the Bison in Golden Gate Park? . . . . . . . . . . 182 WILD TURKEYS: Why Are They Strutting around the Suburbs? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 A PROLIFERATION OF PALMS: Why Are There So Many Palm Trees in the Bay Area? . . . 189 Name That Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

192

SUMMERTIME CHILL: Wind, Fog, and Microclimates . . . Understanding Bay Area Weather . .

194

THE VIEW FROM MOUNT DIABLO: The Biggest View in the World? . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Myth Busting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 ANCIENT HISTORY: The Bay Area during the Last Ice Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

204

CORVID CRUSH: Why Crows Are Crowding Your Bay Area Skies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 REDWOODS: Why Do These Ancient Giants Only Thrive in Northern California? . . . . . . . . 211

YOU CAN CALL IT FRISCO: The History of the City’s Contentious Nickname . . . . . . . . 216 GHOST FLEET: The Buried Ships of San Francisco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 VAULT LIGHTS: What Are Those Grids of Glass in the Sidewalk, and Why Are They Purple? . . . 224 BRICK CIRCLES IN CITY STREETS:

The Underground Firefighting Tanks below San Francisco Intersections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 THE BUTTERFLY BRIDGE:

The Beautiful Bay Bridge Frank Lloyd Wright Never Got to Build . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

BART’S TRANSBAY TUBE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 TUNNELS UNDER SAN FRANCISCO? Inside the Dark, Dangerous World of the Sewers . . . 236 SAN FRANCISCO PAGODAS: The Unexpected History behind San Francisco Chinatown’s

Striking Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

Did San Francisco Put the Bay in Bay Windows? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 STAIRWAY TO PARADISE:

The Garden Oasis of the Filbert Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

THE 49 MILE DRIVE: Seeing San Francisco through Its Lucky Number . . . . . . . . . . . .

250

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256

Introduction On a summer day in 2013, I found myself hurtling across the Bay Bridge in an airport shuttle van. Just an hour earlier I’d arrived at Oakland Airport on a flight from Baltimore—ready to start a new life in San Francisco. In the back of the van sat my giant duffel bag, bulging with the mountain of clothing I’d brought along for my fresh start—a “work” wardrobe of crisp button-ups and pencil skirts, several pairs of high heels, and many, many pairs of shorts. Virtually all these items, I would soon learn, are entirely useless here in San Francisco. The driver turned off at the Treasure Island exit, ready to drop off another passenger. And that’s when I first saw it: downtown San Francisco. Lit like a painting in the fading light of the day, aglow in peaches, pinks, baby blues—so striking that the tourists in the van were begging the driver to stop, so they could capture it with their cameras. I’ll never forget standing on that Treasure Island sidewalk with the sounds of the bay waters lapping at the jagged rocky shore beneath me. As I stared across the bay, at this big, beautiful, mysterious city, I thought, “My new home.” And then . . . “I really need a jacket.”

R

I moved to San Francisco to take a job in the newsroom at KQED, one of the nation’s largest public media stations. By day, I ran their social media accounts and produced news stories for the website. My nights and weekends were all mine. And honestly, it was kind of a lonely time.

6

I didn’t know a soul in the city. So I kept myself busy by walking everywhere. As I hiked miles and miles across the streets of SF, I began to explore the city’s distinct neighborhoods and see how one transitioned into the next—how the Western Addition became Civic Center, then the Tenderloin, then Nob Hill. Every nook and cranny of the city vibrated with activity. And along the way I started to jot down little notes of things that struck me—things to research when I got home. “Different styles of Victorian homes?” “How to play mah-jongg?” “BART expansion?”

The more I learned about the Bay Area, the more curious I became. How does one even define it? References to the “San Francisco Bay Area” first showed up on maps in the early 1900s, and opinions about its borders vary. But I like the “nine-county” definition that comprises Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties. Every question I came up with would lead to ten more. And then late one night, drenched in the blue light of my laptop, several hours deep into reading about the earthquake of 1906, I thought, “I can’t be the only person who does this.”

R

Fast-forward two years to 2015, when, along with my KQED teammates, I launched an occasional radio series called . . . Bay Curious. Inspired by public radio friends at Chicago’s WBEZ and their Curious City program, our premise was simple: We’d invite the public to ask questions about the region—yes, the same kinds of questions I’d come up with on my walks around town—and answer them. And whenever we could, we’d bring the person who asked the question along for the reporting ride. We knew some people would like it. We had no idea how many. After our very first story aired on KQED Public Radio—about an abandoned car on Mount Tamalpais— listeners wrote to tell us how thrilled they were to learn

8

the answer to a question they’d long wondered about. Hundreds of new questions poured in overnight. “Why are there ships buried beneath San Francisco?” “Where did the word hella come from?” “Why are BART trains so loud?” That’s when I knew Bay Curious was onto something.

R

Over the years, that small radio series grew into a hugely popular weekly podcast. And in making it, we’ve met countless people—longtime Bay Area residents, newcomers, and visitors alike—who all share one thing in common: an insatiable love for learning about this captivating region. Somewhere along the way, we lost count of precisely how many questions we’ve answered. One thing’s for sure: By now, the number is up there in the thousands. We’ve got so much curiosity to share that we’ve kept expanding the project, creating in-depth online articles, deep-dive videos, a newsletter, and a live event series. And now? We bring you the Bay Curious book. In these pages you’ll find some of our very favorite stories from the podcast—plus a plethora of brand-new tales, crafted just for this book. As always, every one of these stories is based on a question that came to us from the public. It is a book made with you, and for you. A true collective, curious effort. And I hope you enjoy it.

9

ON OHLONE LAND: The First Bay Area Locals In the eighteenth century, the area from the lower Napa Valley to south Monterey County was one of the most densely populated Native American territories in North America. About forty thousand people belonged to some forty tribes settled in permanent villages beside creeks, in lush grasslands and forests, and near the ocean. Euro-American colonizers lumped these distinct tribes into one group and called them Costanoan. Now they’re commonly called the Ohlone. There are a few ideas about where the term Ohlone came from. “Sometimes people will say that it comes from the name of one of [the] smaller nations,” said Vincent Medina, an Ohlone activist and chef. “But we have another explanation for that in our family here in the East Bay. We believe it comes from the Miwok term which means ‘people of the West.’”

Eighteenth-Century Life for the Ohlone

Though each Ohlone tribe held its own territory, they had similarities in their culture, religion, language, and diet. “Native Californians ate a diversity of plants, fish, birds, and animals,” said Alan Leventhal, a retired San Jose State University archaeologist and anthropologist who has been working with several Ohlone tribes since 1980 as a tribal ethnohistorian. “They hunted deer, antelope, and elk. Fishing was also important to them—sturgeon in the bay and steelhead and salmon runs in the river.” Shellfish were on the menu too, and remnants of mussels, clams, and oysters have been found in archaeological sites. What they wore depended on the season, occasion, and ceremonial circumstance. You might find women wearing aprons

12

made from tule reeds and deer skin. Many tattooed their chins with dotted designs or parallel lines. Men often went unclothed, though in the winter, they draped themselves in cloaks made of rabbit skins or sea otter pelts. They also wore headdresses adorned with feathers for ceremonial occasions. Families lived in round homes built from a variety of materials, most often tule reeds or tree bark. Elite families had larger homes, measuring as much as 20 feet across. Some villages also had a ceremonial structure called a túupentak, big enough to hold hundreds of people. These came in handy

during multi-tribe gatherings to trade goods, make economic and military alliances, or hold religious ceremonies. Like tribes throughout Central and Northern California, the Ohlone practiced Kuksu, a religion characterized by ritualistic dances, song, prayer, reenactments of creation time, intertribal feasts, and commemoration of ancestors. “Religion itself varied because there were men’s songs and dances, and there were women’s songs and dances,” said Leventhal. “There were men healers, and there were women healers.” Shellmounds would have also been an important part of many Ohlone villages; at one point more than four hundred stood around the Bay Area. The human-constructed mounds of earth and organic matter sometimes reached taller than 30 feet. They were ceremonial places, community centers and burial sites, built up, layer by layer, over thousands of years. More than five hundred ancestral remains were found in a shellmound in Coyote Hills Regional Park, which was excavated during the mid-twentieth century. Many more remains were left in the ground.

Fighting for Recognition

The once-robust Ohlone population was decimated throughout the late 1700s and 1800s by starvation, diseases, and genocide at the hands of colonizers. “The conquest was as cruel as it could be. Indians were drawn into the missions, and many of them died either from disease or were killed outright,” said Malcolm Margolin, an author and publisher who has written extensively about the native peoples of California. Survivors had to give up their land and their way of life. The repercussions are still being felt today. “When you deal with a population of people that once owned all of the San Francisco Bay, and today there is nothing for them to show for it, the object is not to take out a violin and say ‘Poor people,’” said Alan Leventhal. “You have to listen to these people when they say, ‘We’re going to organize and reclaim our sovereign rights as a federally recognized tribe.’”

14

Many of the known surviving Native American lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay Area have organized into a united tribe called the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. Though the Muwekma Ohlone were once recognized by the US government as the Verona Band of Alameda County, they were removed from the list of eligible tribal communities in need of land in 1927, along with 134 other landless California Indian bands and tribes. The Sacramento superintendent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs made the decision, saying their numbers had dwindled to the point that the group was extinct. He wrote in his report, “It does not appear at the present time that there is need for the purchase of land for the establishment of their homes.” Since then, Muwekma Ohlone’s six hundred members have spent decades petitioning to regain their federally recognized status—a designation that comes with benefits like housing, medical care, access to higher education, and the ability to establish a land trust. Currently none of the Ohlone tribes have regained their recognition by the federal government. “These tribes have been running for their lives,” said Leventhal. “These are the last generations that can make strong linkages to their heritage. They can’t afford to live in the Bay Area. Unless this next generation of [Native American] children can make some sizable salaries when they grow up, they will continue to be relegated as a landless tribe. So they are slowly radiating away from the Bay Area.”

An Ohlone Resurgence

“Our family experienced a lot of hardships that came with colonization—too many hardships to ever really list,” Vincent Medina says. Through it all, Indigenous people like Medina’s greatgrandmother quietly preserved and passed on the traditions of their ancestors. “When not everything could be carried on, one way that our family found to keep these things alive was through

15

documenting them,” Medina said. His great-grandmother and other elders wrote thousands of pages on their history, language, religion, and food with several anthropologists and linguists. “My great-grandmother survived that time,” Medina said. She got through it, and she still kept our culture close, passing on as much as she could to everybody in our family around her. And through those efforts that’s how so many of us, including myself, grew up empowered with our culture.” Medina says at one point not a single person he knew spoke Chochenyo, his ancestral language. But over the past several years, he and others have worked to resuscitate it, using the documentation their elders left behind as a guide. Now a whole community is conversant. “That shows healing right there in action,” Medina says. “That shows how we can be able to have things back again that we might have not had a short time ago, but that we were always meant to have.” Medina works to make Indigenous culture more visible in other ways too. He runs Cafe Ohlone, where the menu features shellfish, acorn soup, and even acorn-flour brownies—a hit with kids. He’s one person among many working to revive traditional dance, basketry, and even making boats of tule reeds. He sees this as carrying forward a story that began a very, very long time ago. “Knowing that we’re Indigenous here, that we were created here, it gives us that responsibility and that obligation to keep these teachings close with a lot of integrity and a lot of deep care and love,” Medina says. Daniel Potter, Asal Ehsanipour, and Olivia Allen-Price

16

THE STORY OF MARY ELLEN PLEASANT: The Civil Rights Heroine of Victorian San Francisco Sometimes, there’s a character within a city’s history who’s so compelling, you can’t believe their name isn’t on every street corner. Nineteenth-century civil rights icon and entrepreneur Mary Ellen Pleasant is one such figure in San Francisco legend. Although, there is one place you’ll find her name imprinted on the city streets—on a plaque set into the sidewalk at the corner of Bush and Octavia Streets in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, where she once lived in a grand but now-vanished mansion. The plaque reads, “Mother of Civil Rights in California.” And yet, despite her myriad achievements commemorated on that plaque beneath the eucalyptus trees, this towering Bay Area figure remains, for many San Franciscans, a mystery. How can this be? Who was the real Mary Ellen Pleasant?

“Rather Be a Corpse Than a Coward”

“Her life is so enshrouded in mystery because she was her own spin doctor,” said Sacramento writer and performer Susheel Bibbs, who has studied Pleasant’s story for decades. Pleasant wrote three autobiographies—but each one contradicts the others on basic facts, such as the year of her birth. We do know that she was born into slavery in Georgia and was raised in Nantucket, Massachusetts, “in indenture,” said Bibbs. On the East Coast the young Pleasant became a crucial figure in the civil rights fight, secretly teaming up with

17

abolitionists and rescuing escaped enslaved people on the Underground Railroad. In this world nothing could ever be as it seemed—and concealment, disguise, and duality were weapons in Pleasant’s armory from the start. That double life included presenting as a white woman when she could. “She was very used to being covert,” said Bibbs. “She often said that words were made to conceal feelings—and that she was good at it.” Early on, Pleasant married well—and rich. And after her first husband died, Pleasant took the forty-five thousand dollars in gold she now had from his estate and arrived by steamer in San Francisco in 1852, still passing as white. She found a town filled with men come to make their gold rush fortunes, far from home and in need of lodging, food, and domestic services. Pleasant invested her sizable wealth in property, establishing boardinghouses and laundries—anything and everything she correctly thought would “be a niche in San Francisco to make more money,” said Bibbs. Pleasant deliberately stayed close to the action in the boardinghouses she ran and later owned, learning a lot of private details about the influential men who stayed there. She used them as another kind of currency, not just to rise in society but also to further her real cause: bringing the Underground Railroad out west. While the wealthy white people of San Francisco society knew her as the white boardinghouse proprietress, San Francisco’s growing Black community knew her real identity. She was known as the “Black City Hall”—the place you could go to get what you need—someone who helped Black people get jobs on steamers, in white homes, and in her own businesses. Almost a century before Rosa Parks, she challenged San Francisco’s segregated transit system in court, winning the right for Black people to ride streetcars without being thrown off. “My cause,” Pleasant wrote in one of her memoirs, “was

18

the cause of freedom and equality for myself and for my people. And I’d rather be a corpse than a coward.” After the Civil War—and more than a decade after she arrived in the city—Pleasant finally checked the box for “Black” on the census of 1865. While this may have caused a stir among the wealthy white people who’d thought her one of their own, Pleasant continued to move in their circles. The tide, however, was about to turn, and a heroine soon became a villain in the eyes of white society.

“Queen of the Voodoos”

By the 1880s the wild, mud-caked San Francisco that Mary Ellen Pleasant, the capitalist, had carved her way into had itself transformed into a “very much more overtly racist” city, said Susheel Bibbs. Across the nation emancipated Black people became convenient scapegoats for the economy’s woes. As a wealthy older Black woman, Pleasant now inspired suspicion, even fear, in the white social circles she moved in. The press coined a nickname intended to diminish her power with the racist image it conjured: “Mammy Pleasant.” Unsurprisingly, she loathed it. “It gives me the suspirations,” she wrote. She’d always been a figure of fascination in San Francisco, but now whispers spread that she had some otherworldly hold over the wealthy white people she was close to: people like Thomas Bell, her white business partner and friend, with whom she shared her vast mansion—along with Teresa, the wife she’d found for him. One headline in the San Francisco Call asked, “Mammy Pleasant: Angel or Arch Fiend in the House of Mystery?” In 1883 Pleasant became entangled in the scandalous trial of Nevada senator William Sharon, who was accused of seducing and then abandoning a young woman named Sarah Althea Hill.

19

Bibbs describes the case as the O. J. Simpson trial of its day in how it captivated the press and public alike across the nation. Of course, Pleasant wasn’t on trial herself, but she was the young Hill’s friend. And lawyers for Sharon painted Pleasant as a sinister crone. They claimed she’d used dark forces to manipulate her friend into entrapping a senator. Yet rather than rejecting the rumors, Pleasant encouraged them, even during the senator’s trial. She carried a voodoo doll in court, claiming she would use it to bring about his death. And die he did, before the trial ended. While her behavior might strike us now as self-defeating, Pleasant had always employed misdirection to confound expectations and control her narrative. Pleasant’s public status as a “voodoo queen” grew, cementing her reputation as a quasi-mystical figure in San Francisco. To white people in the Bay Area, voodoo meant blood magic and malevolent intent. To Mary Ellen Pleasant, however, the real voodoo—vodoun or vodun—was actually her religion from her ancestral homeland. “She was born the daughter of a voodoo priestess and the granddaughter of a voodoo priestess from Haiti,” explained Bibbs. Bibbs believes there’s strong evidence to suggest that Pleasant had studied in New Orleans with legendary vodoun practitioner Marie Laveau before coming to San Francisco— and learned particularly from Laveau’s emphasis on using one’s power to serve the community. Scandal followed scandal. When Pleasant’s business partner, Thomas Bell, was found dead in her mansion, his widow, Teresa, collaborated on a full-page smear piece in the San Francisco Chronicle with the headline “The Queen of the Voodoos.” The press had used the language of the supernatural to describe Pleasant for years, but now they made her into a flat-out monster, accusing her of witchcraft and implying she murdered Bell. This article ignited a public wave against

20

Mary Ellen Pleasant from the powers that be, for whom she’d become too powerful, too loud, almost diabolical—fueled by “hate, revenge, and racism,” said Bibbs.

“One Could Not Tell Who She Was”

It’s telling who gets a legend—and who gets a ghost story. Mary Ellen Pleasant was demonized in her own lifetime, yet in a system so loaded against Black women in the public eye, playing with rumor as she did was perhaps the only way to play the game. Even if it was ultimately her undoing. Pleasant died in 1904 in her nineties, with her fortunes greatly diminished by scandal. Her obituary in the San Francisco Examiner was titled “Mammy Pleasant Will Work Weird Spells No More.” In her own writings, the widow Teresa Bell defined Pleasant as “a demon from first to last.” Learning the details of her extraordinary life, it’s hard to fathom why Mary Ellen Pleasant isn’t a towering figure in San Francisco history. From those newspapers to her early biographers, Pleasant’s life has been so mangled—to the extent that, as Bibbs put it, “One could not tell who she was.” How we’re remembered depends on who’s telling our stories. And one day Mary Ellen Pleasant will get the recognition she deserves—not in spite of her complexity, but because of it. Carly Severn

21

EMPEROR NORTON: America’s Emperor, San Francisco’s Treasure Emperor Norton is one of San Francisco’s most beloved historical figures, occupying a space somewhere between reality and legend, punch line and moral hero. While the self-proclaimed “emperor” did not wield any real power, he held influence in gold rush–era San Francisco and has since endured as a symbol of its quirky spirit, boom-or-bust fortunes, and progressive values. But who was Emperor Norton really? How was he seen in his own time? And why is he still revered today?

The Rise and Fall of a Gold Rush Businessman

Emperor Norton was born Joshua Abraham Norton in London in 1818. When he was two years old, his family moved to South Africa, where his father started a successful business selling ship­ building supplies. Norton opened his own ship supply business when he was twenty-one, but within eighteen months the business had failed. Looking for a new start, Norton arrived in San Francisco in late 1849. The gold rush had transformed a small town of a few hundred people into a bustling metropolis of twenty-five thousand within a few years. People were making and losing their fortunes in the blink of an eye. Norton, who had already built and lost a business in South Africa, fit right in. He established himself as a successful businessman, selling commodities like rice and flour. He invested in real estate, building on some of the most lucrative plots in town. “He made a great amount of money and was very influential,” said John Lumea, founder of the Emperor Norton Trust, which

22

focuses on researching Norton’s life and sharing it with the public. “He was in with all the right people, attended all the right clubs and all the right restaurants.” Riding high, Norton planned his next business move. With a rice famine underway in China, Norton tried to corner the market by buying a shipload of Peruvian rice. He expected rice prices to soar. But it all went wrong. “Within a [few] days, ship after ship after ship of rice comes in, and so the bottom falls out of the market,” Lumea said. “This idea, which at one point seemed so great, now isn’t so great.” The deal ruined Norton, and by the time he was thirty-eight, he had gone bankrupt for the second time.

An Imperial Transformation

After his business failures, Norton went quiet for a few years. He moved out of his luxurious home and fell out of favor with some members of the social elite. He reemerged on September 17, 1859, on the pages of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin newspaper. Earlier in the day he had walked into the paper’s offices and presented the editor with a short notice he asked to have published. The notice read, “At the peremptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States.” Three years after losing everything, Norton christened himself Emperor of the United States. In the wake of Napoleon III’s invasion of Mexico, Norton added “Protector of Mexico” to his imperial title in 1863. There are no sure answers about Norton’s mental health before or after his imperial declaration, but some people think his money troubles led him into a deep depression and that becoming Emperor Norton was a coping mechanism. “There’s a sense in which the persona of the emperor actually saved him in a way,” John Lumea said.

23

In this first proclamation, Norton called on representatives of all US states to assemble the following February to establish his empire and “to ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring.” When February rolled around, nobody showed up. But that didn’t stop Norton. He had declared himself emperor and would act like it for the next twenty years.

Emperor of the United States, Protector of Mexico

Norton continued issuing imperial proclamations in the local newspapers. Some of his ideas were big, like calling for the end of presidential elections, while others read as personal grievances, such as when he chastised the skating rink operator who wouldn’t let him use a pair of skates. Even though he went by Emperor of the United States, his proclamations were often very local in nature. He didn’t hesitate to call out San Francisco’s police and elected officials if he sensed corruption taking place. He supported a woman’s right to vote. He advocated for fair treatment of immigrants by the courts. Perhaps his most well-known proclamations called for the construction of a bridge connecting Oakland and San Francisco—what we recognize today as the Bay Bridge. Norton also adopted an imperial wardrobe. He started with either a blue or gray military jacket, switching between the two to maintain his neutrality in the ongoing Civil War. After the war, he settled on a blue officer’s jacket furnished with large, fringed, golden shoulder epaulets. His balding head was almost always covered with a hat, most often a small military kepi or a garish beaver fur top hat with a cascade of colorful feathers pinned to the front. Being emperor did not pay very well. Norton spent most of his reign subsisting on the generosity of the public and the support of a few wealthy friends from his high-society days. But he didn’t need much money. His lodgings cost only fifty cents a night, and he spent most of his day reading the newspapers, socializing in Portsmouth

24

Square, and writing proclamations at the Mechanics’ Institute Library on Post Street. For lunch Norton could go to almost any tavern in town and, for the price of a drink, no more than twenty-five cents, get access to a full lunch spread. “He really makes himself part of the life of the city,” John Lumea said. “He goes to political meetings. He goes to the theater. He goes to the saloons. He makes himself a public presence.” For the most part, San Franciscans embraced Norton’s eccentricities. Theaters would even reserve their best seats for the emperor on opening nights, and shops sold emperor figurines.

To the city’s newspapers, however, Norton was a bit of a buffoon, and they regularly published fake proclamations with his name attached. In 1870 he started publishing his genuine proclamations almost exclusively in the African American owned-and-operated abolitionist weekly, The Pacific Appeal. Many of Norton’s proclamations were progressive for his time. “He’s talking about how African Americans should have the right to attend public schools, ride public streetcars. How the Chinese should be able to have their testimony heard in court,” Lumea said. Norton also argued for the rights of Native Americans and against political corruption. “So he’s really making himself into an early champion of the values of fairness and tolerance and the common good that really later become a great symbol of San Francisco.”

“Le roi est mort”

January 8, 1880, was a cold and rainy night in San Francisco. Norton left his room on Commercial Street to walk the few short blocks to a debate at the Academy of Natural Sciences. On his way there he collapsed on California Street and died of a suspected stroke. Days later a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle read, “Le roi est mort.” The king is dead. Ten thousand people reportedly came to his funeral. Though Norton died with just a few dollars in his pocket, his old friends in business paid for a fancy rosewood coffin adorned with silver and a burial plot in the Masonic Cemetery. “Even though often in the official world of journalism or politics he was somewhat seen as a figure of ridicule,” John Lumea said, “to the people in the streets who saw him on a day-to-day basis for twenty years, he was known as a very kind person.” More than 140 years after his death Norton continues to captivate the imaginations of San Franciscans who still flock to his grave, which has since been moved to Colma. For many people, he represents the best of the Bay Area: an advocate of fairness and tolerance, a kind person, and a bit of an oddball. Ryan Levi

26

THE BAY AREA’S HOLLYWOOD: How Charlie Chaplin and Silent Films Flourished in the East Bay When you think of moviemaking in California, your mind may conjure up images of Hollywood, with its big studio lots and glamorous stars. But there’s another spot in the Golden State that played a pivotal role in cinematic history: a small town in the East Bay called Niles.

When Movies Moved In

In the early twentieth century, before Niles became a Fremont neighborhood, it used to be its own town, with sunny, warm weather more akin to that in Southern California and easy access by train to San Francisco and Chicago. That all had tremendous appeal for the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, run in part by Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson, the first western movie-star cowboy. “Anderson had been traveling around the United States for three years, looking for the perfect weather and filming location for the westerns that he was making,” explained David Kiehn, historian for the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum. Anderson settled on Niles in April of 1912, and over the next four years Essanay made more than 350 films there. “It was the most successful silent film company in the Bay Area,” said Kiehn.

Fast and Furious

Film companies of the time churned out movies at the rate of several a week. They tended to be thin on plot and big on action, especially chase scenes and slapstick comedy. The companies hired a lot of actors from the world of vaudeville

27

theater who had the physical stamina and comedic chops for this kind of work. Broncho Billy spotted a rising talent at a rival film company in Hollywood: a young English comedian by the name of Charles Chaplin. “Chaplin had been working at the Keystone Film Company for $150 a week, and his contract was almost up. They signed him at Essanay for $1,250 a week and a $10,000 signing bonus,” said David Kiehn. It was an expensive bet that paid off for Essanay. Chaplin didn’t particularly like Niles, which was, after all, a bit of a backwater compared to Los Angeles, but he made five films in Niles that cemented his standing as a movie star. One of those was The Tramp. You can still visit the locations where scenes were shot. For instance, consider the final, iconic scene, when the brokenhearted tramp waddles away from the camera in Niles Canyon. The area still looks a lot like it did back then, with big trees waving over a winding country road, albeit paved now. Essanay allowed Chaplin to transition from being an ensemble performer, with popular bits in someone else’s films, to a filmmaker himself, exercising creative control with great autonomy. “Niles is pivotal,” said film history expert Marc Wanamaker. “He could do whatever he wanted. This was the beginning of Chaplin as we know him.” Chaplin itched to return to Hollywood, though, which by then was well on its way to becoming the center of the moviemaking universe. There, Chaplin made a few more movies for the company before striking out on his own as a producer. The Niles studio closed in February 1916 and was ultimately torn down in 1933. By then talkies had become popular, and the studio’s proximity to loud train tracks was an insurmountable problem.

28

The silent film era lasted almost forty years, from the 1890s through the 1920s. “It’s amazing how many films were made in that time period. Thousands and thousands of films. Only a fraction survive, but because there were so many made, there are still a lot of them around,” said Kiehn. Today, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum lives on as a temple to silent films. It boasts an impressive and ever-growing archive of silent movies that were filmed not just in Niles but all over the world. People regularly send in old footage to the museum, knowing it’s a safe place to keep it. Kiehn repairs and researches the footage, bringing it back to life. “It’s amazing what’s out there and still turning up,” he said. A family recently came to him with footage from the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. “Some pretty amazing stuff!” Rachael Myrow

29

Movies Set in the Bay Area The gorgeous hills, golden light, and stunning architecture have made the Bay Area an ideal backdrop for many movies over the years. A few favorites on our short list:

THE CLASSICS

Vertigo (1958): If you’re going to watch one movie set in San Francisco, it should be this Alfred Hitchcock psychological thriller, considered by many critics to be one of the greatest films ever made. In the film a police-officer-turned-personalinvestigator becomes obsessed with a woman he’s been hired to tail. It features shots of Coit Tower, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. If you want to see the city’s biggest attractions, this film is a hit parade of gorgeous locations. Bullitt (1968): Do we need to say much more than “epic car chase scenes on San Francisco hills”? This Steve McQueen action thriller features tons of on-location filming, so you’ll get a big taste of the city. Cars fly, skid, and smoke as they race around the streets of North Beach and Potrero Hill. In the background you’ll peep the downtown San Francisco skyline, the blue of bay waters, Angel Island, and Coit Tower. The Joy Luck Club (1993): Have a box of tissues nearby for this emotional film that explores the relationships between Chinese immigrant mothers and their Americanized daughters. Based on the book of the same name, by Oaklandborn Amy Tan, it’s celebrated for its all-Asian cast and nuanced portrayal of the Chinese immigrant experience. Filming took place in Richmond, San Francisco, and Filoli Estate in Woodside.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019): This wasn’t just filmed in San Francisco; it’s also a commentary on how gentrification decimated once vibrant Black neighborhoods in the Bay Area. The story follows Jimmie Fails as he tries to reclaim the Victorian home his grandfather built and, with it, his sense of belonging in a city that has changed. The cinematography will absolutely take your breath away, featuring warm shots of a classic Victorian and everyday city life on San Francisco streets. Inside Out (2015): Pixar Animation Studios is based in Emeryville and has dropped Bay Area references in several animated films over the years, but Inside Out takes it to the next level. You’ll find animated versions of the Golden Gate Bridge, an interior of a Victorian home, San Francisco’s Ferry Building, and a pizza place based on Berkeley’s Cheese Board Collective. The movie highlights the difficulties of living in an expensive city, where parents must work hard to get by and don’t have as much time for their children. It also casts a critical gaze at everything from tech culture to healthy pizza toppings. I mean, broccoli? C’mon. Milk (2008): Based on the life of San Francisco city supervisor and gay rights activist Harvey Milk, this film chronicles his start in politics and increasing devotion to political activism. As a supervisor, Milk fights to legitimize his own identity and create a safer, more accepting city for all through his gay rights ordinance. Even when you know the tragic ending is coming, it’s still a stunning and stoic reminder of a dark chapter in San Francisco history. Most of the film was shot in the Castro and at San Francisco City Hall, both draped in a 1970s veneer.

Blindspotting (2018): Few movies have been as revered for capturing the essence of Oakland as Blindspotting, cowritten by and costarring Berkeley High grads Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. Filmed in and around the city, it follows the story of two friends: a parolee about to finish his term when he witnesses a white police officer kill a fleeing Black suspect, and his volatile best friend, fuming at the gentrification he sees changing his hometown. This one is bursting with Oakland pride, even as it grapples with tough issues.

FEEL GOOD FLICKS

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986): This charming, lighthearted movie makes the Bay Area look undeniably fun, as Admiral James T. Kirk and crew travel back in time to 1986 San Francisco to save the world. Much of the film was shot on location in the city over a ten-day period, so be on the lookout for familiar intersections in Chinatown, scenes along Marine Drive, and of course, the Golden Gate Bridge. Among the many films in the Star Trek franchise, this film ranks highly among Trekkies and general audience members alike. Mrs. Doubtfire (1993): This family comedy features one of the Bay Area’s most beloved celebrities, Robin Williams, who grew up in Marin County. In the film, Williams’s character, Daniel, goes through a bitter divorce and loses custody of his children. He disguises himself as a female housekeeper so he can spend time with them, and hilarity ensues. As you watch, you’ll spot everything from ordinary San Francisco streets to classic landmarks. Many scenes take place at a home at 2640 Steiner Street which became a pop-up memorial after Williams died in 2014. Sister Act (1992): A lounge singer, played by Whoopi Goldberg, enters the witness protection program and gets placed at a struggling convent in San Francisco. She remakes the choir

into a soulful, spirited chorus, bursting with Motown flair. Filmmakers used St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Noe Valley for most of the exterior shots, but don’t expect to recognize much from the street scenes. Designers transformed the tidy, upper-class streets surrounding the church into a run-down neighborhood for the film.

FOR A THRILL

Zodiac (2007): During the late 1960s and 1970s, the serial killer called Zodiac had many Bay Area residents on high alert. This David Fincher film chronicles the cat-and-mouse game the killer played with police and the press. Everything from the musical choices, to the costumes, to the production design tells the story of living in the Bay Area during that time. Be on the lookout for recognizable locations like Lake Berryessa, San Francisco City Hall, and the Transamerica Pyramid. A huge chunk of the film was also shot inside the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom. Basic Instinct (1992): In this erotic thriller, a police detective investigating the murder of a wealthy rock star becomes romantically entangled with the prime suspect. How the very wealthy live in the Bay Area is very much on display in the movie, which features lots of dreamy shots of San Francisco’s coastline. You may recognize film locations in North Beach, Telegraph Hill, and Big Sur too. Dirty Harry (1971): Inspired by the real-life case of the Zodiac Killer, Clint Eastwood plays one of his most iconic roles in this action thriller. With a psychopath known as the “Scorpio Killer” on the loose, it’s up to San Francisco police inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan to track him down. The movie was filmed throughout San Francisco, so keep your eyes peeled for spots like City Hall, Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco General Hospital, and Mount Davidson.

THE PORT CHICAGO 50: How a Deadly Bay Area Explosion Led to the Integration of the Navy There are a few moments in US civil rights history that tend to get the most focus: Brown v. Board of Education—the landmark ruling that led to the desegregation of public schools; Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus and how it called attention to the treatment of Black people on public transportation; Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington. Then, there are the moments that are far less known, but arguably just as important—like the courageous stand fifty sailors took at Port Chicago, a navy site in the East Bay, that ultimately led to the desegregation of the navy.

Segregation in the Navy and at Port Chicago

During World War II the entire military was segregated. In the navy, Black sailors were given one of two jobs—to serve as cooks for white servicemen or as stevedores, loading and unloading naval cargo. They had no chance for promotion, improved ratings, or even lateral movement into combat units. “Draftees and enlistees were assigned to the most menial work and often the most dangerous work, like handling the ammunition in segregated work crews where only Black men were doing this work,” said Dr. Robert L. Allen, author of The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in US Naval History. During the 1970s and 1980s, Allen interviewed survivors of the Port Chicago disaster, who have since died. “This was not something peculiar to the navy. It’s just that the navy was

34

a rather extreme example of what was happening throughout American society.” At Port Chicago, a munitions depot located east of Martinez on Suisun Bay, crews of mostly Black sailors worked around the clock to load ship after ship with bombs, warheads, and other live munitions. Though the work was extremely dangerous, Port Chicago sailors were given little training. Instead, they were encouraged to work at breakneck speed, doing physically demanding work while white officers looked on. “The [white] officers themselves used to bet on their division putting more tonnage than the other division,” said Joe Small, a Black sailor who worked at Port Chicago. “I often heard them arguing. So we were pushed by the petty officers to get the tonnage in.” By July 1944 the United States had ramped up its war machine, and it is said that all the munitions used in the Pacific theater, including the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, came through Port Chicago. Sailors were working at full tilt to keep up.

Disaster Strikes

On the evening of July 17, 1944, two massive explosions ripped through Port Chicago, killing 320 men and wounding 390 more. Of those who died, 202 were Black sailors. No one knows for sure why the explosions happened because everyone at the explosion site died, but after extensive research Allen believes one of the loading mechanisms failed, dropping a bomb into the E. A. Bryan, a merchant ship that was fully loaded and set to sail soon. Another ship, the SS Quinault Victory, was also destroyed, along with the entire navy base at Port Chicago and the small town nearby. “I was knocked out of my bunk,” Martin Bordenave, one of the survivors, told Allen. Bordenave was sleeping in the nearby barracks when the explosions occurred. “I had to go to the hospital because I was all cut up from glass. I was blown twenty, thirty feet from my bunk. I woke up in the hospital.”

35

The explosion was so powerful it registered as a 3.4 on the Richter scale and was felt throughout the Bay Area. Windows broke as far away as San Francisco. It was the worst accidental home-front disaster of World War II. Sailors like Small had long been concerned about the lack of safety training and the pace of the work. Allen said men handling live munitions were given no training: “The instructions they got were, ‘You go in there, you watch what the other guys are doing, and you do the same thing.’ That was it.” The Port Chicago explosions confirmed their worst fears. “That explosion was predicted months before it happened,” Joe Small said. “Everyone knew it was coming.” After the explosion Black survivors were told to clean up the mess, including the bodies of friends and comrades, while their white officers were given time off to grieve. The surviving sailors were moved to a nearby navy base on Mare Island, in Vallejo, and told to go back to work loading the same munitions, under the same conditions, with no new training.

The Port Chicago 50

When faced with the prospect of going back to similarly unsafe conditions, 258 Black sailors refused. Their officers imprisoned them on a barge for several days, where Admiral Wright of the Twelfth Naval District told them that refusing to work was mutiny and that the punishment for mutiny was the death penalty. Upon hearing that, most of the men agreed to go back to work, but fifty held out. They’re now known as the Port Chicago 50. “The navy had brought us up to a point where I thought it was the proper thing to do to not go back to work,” Joe Small said. He was one of the leaders of what Allen called a workers’ strike. “In civilian life it would have been a strike. And there’s no such thing as the strike in the military,” Allen said. Although these fifty men were quite different from one another in many ways, a shared experience of injustice bound them

36

together. They were unwilling to risk their lives for a military that had treated them so poorly. Small believed the Port Chicago 50 were joined by a common personality trait—they were “loudmouths and fighters.” “Those who are willing to speak out are going to be the ones who get pinpointed for retribution,” Allen said. But he doesn’t believe all fifty men were ringleaders. He thinks many of them were ordinary men, fed up with the conditions. The navy court-martialed the fifty men who held out, charging them with mutiny. “We didn’t think it was going to develop into nothing that big,” said Freddie Meeks, one of the Port Chicago 50. He and others said they thought the navy would let them go back home, or at least understand why they didn’t feel safe going back to work immediately. Instead, they were put on trial. The trial was held at the military barracks on Treasure Island over the course of six weeks. It remains the largest mutiny trial in navy history. Sailors were not allowed to give evidence about the working conditions that led to the disaster. “It was a trial for the sake of having a trial,” Allen said. “Because everybody knew what the outcome was going to be, they were going to be found guilty.” The seven-member court made up of high-ranking white officers found all fifty men guilty of mutiny after deliberating for a little over an hour. Each man was given a sentence of fifteen years in military prison and a dishonorable discharge. After their conviction the Port Chicago 50 were sent to San Diego to serve their sentences.

Change in the Navy

The case received a lot of publicity, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent their star lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, to monitor the trial. He used it as an opportunity to highlight the unequal and discriminatory treatment of Black servicemen within all branches of the armed forces. On one occasion outside the courtroom, he said, “This is not fifty men

37

on trial for mutiny. This is the navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes.” While the verdict of the trial was not what civil rights advocates had hoped for, it was successful in bringing to light the navy’s discriminatory policies. Marshall issued a direct challenge to the military in a statement. I want to know why the navy disregarded official warnings by the San Francisco waterfront unions—before the Port Chicago disaster—that an explosion was inevitable if they persisted in using untrained seamen in the loading of ammunition. I want to know why the navy disregarded an offer by these same unions to send experienced men to train navy personnel in the safe handling of explosives. . . . I want to know why the commissioned officers at Port Chicago were allowed to race their men. I want to know why bets ranging from $5 up were made between division officers as to whose crew would load more ammunition. . . .

Marshall’s advocacy brought the case to the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, who was a progressive champion. Allen said the couple found the navy’s treatment of the Port Chicago 50 disgraceful and made their displeasure known throughout the military. By the end of 1944 the secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, was already taking steps to desegregate— first by removing barriers to assigning Black sailors to auxiliary ships, then in all training camps. Forrestal also ordered that Black sailors be considered for ratings and promotions, a change that addressed an oft-cited grievance. “If Thurgood Marshall had not been there, I don’t know if these guys would have gotten anywhere,” Allen said. “I mean, I think they would have all gone to prison for a long time. And it would have been hushed up. They would have disappeared. And the process of desegregation of the military would have been severely impaired.”

38

In 1946 all segregation policies in the navy were officially dropped. It was the first big step toward integration of the military, which wouldn’t come in full until President Harry Truman’s executive order in 1948. And it was all due largely to the courageous actions of the Port Chicago 50 and their mutiny trial.

A Troublesome Ending for the Port Chicago 50

When the war ended, most of the Port Chicago 50 were released from military prison early. Many finished out their military duty on combat ships that were now integrated, although they did not know that their mutiny trial led to the change. When the men finally went back to civilian life, they all had to contend with a mutiny conviction on their records, which made employment difficult. Many of the men never spoke about their experience, even to their families. “I didn’t talk about it,” said Freddie Meeks. “I just kept it inside. I just figure we got a raw deal. The world should have known. I feel like it should have been brought out. I thought it should have been exposed.” More than seventy-five years after the Port Chicago disaster, all the courageous men who stood up for their rights are dead. There have been efforts to posthumously exonerate the Port Chicago 50. So far none have been successful. “It is a symbolic gesture, but some types of symbolic gestures are helpful because there is always the next generation,” Allen said. “And we want the next generation to know about these things too, so that they don’t have to go through them.” Katrina Schwartz

39

FRIDA KAHLO’S SAN FRANCISCO: How “The City of the World” Helped Shape an Icon These days Frida Kahlo’s image is all around us. Her iconic eyebrows and piercing gaze have been immortalized on T-shirts, tote bags, and tequila bottles. But before her image became so ubiquitous, Kahlo was a budding artist waiting for her big break, and her time in San Francisco helped put her on the map.

Frida and Diego Come to San Francisco

San Francisco was a place Kahlo called “the city of the world,” and she often dreamed of it as a teenager, said University of San Francisco professor and author of Frida in America, Celia Stahr. As Kahlo and her husband, the already well-known artist Diego Rivera, made their way to San Francisco for an extended stay in 1930, she doodled a portrait of herself set against a backdrop of how she imagined the city to be. “When they get to San Francisco, she shows it to Diego, and he just marvels at how much it looks like what they’re seeing before them,” said Stahr. “Kind of like she already knew what it was going to look like even though she’d never been.” The couple came because Rivera had landed two prestigious mural commissions in the city. His masterful use of the fresco technique fascinated local artists, who eagerly wanted to learn the craft. As soon as they arrived, Rivera was getting nonstop attention. “The poor guy can’t even go to the bathroom in peace because they’re bugging him all day,” Kahlo wrote to her family in one of her many letters home. She, however, wasn’t as well known.

40

The local press merely regarded her as the wife of the famous Mexican muralist.

Soirees, Sketching, and Sightseeing

In their new home at 716 Montgomery Street, not far from North Beach and Chinatown, Kahlo was surrounded by artists who energized her creative process. She would get together with Pele de Lappe and Lucile Blanch to make art. “We would draw these composite drawings where each one would start on a particular sheet of paper and then trade them off and pass them around,” recalled de Lappe in an interview recorded in 2001. “[The sketches] were usually very obscene or horrendous and bloody or sensuous in some way.” When she wasn’t busy painting, Kahlo made plenty of time for sightseeing around San Francisco. “In the Russia colony they dress as they do in Russia, and the girls dance on the hills. The Greek colony is also very interesting, and the Japanese, but most of all the Chinese,” Kahlo wrote in a letter to her mother. “She just gushes about Chinatown, and she writes about it quite a bit,” said Celia Stahr. “She writes about how she’s convinced that the Mexican people and the Chinese people are connected to one another.” Letters detail how the firecrackers during Chinese New Year festivities reminded Kahlo of street fairs back in Mexico. Silks and other handmade fabrics sold in the shops of Chinatown also caught her eye. She purchased a few to embellish her red leather boots and make into skirts in the style of the Indigenous Mexican clothes she loved. Kahlo’s fashion sense quickly caught the attention of San Franciscans. Her Indigenous dress, influenced by the Zapotec women of Tehuantepec, stirred so much excitement on the streets of San Francisco that she reportedly stopped traffic. “The gringas seem to like me a lot and they are really impressed

41

by all the dresses and rebozos I brought with me. . . . All the painters want me to model for the portraits,” Kahlo wrote to her mother. But underneath her colorful garments, Kahlo’s body ached. At eighteen she had suffered a horrific streetcar accident that severely damaged most of her body. She also experienced chronic pain after overcoming polio as a child. Her long walks around San Francisco began to take a toll.

California Leaves a Lasting Impact

That changed when she met Dr. Leo Eloesser, the chief of thoracic surgery at San Francisco General Hospital. He went above and beyond to treat Kahlo’s foot and leg pain, even showing up at her doorstep when she’d miss her appointments. Beyond his thorough care, he connected with Kahlo and Rivera on a creative level. “Leo was a musician. He played viola, and he would have weekly soirees at his flat,” said Celia Stahr. “So he was a doctor, but you could say he had the soul of an artist.” Rivera, Kahlo, and Eloesser took trips around Northern California together. One of these excursions proved to be a major turning point for Kahlo’s art. On a trip to Santa Rosa, Kahlo visited the garden of the famous horticulturist Luther Burbank. He developed more than eight hundred varieties of fruits, vegetables, and plants by crossbreeding two kinds together. Seeing how Burbank literally fused two organisms to create something new mesmerized Kahlo. When she made a portrait of Burbank, she rendered him as part human and part tree trunk, with roots connecting to his buried corpse. “This is really her first major breakthrough creatively, in terms of creating a new style that was very different from what she’d been working on,” said Stahr. From this point on, Kahlo continued to play with imagery of roots, plants, and hybrid bodies to portray themes of life

42

and death. It’s a duality that was already part of her Mexican upbringing, said Stahr, but a visual style that was honed here in the Bay Area. After Rivera completed his two murals in 1931, the couple briefly went back to Mexico before returning to the United States to paint in New York City and Detroit. But it wouldn’t be the last time they visited San Francisco.

A Tumultuous Return to San Francisco

When they returned a decade later, Kahlo and Rivera were divorced, and they arrived following dramatic circumstances. First came Rivera, who fled Mexican authorities who wanted to question him about the attempted assassination of his former friend and exiled Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. Kahlo wasn’t so lucky. Months later, when Trotsky was actually assassinated, the police detained her for questioning, believing she was an accomplice. The brief experience in jail left her traumatized. “She was in a terrible emotional state. Physically, she wasn’t doing well. She complained of back and leg pain,” said Celia Stahr. Her doctors in Mexico advised her to undergo more surgeries, but her friend and trusted doctor, Leo Eloesser, didn’t agree. He was focused on her emotional health, and he prescribed her a better diet, with less drinking, and advised her to reconcile with Rivera in San Francisco. “[Eloesser] played this important role in their marriage,” said Stahr. “He was really the go-between with their relationship.” Kahlo took his advice, and when she arrived in San Francisco, she lived with Rivera for a time before a stay at St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission District. Once Kahlo was discharged from the hospital and felt physically and emotionally stronger, she and Rivera remarried at San Francisco City Hall. The Oakland Tribune snapped a photograph of the couple and this time acknowledged Kahlo as “an artist in her own right”— no longer simply “Rivera’s wife.”

43

“By 1940 she has achieved quite a bit. You might say she’s at the height of her career at that time,” said Stahr. Her art was exhibited at the World’s Fair on Treasure Island and the Legion of Honor, and it landed in the hands of an important collector, Albert Bender, who was affiliated with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—all things that helped give Kahlo wider exposure around the United States. “You have no idea how marvelous the city is, it helped me a lot to come because it opened my eyes and I’ve seen lots of swell new things,” wrote Kahlo to a friend.

Kahlo’s Impact on San Francisco

As much as the Bay Area provided Kahlo and Rivera a platform to create and thrive, they also gave San Francisco a lasting blueprint for creativity. As many Chicanos and Latinos continued the fight for civil rights and representation, local artists like Amalia Mesa-Bains turned to Kahlo’s and Rivera’s art as a source of empowerment and cultural pride. “We had experienced racism and discrimination, and so we needed to reclaim our sense of belonging. Frida and Diego became in many ways models for us, that an artist could be at the same time political and cultural,” said Mesa-Bains. In 2018 San Francisco city officials renamed a street after Frida Kahlo in front of City College of San Francisco’s main campus, also the permanent home of Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity mural. In what Kahlo called the “city of the world” the lasting brushstrokes of Mexico’s well-known artists are as vibrant as ever. Marisol Medina-Cadena

44

MEET CHARLEY PARKHURST: The Gold Rush’s Fearless, Gender Nonconforming Stagecoach Driver During the gold rush there were few occupations in the West as notorious and formidable as the stagecoach driver. These drivers would drive gold and other valuables from the far-flung mining outposts in the Sierra Nevada to the big-city banks of San Francisco. It was a treacherous journey that required expert navigation across rough terrain—but the biggest challenge was thieves. They were eager to rob drivers and passengers of their valuable cargo. Stagecoach drivers had to be good with a gun to keep their cargo safe and their passengers alive. For their skill and fearlessness, they were paid very well, and the best ones were known by name across California. Among the best drivers in the entire state was Charley Parkhurst.

The Famous California Driver

Parkhurst was described as a man of slight build, who chewed tobacco, drank whiskey, and swore often. He wore beaded riding gloves and used a whip on his horses and to stay out of brawls. He was tough, and he looked even tougher after he was half-blinded when a horse kicked him in the face, which earned him the nickname “One-Eyed Charley.” Some knew the bewildering story of his crossing a crumbling bridge during a storm. Others cared only about his ability to keep the bandits away from their goods. But none of his peers knew that Charley was assigned female at birth. The accounts of Parkhurst’s early years sometimes contradict one another. As far as we know, Parkhurst was born around 1812

45

in New Hampshire. Some sources say he spent his early years in an orphanage, then ran away to find work in stables. A newspaper account said Parkhurst worked on an uncle’s farm until they had a falling-out, and Parkhurst ran away to Rhode Island. Either way, it was after he left that Parkhurst started wearing masculine clothes, living as a man, and learning to ride horses. He started working as a stagecoach driver on the East Coast, but eventually the gold rush brought him out west around 1850.

Discussing Charley’s Gender Today

These days historians like Don Romesburg, chair of women’s and gender studies at Sonoma State University, see Parkhurst as part of trans history. The stagecoach driver did not conform to the gender he was assigned at birth and excelled in a gold rush profession where hypermasculinity was rewarded. However, we cannot say whether Parkhurst identified as transgender because we don’t know why he decided to live as a man. There could have been many motivations. “Women were given very few economic opportunities in the mid-nineteenth-century California. They could be seamstresses or laundresses or teachers or sex workers essentially,” said Romesburg. People with romantic ties to someone of the same sex would have been marginalized at the time too. “There’s all sorts of reasons beyond perhaps a true expression of one’s gendered self that someone like Parkhurst might choose to live as a man for many years,” said Romesburg. When referring to Parkhurst, using the pronoun “he” makes sense to Romesburg because Charley lived life predominantly as a man. However, you could also refer to Charley with the singular “they,” used by nonbinary people and others who reject the gender binary. “I think ‘they’ can also be used for people in the past as a marker of undecidability,” said Romesburg. “I think that if you’re going to pick one wrong gender pronoun for Charley, it would be

46

‘she.’ Because for as much of Charley’s life that Charley was an active agent in asserting a gendered self, he was he.”

Parkhurst’s Gold Rush Dominance

Parkhurst ran stretches of road all around California—between Mariposa and Stockton, Oakland and San Jose, San Juan and

Santa Cruz. Parkhurst was highly sought after, working for many wealthy families. He even drove a large cargo of gold for Wells Fargo. With a money box full of gold and a coach full of passengers, Parkhurst would drive six horses across rough terrain, where bandits lay in wait. Once Parkhurst was stopped by a gang of highway robbers who brought a gun to Parkhurst’s head and threatened the passengers. Parkhurst’s gun was out of reach, and there was no choice but to give the bandits the money box. However, Parkhurst defiantly told the bandits that if someone tried to steal from him again, it would be unpleasant. After that, Parkhurst was always prepared. The next time he was stopped it was by a famous desperado called “Sugarfoot.” Parkhurst shot him dead. It wasn’t long before Parkhurst developed a reputation as one of the safest California “whips” and became known as the “boss driver of the road.” Contemporaries said he often worked alone, serving as both driver and lookout. Though we know there were passengers floating in and out of Parkhurst’s life, we know less about the personal company he kept. There is a story about a poor widow who was about to lose her house. Parkhurst bought the house to give back to her. Some speculated Parkhurst did it for the widow’s daughter, who was pretty, but Parkhurst left that town soon after.

Parkhurst Hangs Up the REINS

Parkhurst retired from stagecoach driving after trains started crisscrossing the Golden State, taking over the role that stagecoach drivers once played. He worked as a farmer and lumberman, where newspaper accounts say he earned high wages. He was registered to vote in 1867, about fifty years before women got suffrage. Parkhurst may have been the first person assigned female at birth to cast a ballot in California for a presidential election.

48

Parkhurst continued to work until he developed severe rheumatism in his sixties, which eventually shriveled his limbs. In 1879 Parkhurst developed cancer of the tongue. He died at the age of sixty-seven near Watsonville, California. That was when the public found out that Parkhurst was assigned female at birth. Across the country, newspapers printed stories that would be seen as insensitive today. Headlines like “Thirty Years in Disguise,” “The Female Stage Driver,” and “A Queer Woman” erased Parkhurst’s experience living as a man. Still, most coverage conveyed a sense of awe in everything Parkhurst accomplished.

Parkhurst Today

Over the decades Parkhurst’s story has been relegated to more obscure historical texts, but now he’s getting a more prominent place in California history books. In 2011 the California State Legislature passed the FAIR Education Act, ensuring that the roles and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans and people with disabilities would be included in K–12 history education. Don Romesburg, who fought to include Parkhurst in lesson plans, said, “It’s important that we see lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives in the past so that we understand that queerness and transness is not something that simply appears after Stonewall, for example. It’s something that’s been around in some form, everywhere, for always.” Jessica Placzek

49

THE HARLEM OF THE WEST: The History of Jazz in the Fillmore District If you were walking down San Francisco’s Fillmore Street in the 1950s, chances are you might run into Billie Holiday stepping out of a restaurant. Or Ella Fitzgerald trying on hats. Or Thelonious Monk smoking a cigarette. None of this would be out of the ordinary in the neighborhood’s musical heyday, when it came to be known as the “Harlem of the West.”

The Neighborhood’s Early Days

How the San Francisco neighborhood came to have a world-famous reputation begins as many stories of the city do—with the 1906 earthquake. The Fillmore District was one of the few neighborhoods that survived after much of the city was leveled. In her book, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, author and filmmaker Elizabeth Pepin Silva describes how the Fillmore became the city’s shopping and political center while Market Street was rebuilt. Wanting to capitalize on the area’s new popularity, the Fillmore Neighborhood Merchants Association decided the district would also become an entertainment center. In 1909 the Fillmore Chutes amusement park was built and, three years after that, the famous Fillmore Auditorium. “It was a really fun, exciting place,” said Silva. “But [these entertainment options] were mainly for white people.” In the early 1900s San Francisco was segregated, but in the Fillmore it was always a bit different. The neighborhood was predominantly Jewish, though also home to Japanese Americans and African Americans. The earthquake had damaged a lot of other neighborhoods where people of color were “allowed” to live in the city, but the surviving Fillmore District had this history of accepting

52

immigrants. “It became known as one of the most integrated neighborhoods west of the Mississippi,” said Silva. From the early 1900s until the 1940s, the neighborhood was made up of Filipinos, Mexicans, African Americans, Russians, Japanese Americans, and Jewish people, all living next door to one another.

Then, Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered World War II. Japanese Americans, who made up a sizable portion of Fillmore residents, were forced out of their homes by an executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and moved to state-operated concentration camps. Simultaneously, African Americans from the Midwest were recruited for the war effort and given free train tickets to come to the Bay Area and work at the shipyards in San Francisco and Richmond. African Americans arriving in San Francisco moved into empty apartments the Japanese Americans had been forced to leave. Between 1940 and 1950, the Black population of San Francisco grew tenfold. By 1945 some thirty thousand African Americans were living in the city. With this surge in population came an explosion in the Fillmore of Black-owned businesses, nightclubs, restaurants, and bars.

The Making of a Jazz Hot Spot

“You might have four clubs in a block, two on each side of the street. And then you go around a couple more blocks and then you have another couple of clubs,” said jazz drummer Earl Watkins in an interview with Carol Chamberland for her documentary The Legend of Bop City. These clubs booked musical acts every night of the week. Musicians of the era recall roaming from one club to another, jamming for a while at each stop. It wasn’t unusual for a big name like Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk to show up unannounced, hop on stage, and start playing. According to Elizabeth Pepin Silva, “You could go out on Friday night and not come home until Sunday night because there is so much to do. And so that’s how Fillmore became the ‘Harlem of the West.’” Musician Terry Hilliard started playing at venues in the Fillmore District in the 1950s when he was a student at San Francisco State. “[The Fillmore] was a place where talent could be developed, whether it be music, art, dancing, or whatever it was . . .

54

It was a place where you could express yourself and be accepted by others, and you had an audience,” said Hilliard. Reflecting on his time playing bass with house bands in the Fillmore, Hilliard said, “We had great crowds. People dressed up nice. The places were very elegant. There was just a lot of joy.” The Fillmore was also one of the few places where, as a Black man, he could play a venue and enter through the front door: “At the Fillmore, they were Black clubs.” Jazz singer Mary Stallings was born in the Fillmore District in 1939. Her family came to San Francisco from the Midwest, and she was the first of her eleven siblings born in the city. She started singing gospel in her neighborhood church when she was eight years old and remembers the Fillmore as being full of music all the time. Growing up, Stallings imitated her idols Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday. At jazz clubs in the Fillmore, she not only got to work with these women but also got to know them personally. “It was just an amazing experience . . . and I knew I was living something very special,” Stallings said. But Stallings and Hilliard both say it wasn’t just the music that made the Fillmore special. “You felt like you were cared for, you know? You had a homelife, but everybody else was your family too,” Stallings said.

Seeing the Greats at Bop City

One of the best-known clubs got its start in 1950, when John “Jimbo” Edwards, San Francisco’s first African American car salesman, took over a defunct jazz club in the Fillmore. He planned to run it as a café, dubbing it “Jimbo’s Waffle Shop,” but his musician friends had other ideas. “There was a big old room in there,” said Edwards in an interview with Carol Chamberland. “About eight, ten musicians come and say, ‘Let’s take this back room and have us a hangout house.’ So when I opened it up, I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ . . . And so that’s how Bop City came [to be].”

55

The back room at Jimbo’s Waffle Shop was transformed into Bop City, and some of the biggest names would show up for latenight performances that didn’t begin until the other clubs closed at two o’clock in the morning. Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, John Coltrane, and Ben Webster were just a few of the performers who played there.

The Impact of Gentrification

By 1965 San Francisco, and the world, had started to move on from jazz. Clubs featuring different genres opened in other parts of the city, and jazz albums started to fall off the top of the music charts. Bop City closed its doors in 1965, following a number of other prominent Fillmore clubs that had already shuttered. In another blow to the neighborhood, the Fillmore became the focus of San Francisco’s urban renewal program, which authorized the demolition and reconstruction of neighborhoods that were considered slums. The program is now widely critiqued for displacing communities of color and undercutting people’s financial security. Residents were forced out of their homes, often without much warning or adequate compensation. The redevelopment of the Fillmore was one of the largest projects of urban renewal on the West Coast. It impacted nearly twenty thousand people. By the time new housing and storefronts were finally completed in the 1980s, most of the former Fillmore residents couldn’t afford to move back in. According to the US Census Bureau, in the 1970s, 10 percent of San Francisco’s population identified as Black. In 2020 that number was down by half. Even so, there are groups working to keep the spirit of the Fillmore alive. You might catch a live jazz show at the Boom Boom Room on Fillmore and Geary. The Fillmore Jazz Festival draws big performers each summer, and organizations like Fillmore Jazz Ambassadors are dedicated to reviving jazz in the city. The Fillmore may no longer be the “Harlem of the West,” but its jazz legacy lives on. Bianca Taylor

56

HELLA OAKLAND: The Origins of the Bay Area’s Most Notorious Slang Word If you’ve lived in Northern California for any period of time, you’ve surely come to know the word hella. “I’m hella hungry right now.” “That concert last night was hella cool.” “I’m hella jealous!” The word has gained some level of widespread use but is still closely tied to the Bay Area. And for good reason.

Hella: A Linguistic Boundary

Many Bay Area residents and Californians believe that hella—and its G-rated equivalent hecka—are Bay Area slang. The words, which mean “very” or “a lot of,” can be used multiple ways. You can say “I’m hella stoked,” or “There were hella people at that party last night,” or even “I was doing it for hella days.” Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conducted a study in which people indicated their perceptions of how people talk in certain areas of California. Hella was the most frequently cited word, and 78.4 percent of the people who mentioned it in the study said it was Northern California slang. “For Southern Californians in particular, hella represents a crucial shibboleth separating the two major regions of the state,” said Bucholtz.

57

That’s true for Southern California transplant Bree DeRobbio, now living in San Jose. She remembers the first time she heard someone say hella. “My reaction was, ‘Oh my God, they really do say it.’ And I was amazed at all the different applications the word has,” DeRobbio said.

The Dictionary Says What?

There are at least two origin stories for hella: One places it in Toronto (yes, Canada!), and the other, in Oakland. More on Oakland later, but first—Toronto? Really? Hella made its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002, and the dictionary says the word was first used in a 1987 article in the Toronto Star with this line: “The horse went hella whoopin’ down the trail, trailing 50 feet or more . . .” The Oxford English Dictionary identifies hella as northern American slang that was probably shortened from helluva or hellacious, but English-language historian Michael Adams said hella’s grammatical usage doesn’t quite align with what the dictionary says. “I’m really skeptical of that etymology that hella comes from helluva because we don’t use hella grammatically in the same way that we would use helluva,” Adams said. What Adams means is you can’t get “hella cute” from “helluva cute,” or say “My dad’s a hella cook,” even though you could say “My dad’s a helluva cook.” He also has an explanation for why hella didn’t come from hellacious. “The suffix from hellacious is ‘-acious,’ like tenacious, and if you’re going to break a word, you’re usually going to break a word where there’s a boundary between its parts,” Adams said. Following this theory, the natural break for hellacious would make it “hell-aysh,” not hella.

58

From Oakland Teens to the Rest of the World

UC Berkeley linguist Geoff Nunberg traces hella back to Oakland, a few years before it showed up in print in the Toronto Star. The word can be found in the dissertation of a UC Berkeley student who was quoting local high school students. “Hella emerged somewhere in Northern California around the late 1970s, and although it spread to other places, it’s still associated with this region,” said Nunberg. Historically, slang spreads from Black English to white English and not in the other direction, which is why Nunberg suspects it started in Oakland. Phrases like “cool” and “tell it like it is” are good examples. “‘Cool’ was adopted by white hipsters and beatniks in the early ’50s before spreading to teen slang,” he said. “‘Tell it like it is’ was used by Black writers in the early ’60s and quickly became part of general white English.” That history lines up with what multimedia producer and local hip-hop historian Sean Kennedy recalls. Born in Oakland, he remembers saying hella with the kids on his Pop Warner football team and at King Estate Junior High School in the late ’70s. “Very rarely in the African American or Black community do we pick up other people’s language and use them,” Kennedy said. “It’s usually the language we create, and other people use them.” At that time, hip-hop and street culture gained widespread popularity. “It was used in a manner of explaining, ‘That looked hella good—that looked good’—something that was clean, or somebody acting crazy, ‘You’re hella crazy,’” Kennedy said.

59

Hella or Hell Of?

In early years, Bay Area youth debated whether the slang word was hella or actually hell of. In Berkeley the debate could get quite heated, said punk rocker Frank Portman. In 1997 he wrote a song called “Hell of Dumb,” poking fun at the issue with his band, the Mr. T. Experience. He thinks the hella vs. hell of debate goes back to 1983. “It was always very clear that it was hell of. It was not hella. And if anyone ever said hella, which sometimes people did, they would always correct you, with the attitude of a school marm correcting your grammar,” Portman said. Since those early days, widespread use of hell of, hellacious, and helluva has dwindled—leaving hella to stand alone. The word started to make its way beyond the Bay Area in the mid-1990s, spreading through hip-hop lyrics and other art forms. In the 1998 South Park episode “Spookyfish,” Cartman taunts Stan and Kyle by singing, “You guys are hella stupid, you guys are hella lame, you guys are hella dumb hella, hella, hella.” In 2001 the band No Doubt had the chart-topping single “Hella Good,” and in 2009 the BBC included hella on a list of words that sums up the 2000–2009 decade. At this point, the word may be one of Northern California’s most notorious cultural exports. You’re welcome, world. Adizah Eghan

60

A Guide to Bay Area Slang Hella isn’t the only piece of Bay Area slang you may encounter. As linguist Geoff Nunberg points out, there is a history of slang spreading from the Bay Area’s Black communities into wider usage, including some terms on this list: The City: The City is San Francisco. Example: “I’m heading into the City for the night.” The Town: The Town is Oakland. Example: I’m heading over the bridge to the Town.” Hyphy: Hyper; excited. Example: “They were getting hyphy in the club on Saturday.” Slaps: Really good, especially when talking about music. Example: “This new song slaps!” Yee: A very enthusiastic yes. Example: “Are you going to the party tonight?” “Yee!” Janky: Poor quality; inferior; weird. Example: “Ugh, this umbrella is hella janky.”

Scraper: An older, inexpensive car, usually American made, with big rims. They have typically been nicely modified. Example: “He rode by my house in his scraper blasting music last night.” On Mamas: To promise or swear on your mother’s life. Example: “I would have gotten up and left if he said that to me, on mamas!” Yadadamean: “Know what I mean?” Another variation is yadadaimsayin, which means, “You know what I’m saying?” Both are the West Coast siblings to the East Coast equivalent ya mean. Example: “The party got wild, yadadamean!” 420: Synonym for marijuana. Also a time of day when you might smoke weed. Example: “You got any 420?” “Yee!”

420 STARTED IN THE BAY AREA: How Five High Schoolers in San Rafael Started a Phenomenon You might call April 20 a Bay Area holiday. Every year on 4/20, at 4:20 p.m., thousands of people gather in Golden Gate Park to pay homage to marijuana—a.k.a. “420”—with a celebratory smoke. It’s not too surprising that a city known for its hippie culture would celebrate in this way, and once you know the term 420 originated in the Bay Area, that celebration makes even more sense.

The Waldos

The story starts in 1971 with a group of five guys—Dave Reddix, Steve Capper, Larry Schwartz, Jeff Noel, and Mark Gravich— nicknamed the “Waldos.” “We’re all good friends, and we used to hang out on this wall at San Rafael High School on campus, and that’s why we’re called the Waldos,” said Dave Reddix, better known as “Waldo Dave.” The Waldos were the jokesters of the school. They were always laughing, playing pranks, impersonating strangers, and having a good time. And they got high. A lot. “We were the guys under the high school grandstands during Friday night football games smoking a doobie,” Reddix said. But they weren’t the deadbeat stoners you might be imagining. The Waldos were a curious bunch, who would go on unofficial field trips after school. One time they trekked down to Silicon Valley to see groundbreaking hologram technology. On another trip, they ventured to an off-limits portion of the Golden Gate Bridge. They started calling these adventures “Waldo safaris.” One day the Waldos got a tip from a high school friend about some marijuana plants ripe for the picking. A few men in the

62

coast guard, based in Point Reyes, were growing the crop but had gotten spooked. “They thought that their commanding officer was going to bust them,” said Steve Capper, or “Waldo Steve.” “They didn’t want to get busted. They decided, ‘We’re going to abandon this growing project.’” One coastguardsman drew a crude map guiding the way to the plants and gave it to his brother-in-law, Bill McNulty, who then shared it with the Waldos. Now the friends had a mission for their next Waldo safari. “It was a no-brainer. I mean, we’re sixteen years old. We have no money. It’s free weed,” said Reddix. “We decided we’d meet at 4:20 p.m., on the campus of San Rafael High School, in front of the statue of Louis Pasteur.” That’s the French microbiologist known for his breakthroughs in vaccinations and pasteurization. The Waldos got high, hopped into Capper’s 1966 Chevy Impala, and drove out to Point Reyes to search for the crop. On their first trip they didn’t find any plants. But they kept trying, again and again, for weeks. “We would remind each other in the hallways all day long. We’d say ‘420 Louis.’ It was a private joke,” said Capper. “After a few weeks we dropped ‘Louis.’” The Waldos eventually abandoned their hunt for the mythical marijuana patch, but the code 420 stuck around. It was useful. After all, smoking pot was a crime. “We started using 420 as a code for weed,” said Reddix. “We could use it around our teachers, parents, cops, anybody. They didn’t know what it was. It was our own little secret code.” For a while, 420 was just a Waldos thing, but soon other students at San Rafael High started to pick up on it.

Proving It

Finding the origin of a word or slang term can be a murky business, but the Waldos have the documentation to back up their story. There are letters that reference 420, postmarked in the 1970s, which was before the term had widespread use. There’s an art project done by a friend of the Waldos that includes the

63

word 420 next to a marijuana leaf. There’s a mention in the high school newspaper. In 2017 the Oxford English Dictionary took a hard look at all this evidence, and now its online dictionary entry for 420 credits “students from San Rafael.”

420 beyond San Rafael

Eventually the term made its way to the Grateful Dead, who were rehearsing in San Rafael at the time. Dave Reddix’s brother was managing musician Phil Lesh’s side bands, and another Waldo’s dad helped the band with real estate. “We used to shoot baskets outside their rehearsal hall, because the doors would be open and they’d be practicing,” said Reddix. “We could listen to them playing music. It was awesome.” Once the Dead started saying 420, it was here to stay. Today you’ll find 420 celebrated around the world on April 20, with public gatherings in cities like Denver, Toronto, Amsterdam, and Sydney. It is predominantly a day to celebrate cannabis culture, but for some, it is also a day of activism. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law in the United States, and there are tens of thousands of people currently incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes—both things advocates for legalization would like to change. The term 420 may have started as an inside joke among friends, but it’s grown into a worldwide celebration, a call to action, and a daily reminder to relax.

64

THE OAKLAND COMMUNITY SCHOOL: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party’s Women-Led Elementary School When some people think of the Black Panther Party, they probably envision Black men in leather jackets and berets, carrying guns. This was the militant image splashed across front pages of countless newspapers throughout the late 1960s. The famous photo of Huey P. Newton, seated in a throne-like wicker chair, with a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, remains one of the most iconic images of the Black Power movement. The Black Panthers’ longest-running program, however, was an elementary school run mostly by women.

Survival Programs

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale originally started the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966, as a strategy for organizing against rampant police violence. As the grassroots organization quickly gained followers, the scope of the Panthers’ mission expanded. Responding to the most urgent needs of the East Bay’s underserved Black community, they set up “survival programs,” including health clinics, senior assistance, and a free breakfast program for children. Ericka Huggins, the Black Panther Party member who would go on to become the principal for the Oakland Community School, explained, “We started a coalition against infant mortality when we found out that Oakland had higher rates of infant deaths in the first year of life than many sub-Saharan African countries.”

65

The Party also emphasized the need for culturally competent schools designed to educate Black students, instead of simply to indoctrinate and discipline them. When the Panthers laid out their blueprint for Black empowerment, the Ten-Point Program stated, “We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.” Despite these aspirations, by the early 1970s, the future of the Black Panther Party was unclear. Following years of government harassment via the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which fomented paranoia and violence among the Black Panthers, many of the party’s male leaders were dead, in exile, or keeping a low profile. In this void Elaine Brown emerged as the Panthers’ first female chairperson, and Ericka Huggins reignited the party’s commitment to education by establishing the Oakland Community School in East Oakland.

A Radical Curriculum

The school’s guiding philosophy was to teach children not what to think but how to think. In lessons on Black history, a subject ignored by most mainstream grade schools at the time, kids were asked to question dominant narratives that glorified imperialism and uncritically lauded slave-owning Founding Fathers. The student body, composed mainly of poor Black and brown youth, were also taught self-esteem-boosting skills, like martial arts. Ericka Huggins often incorporated lessons from her own life into the curriculum. She had learned the value of meditation while spending more than a year behind bars awaiting trial (which ultimately resulted in a hung jury). Sharing this practice with her students had a profound impact. “People who say that children from low-income neighborhoods are unruly or unfocused have forgotten what poverty does to a human being, have forgotten what racism does to a human being,” Huggins said. “What those children who

66

sat quietly at Oakland Community School recognized is that no matter what anybody says, no matter what is happening external to them, they still have their own power within.” The school also pioneered a forward-thinking approach toward discipline. Black parents had long complained that white administrators at Oakland public schools had been unfairly punitive toward students of color, which led to lower grades and higher dropout rates. Gregory Lewis, now an Oakland-based lawyer, remembers that whenever he or one of his fellow “Panther Cubs” (as they were sometimes called) misbehaved, instead of being punished by teachers, they had to defend themselves before a panel of their peers.

Lewis recalls that this practice, which prefigured elements of the restorative justice movement now gaining traction throughout educational systems, was remarkably effective because nobody wanted to be embarrassed in front of their friends. Speaking about these childhood memories decades later, Lewis still remembers the stark contrast between the Black Panthers’ school and a more traditional learning environment. “When I got to public school, it was more competitive and less about the communal good,” he said. “The difference was that in the classroom [at Oakland Community School], a lot of the teachers were either our parents, or our friends’ parents, or another mentor from the neighborhood. We were all connected. That’s the difference: When I left, I didn’t feel connected to my teachers anymore.”

Nine Years of Pioneering Education

From 1973 until 1982, the Oakland Community School pioneered an empowerment-oriented form of learning that was praised by Governor Jerry Brown and the California State Legislature for setting “the standard for the highest level of elementary education.” The institution attracted famous visitors, including Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, Richard Pryor, Cesar Chavez, Willie Mays, and Sun Ra. Some of these cultural leaders and celebrities helped raise funds for the organization, but Maya Angelou went even further, developing an afterschool program that became a model throughout Oakland. Over its nine years of existence, the Oakland Community School served more than one thousand students, including rapper Money-B, who would later achieve fame with the hip-hop group Digital Underground. However, lack of funding was always a struggle for the scrappy institution. Huggins, a single mother herself, received so little compensation from her

68

principal duties that she qualified to collect welfare. This financial stress led to some of the most qualified teachers leaving for better-paid positions elsewhere.

The Community School’s Legacy

Ultimately, the Black Panther Party dissolved in the early 1980s, and the school was a victim of this collapse. In the book Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, scholar Donna Jean Murch called the school “arguably the Party’s most important organizing legacy”—and also one of its least studied. So why has the Oakland Community School been given so little attention, relative to other aspects of Black Panther history? Ericka Huggins provides a simple explanation: “Because we live in a country, as well as a world, that’s very male-centered.” Despite the painful loss of the school, Huggins remained in education throughout her career, eventually teaching at institutions such as Laney College and San Francisco State University. Although the Oakland Community School never generated as much fanfare as some of the Panthers’ other activities, she’s still proud of what the school accomplished. “We were courageous enough to work across gender, class, sexual orientation, race, [and] citizenship status lines before anybody was talking about that,” Huggins said. “We worked with everybody. What we were concerned with was a united front. I think the Black Panther Party will live forever in the hearts of people, because of our intention and love for people. The school is a shining example of that.” Liam O’Donoghue

69

The White Horse Inn: Is This Unassuming Spot in Oakland the Nation’s First Gay Bar? The White Horse Inn isn’t the flashiest watering hole in town. It’s situated on the corner of 66th Street and Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, in a fairly residential neighborhood. It often has the feel of a neighborhood bar—casual and comfortable with a long bar and big fireplace—but it can also get rowdy when performances take over the back room. By simply looking at it, you wouldn’t know that the White Horse Inn has a storied history. It’s thought to be one of the oldest continuously running gay and lesbian bars in the United States. 

An Uncertain Origin Story

Officially, the White Horse Inn opened its doors in 1936 following the passage of the 21st Amendment, but it’s thought to have operated for years before that as a speakeasy during Prohibition. There was a lot of anti-gay sentiment at the time, so it’s hard to know when and how the White Horse became known as a gay bar. Much of its history has been passed down through word of mouth. Perry Wood, a longtime patron, told the East Bay Express in 2001 that he remembers it being a gay bar in 1942. Some straight people who lived in the neighborhood recall visiting without knowing it was a gay bar, suggesting even if the bar was relatively safe for gay patrons, they still felt the need to be discreet. By some accounts it turned into a gay bar only after a certain hour. Katie Gilmartin is an artist and fiction writer whose work centers on Bay Area queer life in the 1950s. Her 2017 short story, “White Horse,” was set at the historic bar. “Bars like the

70

White Horse were incredibly important because they were among the first public spaces that queer people claimed,” said Gilmartin. “We went for love, we went for lust, we went for community. To have a public space meant that you could find one another.” The demand for spaces where the gay community could gather boomed after sailors poured into the Bay Area following World War II. News of the White Horse spread, especially among gay and lesbian University of California, Berkeley, students, who were prohibited from drinking within a mile of campus (the White Horse is just outside that limit). Part of the White Horse’s charm is that it has a “homey, living room feel,” Gilmartin said. Gay and lesbian patrons of all ethnicities were welcome and, notably, they were kept safe. The White Horse managed to avoid the police raids that swept other LGBTQ spaces throughout the country.  “Queer bars were fighting an endless battle with both the police and the state, who could raid at any time simply because queers went there,” said Gilmartin. “Our presence in bars was sufficient to shut them down.”

The Legal Battle for Gay Bars

In a 1951 case involving the Black Cat Bar in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, the California Supreme Court ruled that queer people had the right to congregate, as long as there were no illegal or “immoral” acts happening on the premises. The ruling led to a flowering of gay nightlife, with roughly fifteen gay bars opening in San Francisco alone.  However, this victory was quickly eroded as police and the state liquor board developed new tactics for surveillance and repression. In 1959, the California Supreme Court ruled that police could close a bar or revoke a bar owner’s liquor license if they had evidence of same-sex activities happening on the premises, such as dancing, touching, or kissing. According to

71

the law, these activities were considered “contrary to public welfare or morals.” “Gay bars were incredibly dangerous places to go to,” said Gilmartin. “You could be beaten up on your way home. You could be caught in a raid, which meant that you landed in jail. They routinely published names, addresses, and even employers in the newspaper. Being caught in a raid could absolutely wreck a life.”  A straight couple named Joe and Ruth Johansen owned the White Horse in the late 1960s. Ruthie, as she was known, was friendlier, often joking around with the old-timers and calling everyone “sweetie” or “darling.” Joe, on the other hand, was taciturn. “He didn’t want customers touching each other,” Jim Roach, a regular patron, told the East Bay Express. “He didn’t say anything. He’d come up to you and hit you with a broom or something. When he came up and hit you, you knew you were too close.” Roach described Johansen as old-fashioned. He didn’t interact with customers too much. He wanted a low-key, traditional bar vibe. “What was ironic is that some bar owners, in order to stay open, essentially became chaperones,” Gilmartin said. “The White Horse Inn would chaperone their clientele. So imagine you’re going to a place where you can be yourself, where you can let down your mask. And there’s the chaperone, like a Catholic school nun, ready to smack you with a ruler any time you did anything.”  Still, until homosexuality was legalized in 1976, the White Horse did offer a rare safe haven for queer people to gather publicly—most likely because the owners paid the police to look the other way. Patrons didn’t have to check for the exits or hide $20 bills in their shoes to pass off to police. But they did have to limit any physical interactions.

72

Reclaiming the Space By the late ’60s, times were changing around the Bay Area—including at the White Horse Inn. The bar had become enmeshed in the burgeoning gay liberation movement that had taken hold. A more outspoken clientele began frequenting the tavern with a fervor that confused the Johansens and more conservative patrons. It was a sharp pivot from the low-profile, discreet atmosphere that had defined the bar for at least thirty years. In 1970, members of the Gay Liberation Front decided to boycott the White Horse, demanding an end to the touching ban and advocating for distribution of the Gay Sunshine, a Berkeleybased underground newspaper that the Johansens prohibited. One night, some patrons staged a sit-in where they lounged in the bar’s big leather chairs while reading the newspaper. Eventually, the protesters got their way. Management agreed to lift the no-touching ban and allow other concessions that would cement the White Horse as an out-and-proud space for the gay community.

A Space For Everyone

Today, the White Horse still offers a more mellow vibe than other gay bars in the Bay Area. It continues to draw people in with its cheap, stiff drinks and easygoing atmosphere. But every first and third Wednesday it gets lively when the Rebel Kings perform their drag show. “I’m the fanny pack drag king,” said Vera Hannush, host of Rebel Kings Oakland, who performs as VERA! on stage. “It’s a lot of fanny packs. It’s a lot of dad jokes, a lot of Armenian-ness. There’s a lot of splits, a lot of wrestling singlets, a lot of jingle belts—the whole continuum, really.” Hannush first visited the White Horse in 2005 while attending Cal. They remember it as a safe place for queer people of color to gather, and they loved the Rebel Kings show so much they started performing.

73

“I felt just pure joy to perform at that bar,” Hannush said. “I’ve always felt comfortable being myself at that bar. I feel like I definitely have found myself through drag, and figured out my gender through drag, and had so many epiphanies and been able to express myself, my true self. That’s why my drag name is VERA! in all caps with an exclamation mark. It’s really just me, with a beard, and maybe more, to the max.” Patrons also visit for karaoke nights, or to lounge by the fireplace with friends. “I think it’s really interesting that somewhere as cozy and unassuming and safe [as the White Horse Inn] has such longevity,” Gilmartin explained. “I would say it’s not fancy. It’s not shiny and glitzy and new.”

A Legacy You Can See and Feel

The title of “oldest gay bar” is one the White Horse vies for with several other watering holes around the United States. The facts of the matter are hard to pin down because the earliest gay bars were, by necessity, unofficial gay hangouts rather than advertised public spaces. No matter which bar holds the title, White Horse regulars like Hannush can feel its history. They think about the generations of other queer people who found safety there. Even the design of the space speaks to its history. “There’s some architecture on the windows that’s still a remnant of when they were trying to not have people look in, and [patrons assigned female at birth] had to wear a certain amount of women’s clothing to be safe,” Hannush said. Gilmartin believes it’s significant that the White Horse is embedded in an Oakland neighborhood, rather than the flashier San Francisco. Over the years, the neighbors have come to embrace its storied past. In 2018 they petitioned the city of Oakland to install rainbow crosswalks at the bar’s intersection to celebrate its importance to the LGBTQ

74

community. When the city was slow to respond, guerilla painters did the job themselves. “It’s really important to recognize that San Francisco was not the epicenter. The Castro was not the epicenter,” Gilmartin said. “There’s this sense of San Francisco being our ancestral home, but Oakland also has this very rich history.” Asal Ehsanipour and Katrina Schwartz

75

Compton’s Cafeteria Riot San Francisco is the home to many firsts from LGBTQ history—hosting the first gay pride parade, electing Harvey Milk as California’s first openly gay politician, and issuing the first same-sex marriage license in the United States. One first that often goes overlooked took place in 1966. Three years before the famous Stonewall Riots in New York City, a group of trans women stood up to the police one night at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It is the first known instance of militant queer resistance to police harassment in the United States. Compton’s was an all-night restaurant popular with many trans women, drag queens, and other queer community members. “Everybody would go to Compton’s and sit for three or four hours and just have coffee and talk,” Collette LeGrande told KQED Arts. “It was the only safe space around where everybody could be around each other.” The women who gathered were accustomed to violence on San Francisco’s streets. Some were sex workers who endured abuse from clients. Many had brutal run-ins with police for crimes like “female impersonation” or the euphemistic “blocking the sidewalk.” “The streets were no good. The police would be on everybody,” said LeGrande.

Though queer people were beginning to find more acceptance in some parts of San Francisco, the police remained notoriously rough and abusive. As is still the case, trans women of color are some of the most visible and therefore most frequently targeted members of the LGBTQ community, and back in the 1960s they received the brunt of police violence. One night in August 1966, a police officer came into Compton’s Cafeteria. He grabbed and attempted to arrest a drag queen for an unwarranted cause. Fed up with the treatment, she threw her hot coffee in his face. Soon, dozens of surrounding patrons began to throw whatever was at hand—coffee cups, sugar shakers, dishware. When more officers arrived, drag queens beat them with purses and high heels. As police fought back, furniture went through the cafeteria’s front windows, tables were overturned, and a police car outside the restaurant was destroyed. Many involved in the riot were arrested that night, but the clash inspired more to join the cause. The following day, the owners of the restaurant banned drag queens and trans women, which led more people to show up to picket the cafeteria that night and smash the newly replaced windows again. For decades, the incident went relatively unacknowledged, largely overshadowed by the Stonewall Riots. It has only been recently, through the efforts of several who were there that night, that the stories of this community have started to emerge and that the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot has taken its place in the history books as the start of transgender activism in San Francisco.

SPINNING RIMS, SPINNING CARS: The History of the Oakland Sideshow Cars swerving back and forth, spinning in circles. The sound of tires screeching against concrete. The smell of burnt rubber. The cheers of the crowd standing on the sidelines. It’s not NASCAR. It’s not The Fast and the Furious. This is the Oakland sideshow.

Sideshow Beginnings

Sideshows have a bad reputation as illegal, dangerous, and occasionally violent street-car shows, where gunshots may ring out and people could die. But for those who grew up in the early days, sideshows were not dangerous—they were innovative. They created a space for the self-expression and originality coming out of Deep East Oakland in the 1980s, said Sean Kennedy, a multimedia producer and local hip-hop historian. They were pop-up events—part car show, part block party— drawing crowds to mall parking lots. “It seems like it started when hip-hop first got out here,” Kennedy said, standing at the entrance to the Foods Co. in Foothill Square. Kennedy explained this was where it all began. “There was a carnival that used to exist right here in Foothill Square, because there was a skating rink right here,” Kennedy said. “All the people would come down here to the skating rink and the carnival. They would bring their best cars and just cruise.” What many people think of as a sideshow these days—all doughnuts and destruction—was not the way it began. Back then, “no one did doughnuts or spun their cars,” said Kennedy. It was just peacocking, showing off the cars that were the pride and joy

78

of many, mostly male, residents. “That was the original sideshow of East Oakland.” People had cruised around in their souped-up Chevys before, but it was as if the introduction of hip-hop taught the cars to dance. As the popularity of sideshows spread, Kennedy said,

they became a sort of cultural marketplace. People repped parties, hawked homemade fashion lines, and shared the latest beats and music. It was always firmly rooted in a sense of place, Kennedy said. “It’s in the soil. For some reason the air here in East Oakland breeds that kind of creativity.”

The Sideshow as Cultural Marketplace

Yakpasua Zazaboi covered sideshows across East Oakland for his documentary series Sydewayz. He said sideshows were part craft fair, part improv performance, and always a place to catch the cultural zeitgeist. They formed the space where Oakland’s hyphy culture was born—a movement that started with up-tempo hip-hop music and spread to encapsulate an era of fashion, dance, and lingo. All of it was on display at the sideshow. “You would come out and you would really understand what is popular in Oakland,” Zazaboi said. A key part of that was the music. “I think for about three or four years straight, we used to hear this song by a group called 3X Krazy. It was just a baseline, and it was so popular and would sound so good on really nice audio systems. It was almost like a sideshow theme.” When asked to name his pick for the musical theme of the sideshows, Sean Kennedy said there is really only one: Richie Rich’s “Side Show” song. “Now that’s a classic when it comes to explaining the sideshow, in the early days,” said Kennedy. You can hear the whole sideshow in the way Richie Rich raps about Oakland Saturday nights full of drop-tops and straight-laced Zeniths in his deep and sonorous voice.

Car Culture and A-1

Music might have been the lifeblood of the sideshow, but according to Sean Kennedy, the neighborhood’s deep-rooted car culture was the heart pumping that blood.

80

Ruben Flores is the owner of A-1 Spring Service, a mechanic shop on the corner of MacArthur Boulevard and 98th Avenue. This was—and still is—the go-to place to bring your car for modifications. Flores, who went to Castlemont, the neighborhood high school, got the job straight out of senior year. “The owner of the shop, he was losing a man, a mechanic, so he came down to the high school to ask about the auto shop program,” Flores said. He was hired on the spot and has been there ever since. Now he owns the place. “The first day of work became the longest day of work, thirty-eight years later,” Flores laughed. Those years have given him a passenger seat in car culture in Deep East Oakland. He confirms what Sean Kennedy said—that in the beginning, it wasn’t about souping up cars to go fast. “It was going lower,” Flores said. “Low and slow.” The best way to show off the beauty of your car. Flores said his shop became known for fixing up cars in a signature style: “What A-1 means, in the car culture, is the stance is higher in the front and lower in the back. So they have that pointing-toward-the-moon type of look.” Yakpasua Zazaboi said everyone knew about A-1. “That was the place to go,” he said. “People would say, ‘I have my car sitting A-1.’ It was because of the name of the shop.” Over time the sideshows began to change. They went from low and slow to fast and loose, with drivers performing tricks with increasing levels of difficulty and danger. The Oakland Police Department began to take notice.

Sideshows Run into the Law

Everyone has a story about when and how things got out of hand. Yakpasua Zazaboi said it was when guys with cheap cars started doing doughnuts to get attention. Sean Kennedy said it was when the new built-for-speed Mustangs came on the market in the 1980s. Maybe it was the death of a young girl during a police chase after a sideshow got busted in the mid-1990s. Whatever the exact moment, the crackdowns by Oakland police and the city were swift.

81

New laws were introduced that criminalized sideshow spectating. You could be fined, even arrested, for just watching. Then came a 2005 ordinance, which allowed police to permanently confiscate any car directly involved in a sideshow. According to Zazaboi, that made it personal. “Their car is an extension of their ego,” Zazaboi said of sideshow participants. “You take away their car, you kill their ego, and that is exactly what they did out here in Oakland.” Kennedy said the response complicated the already tense relationship between police and the community. “Does that create an animosity to the police?” Kennedy asked. “It becomes a war at that point. And then it becomes a situation where the rebellion is, ‘We’re going to have sideshows anyway.’” Both Kennedy and Zazaboi said that as local politicians criminalized the sideshow, local media demonized it, releasing story after story of violent, out-of-control youth taking over the streets. Kennedy admits that bad stuff did go down, and there was by necessity a kind of nomadic, extralegal element to the sideshows. People brought guns and sold drugs; sometimes fights broke out. And yes, young men acted stupid. But he said that was just as likely to happen at a Raiders game. Kennedy is clear that despite everything, the sideshow did not breed criminal behavior. “It’s not about a car show,” he said. “At that point, it’s about arresting Black youth in Oakland.” He said the sideshow made it easy to paint East Oakland youth into a ready-made stereotype: “Young Black kids who don’t have anything to do with their lives, out there playing around in these cars, carrying guns and selling drugs.”

Celebrating the Sideshow

What was lost in that narrative, Sean Kennedy said, was the ingenuity of the sideshow: the mechanical skills it took to work on the cars, the driving skills it took to get them moving and dancing,

82

the coordination to plan what are in essence the Bay Area’s first pop-up events, long before the phrase “pop-up events” became more widely used. Kennedy acknowledges his perspective has changed with age. Now that he has a few years on him, he is a little more wary of making cars spin like whirling dervishes. “As much as I love sideshows,” he said, “it’s a dangerous culture when it comes to spinning around a half-a-ton vehicle with no barriers and people standing there.” That is why Kennedy, among others, supported a push to legalize sideshows that gained some ground in the late 2000s. The suggestion was to bring sideshows out of the shadows and turn them into neighborhood street parties. They could even make money, proponents argued. But opponents, like Councilman Larry Reid, who represents Deep East Oakland, countered that it was folly for the city to sanction an illegal activity.

As Culture Changes, So Does the Sideshow

If you ask Yakpasua Zazaboi, he will say what is happening now is not even a real sideshow. “I break it down like this now,” Zazaboi said. “This is how you know it’s a sideshow. If there are clean cars and women out there, you might have a sideshow. If it’s a bunch of buckets and a whole bunch of dudes clowning around, looking at each other—you do not have a sideshow.” The definition of exactly what makes a sideshow is constantly in flux. Every generation has its own version, just like every sideshow has people who say it is either a criminal act or a space for the creation of culture. Maybe there’s a little bit of both hanging out at the sideshow. Sandhya Dirks

83

NAKED BY THE BAY: Nudity in San Francisco, Uncovered San Francisco has a reputation for being friendly to bodies in the buff. If you hang around long enough, you might see naked people on bike rides, lounging at Baker Beach, running in the Bay to Breakers footrace, or walking around at the annual Folsom Street Fair. Despite the regular displays, the legality and history of nudity in the city is a complicated story.

Getting Closer to Nature

For the first half of the twentieth century, San Francisco didn’t have public nudity laws. Locals weren’t walking around nude very often, so it was essentially a nonissue. Then came the 1960s, and with it, a major cultural shift. Nudity became a form of political, artistic, and personal expression. Hippie culture was thriving in San Francisco, and Golden Gate Park became a favorite hangout for nudists. According to police patrolling the area, there was also a decent amount of public sex. “It wasn’t uncommon for a gal to come out of the bushes there in the Panhandle without a damn stitch and stand right in front of you with her hands up,” said Thomas J. Cahill, who was chief of police at the time. “I was out in the park, and two started going to it on the lawn beside me.” Of course, public sex was already illegal according to California law. But conservative San Franciscans wanted tougher laws to prevent this kind of behavior. In the 1970s a civil ordinance passed that banned public nudity in city parks. Though it is not often enforced, it remains on the books today.

84

Banned in the East Bay

Outside of city parks, though, nudity was still fair game. In the coming decades cities around the Bay took steps to make public nudity illegal—including San Jose and Berkeley. Berkeley’s ban is mostly due to one guy, Andrew Martinez, who was a student at UC Berkeley. He believed that society was sexually repressed, and to address this he went to classes and parties wearing nothing but a pair of sandals and a backpack. Among his fellow students he was known as the “Naked Guy.” In 1992 the university implemented a dress code policy and found Martinez in violation of it. When he showed up naked to his disciplinary hearing, he was expelled. Martinez stayed in Berkeley and continued to walk around town nude until 1993, when the city council took on the issue of whether public nudity should be allowed. Martinez showed up naked to speak at a meeting, flanked by nude friends. The council was sufficiently offended and voted to make public nudity a misdemeanor crime.

San Francisco in the Buff

Back in San Francisco nudists were finding ways to enjoy their time in the sun despite the city park ordinance. The city developed a reputation for nudity, especially at certain public events like the Folsom Street Fair, a leather fetish festival, and Bay to Breakers, a rambunctious 12-kilometer race across the city. Rich Pasco, former coordinator of the Bay Area Naturists, was a regular in the race. “We are a group of people who believe that the human body is God’s divine creation, nothing to be ashamed of, and that our interaction with Mother Nature is enhanced by removing the barrier of clothing,” Pasco said. Beyond select city events, nudists would congregate at certain beaches and neighborhoods.

85

“There were a group of people in San Francisco who thought going to Jane Warner Plaza would be a good idea,” Pasco said. “It’s a little urban park [in the Castro], and this urban park became an urban nude beach.”

The Wiener Bill

The tides of the urban nude beach at Jane Warner Plaza began to change in 2011, when then-supervisor Scott Wiener began focusing on “quality of life” issues. Wiener led a charge to ban nudity in restaurants and wanted naked people to put a buffer between themselves and public seating—like sitting on a newspaper when riding the bus. He also felt the men in Jane Warner Plaza were taking things too far by wearing genital jewelry designed to maintain erections. “I just don’t buy the freedom of expression argument here,” said Wiener in an interview with KQED Forum at the time. “Freedom of expression is not about taking your pants off at Castro and Market and showing your genitals to passing traffic and pedestrians.” Wiener authored a bill to ban public nudity on streets, plazas, sidewalks, and public transit. There was a blanket exemption for street fairs and festivals, and no impact on nude beaches. Obviously, the nudists were not fans of Wiener’s proposal. There were a number of public meetings about the ban, where nudists made their thoughts known, sometimes taking their clothes off in opposition to the ban.

Life after the Ban

Despite the efforts of nudist activists, the antinudity bill passed in November 2012 by a six-to-five vote. There were some loopholes, however. To appease people concerned about traditional events like the Bay to Breakers and the Folsom Street Fair, the bill allowed nudity at permitted

86

events like parades, fairs, and festivals, as long as the event organizers didn’t mind. But nudists ran into trouble when they applied to get permits for nude-specific events. They lawyered up, filing a complaint against the San Francisco Police Department for infringing on their First Amendment rights. In 2015 a federal judge ordered the city to give a permit to the nudists for a parade. So today, you need a permit to get fully naked in San Francisco. Or, if you’re not into paperwork, you can always go to a nude-approved park, like the north end of Baker Beach, where the National Park Service has said nudity is legal. San Francisco will continue to be a place where you can occasionally let the sun shine . . . where the sun doesn’t usually shine. Jessica Placzek

87

JEANS AND SNEAKERS: How the Bay Area Came to Be a Hub for Casual Style Like beauty, fashion is very much in the eye of the beholder. In the Bay Area the fashion you’re likely to behold is decidedly dressed down. Sneakers and jeans at the opera. Hoodies at a fancy restaurant. Puffy down jackets everywhere, all the time. While we’re certainly not the only place where residents tend to dress down, we’re high on the list. If you’re thinking it’s due to tech culture, and the influence of casually dressed CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, you should definitely read on. The roots of our laid-back styling go back much further.

The History of Casual in the Bay

San Francisco–based fashion historian Melissa Leventon said the rise of casual wear in the Bay Area is part of the overall fashion story of California, having to do with economics, Hollywood, immigration patterns, and the rise of modern design in the middle of the century. According to Leventon, the San Francisco clothing industry was split in the late 1800s and well into the 1900s. On the one hand, San Francisco really was a dress-up town. “San Francisco was actually a city that kind of prided itself on its elegance,” Leventon said. People wore gloves and hats to run errands, and there were catwalk shows in San Francisco’s Union Square. San Francisco was home to some highly sought-after fashion labels, like Lilli Ann, founded in the city in the 1930s. “The company made beautifully tailored suits, cocktail dresses, evening dresses,” Leventon said. “They

88

made the kind of elegant wear that well-to-do, well-dressed San Franciscans would wear.” Even working-class San Franciscans who didn’t have lots of spare cash to throw around on fancy duds dressed up in a bid to project a sense of propriety and economic self-improvement. Then there is the other side of San Francisco’s nascent clothing industry—the side focused on making hardy workwear for people like miners and railroad engineers. That side centered around Levi’s. “Levi’s is very important and certainly one thing that San Francisco has contributed to the general move to casualness, not only here but everywhere,” Leventon said. Founded in San Francisco in 1853, Levi’s gradually became hugely influential after inventing the first denim jeans in the 1870s. The company was a game changer, especially starting in the 1930s, when it began marketing its jeans not just as workwear but also as leisurewear. Teenagers became a target market after World War II, and Hollywood helped spread the word. “Two movies helped popularize jeans,” Leventon said. “Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One.” In these movies James Dean and Marlon Brando smoldered in denim. Everyone wanted the look. California also became home to some talented architects and fashion designers who had fled Nazi Europe, like Rudi Gernreich, who emigrated from Austria in 1938. “He did some really groundbreaking designs in the 1950s,” Leventon said. “He was a pioneer of unisex fashions. His clothes were streamlined, youthful, and accessible to a wide range of consumers.” The freewheeling styles of designers like Gernreich went hand in hand with other global California exports, like the Beat Generation, the Black Panthers, hippie culture, and Hollywood surf movies. All this culture created a shift in the media and advertising that projected a sense of the Golden State as a place of permissiveness, comfort, and ease.

89

“The idea of California as a place where you could get back to nature,” Leventon said. “Nobody’s dressing up and going to the office. You’re putting on your bathing suit and maybe a pair of shorts and a tank top on top of that, and going out to the pool.” That idea persists today. You can see a version of it in the yoga pants that many people wear about town, and of course, there are the jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, and sneakers popular among those working in the tech and entertainment industries— two stereotypical looks associated with the Bay Area. It’s not surprising that quite a few major leisure fashion brands beyond Levi’s have their roots here. The Gap, Esprit, and Old Navy, not to mention newer brands like Everlane, Allbirds, and Rothy’s, are based in the Bay Area. All of these brands, especially the ones that have been around for a while, have fed into the idea of the Bay Area being a home for casual style.

Our Diverse Fashion Sense

All that said, when it comes down to it, you really can’t put Bay Area style in a box. “I think there’s a lot of diversity here if you open your eyes,” said Tony Bravo, the San Francisco Chronicle’s arts and culture writer. “The thing about walking around San Francisco is, there’s always something for the eye,” Bravo said. “It may not be that Balenciaga ball gown or a perfect three-piece suit, but there might be a great color story. There might just be an impeccably cut piece of outerwear. A great shoe.” When Bravo is in Union Square—one of San Francisco’s great people-watching spots—all kinds of exciting details can catch his eye, from a teen dressed in a black tulle ballet skirt, a pair of leggings, and a pink sequined hoodie, to an older person in cropped balloon pants, a big sun hat, and a bright yellow top that reminds Bravo of a van Gogh painting.

90

There are always, of course, lots of jeans and sneakers. But people clearly express themselves with their clothes, whether casual or formal. “We’re a great, progressive, sometimes libertine city, and I think that’s reflected in what we wear,” Bravo said. “It’s high, it’s low, it’s simple, it’s extravagant. It is so many things. It is perhaps too many things to categorize.” So the next time you find yourself people watching, try to appreciate the range of styles you see on display. And when a pair of blue jeans inevitably makes an appearance, consider them a nod to Bay Area history. Chloe Veltman

91

WHEN BREEZERS GOT ROLLING: How Mountain Bike Racing Got Its Start in Marin Ever since bicycles were invented in the early 1800s, people have been riding them off-road. Paved roads were hard to come by back then, so there’s nothing novel about riding on gravel or trails. But what hasn’t always been around is mountain bike racing, or the mountain bike itself—a custom creation for mountain terrain. For both, we have a motley crew of Marin cyclists to thank.

Old Bikes Put to New Uses

In the 1970s America was experiencing a bicycle boom. For the first time since the “Golden Age of Bicycling” in the 1880s and ’90s, biking wasn’t just for kids anymore. Adults were getting in on the action too. “There were many of us who took up the common bike of the day, the road-racing type of bicycle. You know, skinny tires and drop handlebars. That was the bike of the bike boom,” said Joe Breeze, curator of the Marin Museum of Bicycling and Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in Fairfax, California, and one of the forefathers of mountain bike racing. Northern California was a hot spot for road racing, and some of the most talented cyclists in the country were training here—Breeze among them. But beyond the road riders, there was another group of cyclists that started getting noticed. A group of teens from Redwood High School were often spotted in downtown Larkspur lugging around the old fat-tire bicycles that had been popular with children decades before. “They had

93

apparently resurrected them from the local junkyard,” said Breeze. They seemed to be having a good time—but why those klunker bikes? This group, called the Canyonites, had discovered that the rugged tires and stout design of the fat-tire bikes did an all right job on off-road terrain. The group would hitchhike to the top of Mount Tamalpais and bomb their way down the mountain on a winding single track. To the self-described adrenaline junkies, it was a total rush. Breeze and other road racers took notice of these kids coming off the mountain. They already knew the local paved roads like the back of their hands—so riding on the rugged mountain trails they’d grown up hiking was a welcome, new adventure. On his first mountain ride, Breeze said something clicked: “I just had a ball doing it.” Soon, hundreds of cyclists from a variety of local groups started riding off-road. They’d strip erroneous components from the junker bikes—pulling off chain guards and fenders— and modify them to suit a new downhill purpose. As more and more people started riding, smack talking ensued. “You get a bunch of competitive guys together and it’s bound to happen that there needs to be some certification of who’s the fastest, I guess,” laughed Breeze. Once the fire of competition was lit, it was only a matter of time before racing began.

A New Sport Is Born

Just west of Fairfax, California, there’s an old fire road that starts near the top of Pine Mountain. It descends 1,300 feet in less than 2.1 miles, twisting its way toward town in a seemingly endless set of steep switchbacks. Giant rocks, gullies, and blind curves add to the challenge. Depending on the season, there’s dust or mud to contend with too.

94

For some people, riding down such a road might be considered a death wish. But to the off-roaders of Marin, it was the perfect site for a race. A local rider named Charlie Kelly phoned everyone he knew and invited them to come out on October 21, 1976, and test their skills on the course. Ten guys showed up to that first race. They took turns barreling down the mountain on their klunker bikes, with their sporting jeans and long hair. Only one would make it to the finish line without crashing. The crew reconvened the next week to run the race again and then once more a few weeks later. Before long, the race was attracting riders from all over and being run as frequently as twice a week. “It really was the very crucible of the mountain bike movement because it brought together all the different people riding fat-tire bikes from around the mountain on a regular basis,” said Breeze. “They could share their passion for this new type of riding.” Riders would be sent off at two-minute intervals, with the previous week’s fastest riders going last. Once everyone was down the mountain, times were compared. The winner went home with a prize that changed from week to week—maybe a bike component or a bottle of wine. “The bikes’ antiquated hub coaster brakes would get so hot that the grease would vaporize,” wrote Breeze in a historical account for the Marin Museum of Bicycling. “After a run or two, the hub had to be repacked with new grease.” The race came to be known as “Repack.”

The First Mountain Bike

While fat-tire bikes were the ride of choice for early Repack racers, they certainly had their limits. Frames were

95

easily broken, brakes wore out quickly, and the bikes were extremely heavy, to name just a few problems. Repack organizer Charlie Kelly offered Breeze three hundred dollars to build a new bike frame made specifically for mountain biking. Breeze took him up on it and built ten frames that he dubbed “Breezers.” “They weren’t kids’ bikes. They didn’t weigh a ton,” laughed Breeze. “They had all the latest road bike technology grafted onto them to make them lighter.” Breeze knew he’d made something that would work well for Repack riders, but he soon got a glimpse at how well the bike might appeal to everyday cyclists too. As he was finishing up work on one of his Breezers, his dad asked if he could try the bike out. “He rode it up the street and came back, and he had a big smile on his face, and he said, ‘You know, this might actually go somewhere,’” Breeze said. “That was the acid test for me, you know. My dad thinks this might actually go somewhere.”

Word Spreads around the World

As the Repack race grew in popularity, the media took notice. Repack was featured in VeloNews and Outside Magazine. It also got a segment on KPIX’s Evening Magazine, which aired nationally on CBS affiliates. Word on Repack, and the very concept of mountain bike racing, was out. “What blew me away the most was they took to it in Europe, where they knew bicycles all day long,” said Breeze. “They had nothing to learn from Americans about bicycles, but they totally embraced the mountain bike.” Though many cyclists had biked on mountains before, it was the Repack race that helped mountain biking find enough critical mass to spread.

96

“And that’s really Marin County’s claim to being the place where mountain biking got rolling,” said Breeze. “Without that need of competition improving the breed, it would have been just another off-road endeavor that transpired.” Over time the sport of mountain biking has gone from niche to mainstream. In 1996 it became an Olympic sport. And today, you’ll find the Breezer 1, that first bike Breeze built in 1977, on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. It’s considered the first mountain bike. So it turns out his dad’s hunch was right—this mountain bike thing did, in fact, go somewhere.

97

THE WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE: The True Story behind San Jose’s Infamous Haunted Mansion The Winchester Mystery House is the center of one of the Bay Area’s spookiest local legends. Even the Bay Area residents who’ve never set foot inside the house most likely know a little about the shadowy stories that surround it. The house is a sprawling Victorian mansion in San Jose, set among lush gardens. It is primarily infamous for the bizarre architectural features that greet visitors within its walls. Staircases that lead to nowhere. Mysteriously placed doors and windows. Equally infamous is the Winchester House’s creator, Sarah Winchester. Legend has it that she moved to California to build this home to appease the angry ghosts of all the people killed by Winchester rifles. But to truly understand the house and how it came to be, you have to understand more about the human behind the legend.

Who Was Sarah Winchester?

Sarah Winchester, née Pardee, was born in 1839 in Connecticut. After marrying William Winchester, she suffered two waves of devastating loss in her life. The first, in her late twenties, was the death of her only child, Annie, at five weeks old. Fourteen years later, in 1880, her father-in-law Oliver Winchester died, followed within a matter of months by the death of her husband William. Sarah became the widowed heiress to one of the biggest, most successful weapons manufacturers of the time: Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

100

The story goes that a few years later she moved to California and began building the house on the advice of a psychic. But Sarah’s biographer, Mary Jo Ignoffo, said her motives for moving out west were far more practical than any psychic’s prophecy. In the face of her multiple bereavements—and encouraged by her doctor to seek warmer climes—Sarah and her sisters actually relocated to the Bay Area as a group, joining one sister who’d already moved to Oakland. Ignoffo also strongly doubts that Sarah would have ever been prone to guilt-fueled fears about the victims of Winchester gun violence seeking vengeance from beyond the grave. Sarah’s connection to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company remained strong even after she inherited that huge weapons fortune, said Ignoffo—continuing as an active, involved member on the company’s board.

Already keenly interested in architecture, Sarah purchased the modest two-story farmhouse in the San Jose area in 1886. Over more than three decades of construction, she would turn it into her giant mansion. At 24,000 square feet, the resulting 160room home boasts 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 47 stairways, 17 chimneys, and 13 bathrooms. In today’s money, the Mystery House’s construction costs would have totaled seventy-one million dollars. Her neighbors and the local press were fascinated and baffled by not just the scale of her ever-expanding compound but also the Winchester widow herself: a hyperprivate outsider who shunned the aristocratic South Bay social scene and stayed silent about her remodeling motivations. Because she wouldn’t talk, the press did the talking for her. One rumor claimed that Sarah believed endlessly remodeling the house would keep her alive. Others said she obsessively tried to contact the spirit world through séances in the house. Many of these myths took hold in Sarah’s own lifetime, fueled by not only her silence and withdrawal from public life but also onlookers’ feelings about the grandeur and expense of her seemingly inexplicable mission. Sarah died of heart failure in her house in September 1922. Over the last decade of her life, she’d spent most of her time in another of her many homes in the South Bay, but it was to her San Jose mansion that she returned to see out her last days, alone.

The Mystery House

In the spring of 1923 the mansion was leased by John and Mayme Brown, who apparently planned to build an amusement park on the site but pivoted to public tours of the house, given the existing interest and intrigue that had taken root locally during Sarah’s lifetime. In June 1923, just eight months after Sarah died, the doors of her house were opened to the general public, who were thrilled

102

to finally see the place about which they’d heard so many wild rumors. The “Mystery House” moniker was allegedly bestowed by Harry Houdini after he visited the home in 1924. Part of this place’s mystery is undoubtedly its strange architecture. Although if you visit expecting some sort of M. C. Escher fun house, the subdued reality of those oddly placed doors and stairs-to-nowhere scattered throughout the house might come as something of an anticlimax. The lore goes that Sarah intended these odd features by design to either confuse the spirits in her house or pay homage to them. The more prosaic reality might be that these were mistakes in construction or additions to previous designs made by a woman who was learning about architecture as she went. Ignoffo also believes that many of these features are actually the result of patch-up work after the 1906 earthquake, which considerably damaged the house and reduced it by several stories. In other words, those ghostly stairs-to-nowhere probably very much led somewhere real.

The Ghosts

And what of the ghosts? Since the Mystery House first opened its doors, much of its supernatural appeal has been fueled by the image of Sarah as a devoted spiritualist, uniquely vulnerable to notions of vengeful spirits and obsessed with inviting in the denizens of the netherworld through séances held in the Mystery House itself. Spiritualism, a belief system that hinged on attempting contact with the dead, was popular among upper-crust women like Sarah. Yet there’s little to no evidence that Sarah was a spiritualist, according to Ignoffo. Séances were by their nature a group affair, and Sarah had a well-documented aversion to visitors. Despite this, the long-standing suggestion of an otherworldly connection has made the Winchester Mystery House famous

103

worldwide among ghost hunters and supernatural enthusiasts alike, who report unearthly sightings and unexplained sensed presences in its corridors and rooms. Many who arrive for the Mystery House’s public tours today are visiting in the hope of experiencing just that. Admittedly there’s something about its claustrophobic proportions, its rabbit-warren feeling, its curious darkness even in the bright San Jose sunshine, that can make even a skeptical visitor feel like they’re being watched. In many ways, the Mystery House represents all the things that feel like they should be true. Of course those who brought a new lethal weapon into the world in the Winchester Repeating Rifle would have been haunted by guilt. Of course a grieving widow would have sought answers in séances. Of course the confusing elements of that woman’s sprawling mansion would be rooted in the supernatural, not architectural ambition. And of course such a place would be haunted. Yet when lore is stripped away, the facts of Sarah Winchester’s life and her Mystery House leave us with something poignantly recognizable. After all, who among us hasn’t thrown ourselves deep into an all-consuming project after overwhelming change or loss in our lives? Or strived for self-determination through creative expression, however much it might alienate us from the people around us? The Mystery House may have become famous for its ghosts, but ultimately, its mysteries are perhaps far more human. Carly Severn

104

The Iconic Bay Area Spots That Locals Don’t Visit For people who grew up here, it’s often the most famous attractions—the ones tourists travel continents to see— that, for whatever reason, they just have never visited. Here are some of the top destinations and experiences locals have somehow missed.

Riding a Cable Car

Given how iconic the city’s cable cars are, you’d think we ride them all the time. Nope! The long wait times and expense to ride them have caused plenty of locals to skip this attraction. But here’s a tip: If you’re at a super busy stop with a long line—like the Powell Street turnaround—try walking up a stop or two for a much better chance of climbing aboard. You might also try a latenight ride. They typically run until just after midnight.

Walking the Golden Gate Bridge

Depending on where you live in the Bay Area, getting to the Golden Gate Bridge can be quite the journey. Many locals have crossed countless times in a car or bus, but never on foot. Given the price (free!) and the views (stunning!), hopefully more locals will put this on their must-see list. Just be sure to check the weather first and aim for a clear day.

The Winchester Mystery House

Many locals could recite the legend of Sarah Winchester and her unusual mansion without ever having visited the house. Despite its local infamy, some locals still avoid a visit, leaving the potential thrills to the many tourists who come looking for hauntings. Locals who do want to brave the possibly haunted house might try visiting in the off-season for a less crowded tour.

Coit Tower

You can see it from all over the Bay, yet many locals haven’t bothered to take a trip inside this 210-foot tower atop Telegraph Hill. Perhaps it’s the heart-pumping climb many take up the Filbert Steps to reach the tower that has them deterred? There are some incredible New Deal–era murals on the first floor, which are free and open to the public. For a fee, you can take an elevator to the top of the tower for a unique 360-degree view.

Alcatraz

Hands down, Alcatraz Island, with its infamous former federal penitentiary, is the destination most skipped by Bay Area locals. And it’s understandable—getting there requires planning ahead and a big chunk of time, and it’s not exactly a cheap ticket. Whatever the reason, never visiting Alcatraz might have to join saying hella as indisputable proof of one’s Bay Area credentials.

THE COLMA CEMETERIES: How a Town Became San Francisco’s Modern-Day Necropolis When you drive around the tiny town of Colma, just south of Daly City, you can’t help but notice a certain redundancy of scenery. Tombstones. A florist. More tombstones. Another florist. That’s because what Las Vegas is to gambling, Colma is to the dead. On the other hand, if you want to visit graves in San Francisco, your choices are limited. There’s San Francisco National Cemetery in the Presidio, but that’s technically on federal land. The lone cemetery in the city proper is tucked away at Mission Dolores, and it’s now just one-sixth its original size. Those two cemeteries account for a few thousand expired San Franciscans. Where is everybody else?

San Francisco Graveyards of the Past

San Francisco was once full of cemeteries. “In the gold rush days they decided to build cemeteries in the western part of the city, where nobody would ever want to live,” said Michael Svanevik, a San Mateo County historian. The city’s largest cemeteries—Calvary, Laurel Hill, Masonic, and the Independent Order of Oddfellows—together known as the Big Four, took up between sixty and seventy square blocks, on land that the University of San Francisco occupies today. Golden Gate National Cemetery, out by Lands End, took up a similar swath of space. As San Francisco’s population rapidly grew, homes were built on all sides of the cemetery complex. Streetcars had to navigate around these islands of the dead to transport residents to and from work. “This now became very valuable land, and people turned against the cemeteries,” Svanevik said. If you think the living have a hard

107

time navigating real estate in San Francisco, imagine how the dead fared.

Public Opinion Turns

By 1880 San Franciscans had grown disenchanted with its burgeoning population of dead folks. Headlines like “Cemeteries must go!” began to show up in local newspapers. Residents also grew concerned over hysterical claims about health hazards the cemeteries might cause. In 1901 San Francisco banned any new burials within city limits. For several decades after, what to do with the existing cemeteries was a hot button issue. Those who coveted valuable graveyard land could rely on at least one legitimate talking point: The cemeteries had become a real mess. After San Francisco prohibited new burials, there was no money to care for existing cemetery grounds, and many graveyards fell into ruin. Statues and gravestones were toppled. The valuable bronze doors on private mausoleums were stolen. People would reportedly wander in and get drunk. “Entire skeletons were carried away to be used as Halloween decorations,” said Svanevik.

Colma: The Incorporation

The first of the dead to be moved out of San Francisco were two Jewish cemeteries, Hills of Eternity and Home of Peace. In the 1880s they abandoned the plots of land that now make up Dolores Park for open farmland south of the city, in what is now Colma. A few years later the Archdiocese of San Francisco established Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in the same area. Soon, more of San Francisco’s cemetery associations looked south, purchasing large plots of farmland. In 1924 fourteen cemetery associations incorporated the town of Lawndale (Colma’s original name). “We’re the only city in the world that was incorporated to preserve and protect our dead,” said the Colma Historical Association’s Pat Hatfield.

108

The founders had good reason to be explicit about the new town’s purpose. After all, many of the remains that came to Colma had been moved several times. “They didn’t want living people in Colma,” said Svanevik. “Every time somebody came forth and wanted to open a store, the town council voted it down, unless it was a floral shop or something associated with a cemetery.”

San Francisco: And Then There Were Five

By the 1920s the only San Francisco cemeteries remaining were the Big Four, as well as the one at Mission Dolores. In the face of public hostility, the Odd Fellows and Masonic cemeteries agreed to move to Colma, but seventeen families went to federal court to block the Masonic move. Those bodies were transferred only after sale of the land was approved in a 1930 Supreme Court ruling. The Catholic Church successfully made the case that the roughly ten thousand interments at Mission Dolores Cemetery should be allowed to stay for historical reasons. Just sixty bodies were moved to Colma between 1930 and 1932. The Catholic Church also balked at uprooting Calvary Cemetery, though it eventually relented, leaving one cemetery—Laurel Hill. The rectangle of graves bounded by California, Geary, Parker, and Presidio Streets was the lone holdout. Anti-cemetery activists made three unsuccessful attempts at ridding the city of Laurel Hill by putting the issue to voters, before finally, in 1937, the measure to evict passed.

Removing the Bodies

Exhumation and transportation of the bodies was quite the process and spanned five decades. If the casket was in good shape, it was moved with the body. If the casket had deteriorated, the bones were placed in boxes. Remains were required to be brought by hearse on the same day as exhumation, said Svanevik. The Catholic Church also required a priest to witness the exhumation of any bodies from Calvary Cemetery.

109

About one hundred and thirty thousand bodies were disinterred from the Big Four cemeteries and moved to Colma. Most bodies were reburied in mass graves, with a single monument to mark their presence. For the fifty-five thousand Catholic pioneers who were moved from San Francisco to Holy Cross in Colma, no marker identified them at their new resting place until 1993.

What Was Left Behind

When the San Francisco cemeteries were moved, the bodies were transported for free, but surviving family and loved ones had to pay if they wanted to keep the tombstones. Many survivors couldn’t be found, and the majority of tombstones did not make the trip to Colma. Instead, they were sold for a few pennies each to be used in public works, said Svanevik. Some tombstones lined the gutters in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. Others were used to build a seawall along the Great Highway. They still resurface from time to time—spooking tourists and locals alike. Another more grim reminder of this history has been found around the city too. “They missed a lot of the bodies,” said Alan Ziajka, the University of San Francisco’s official historian. “No one knew that until 1950, when [USF] put up our first major building after the Depression.” That was Gleeson Library, which, like much of the university, was built over what was once the Masonic Cemetery. At least two hundred bodies were found during excavations, when a backhoe churned up a whole mausoleum. Since then, every time a major excavation has occurred on campus, remains have been found. Another startling cemetery discovery came in 1993, when the Legion of Honor was undergoing seismic renovation. As the dig began, about 750 bodies were discovered from the Golden Gate National Cemetery, also called City Cemetery, which was used from 1868 to 1909.

110

The LA Times reported that remains included “a man who had a third arm buried with him, several medical-school cadavers, and two coffins containing remnants of denim with rivets stamped Levi.”

A Final Resting Place?

Colma is the last place you want to be when the zombie apocalypse goes down. Nearly three-quarters of the 2.2-square-mile town is zoned for cemeteries—of which there are seventeen. The town’s population is 1,431 of the living, said Pat Hatfield of the Colma Historical Association: “Above-ground residents, we call them. Maybe a million and a half underground, so we’re a little bit outgunned.” The association’s headquarters sits quietly between two cemeteries. It doubles as a museum, with binders on display for each of the town’s final resting places. Flip through and your eye catches on bold-letter names like Joe DiMaggio and William Randolph Hearst. Yet even in Colma, the sanctity of the grave is not what it used to be. The needs and whims of the living have encroached over the years. In 1951 Sunset View Cemetery, a burial ground for paupers, became a golf course. “The question I get so frequently is: ‘Is Colma safe?’” said Svanevik. “I want to say Colma is safe, but I’ve noticed since 1970 the largest auto row south of San Francisco is in Colma. They have a Home Depot. At one point a portion of Greenlawn [Memorial Park] was cut away to make a movie theater. I can stand in Colma cemeteries today and hear a PA system say, ‘Your car is ready to be serviced.’” Some find the odyssey of San Francisco’s dead prior to the twentieth century unnerving. Who knew that after you die, your body could be so peripatetic? San Francisco is a testament to the reality that your remains may not remain, or that they may remain when they’re not supposed to. Ensuring that your final resting place is really your final resting place was the very idea behind establishing Colma as a modern-day necropolis. Jon Brooks

111

THE RISE AND FALL OF DRAWBRIDGE: The Island Ghost Town in the Middle of San Francisco Bay On an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay sits a series of abandoned wooden buildings, slumped over and sinking into the ground. They’re all that remain of the town called Drawbridge— often referred to as the last ghost town in the Bay Area. It’s a place that was once a vacationer’s paradise but ultimately served as a lesson in the devastating impact humans can have on nature.

The Beginning

The history of Drawbridge began with a solution to the hardships of travel in the late 1800s. San Franciscans looking for a relaxing getaway were drawn south to the beautiful, sunny beaches of Santa Cruz. Getting there, however, was no simple journey. “If they went by stagecoach, it would take them a couple days down through the peninsula,” said Cecilia “Ceal” Craig, coauthor of Sinking Underwater: A Ghost Town’s Amazing Legacy. The journey cost more than forty dollars, which today would be about nine hundred dollars—all to travel 75 miles! A few men saw a business opportunity and decided to create an alternative route. James “Slippery Jim” Fair was a politician, and Alfred “Hog” Davis owned a meatpacking plant. Together they formed a railroad company called the South Pacific Coast Railroad. They purchased an existing rail line in eastern Santa Clara County and expanded it, north to Alameda and southwest to Santa Cruz. Soon, this new railroad company could get San Franciscans to Alameda by ferry and then put them on a train down to Santa Cruz—all in a few hours.

112

To make the trip shorter, the railroad company laid tracks across the marshlands at the south end of the bay. At one section the tracks crossed a small island flanked by two active waterways, Coyote Creek and Warm Springs Slough. Before European colonization, Native Americans visited the island seasonally to gather food and supplies. They caught fish and shrimp that thrived in the muddy waters and hunted birds hiding in the tall grasses. Tule reeds were also harvested for making baskets and temporary dwellings. When South Pacific Coast Railroad came to the island in 1876, they built the bridges that gave the town its name. According to Craig, however, “Drawbridge is a misnomer. The town should be called Swing Bridge.” The railroad company built their tracks across flat swing bridges that could pivot horizontally at the center, opening the waterway for boat traffic.

A Bustling Town

When the bridges were first constructed, they were operated manually by a bridge tender named George Mundershietz, who lived in a cabin on the island. Friends of Mundershietz and train passengers eventually took notice of the prime recreation opportunities the island had to offer, and they soon began abandoning their trips to Santa Cruz to hunt and fish in Drawbridge. When day-trippers got too tired to make it home, they’d pay Mundershietz fifty cents to spend the night in his cabin. Outdoorsmen started coming to Drawbridge in droves, and hunting club cabins popped up along the train tracks. From there, the town of Drawbridge grew. Around 1900 German immigrants Joe and Hedwig Sprung opened the Sprung Hotel. It quickly became a local fixture. The hotel served duck dinners and provided the town with well water, which was pumped out daily for a small fee. When all the rooms were full, Hedwig Sprung was said to rent out her own bedroom and sleep in the bathtub.

113

The town also developed a reputation as a place to go for gambling and, during Prohibition, alcohol. Hedwig Sprung brewed her own dark beer and sold it to hotel visitors for twenty-five cents. “There were no police, no mayor, no city council—nothing like that,” Ceal Craig said. Hunters would push the limits on game regulation too. They filled small cannons with shot, nails, and chains, killing hundreds of birds in a single firing. The town reached its heyday in the 1920s, when about eighty or ninety houses stood around the island. Most of the full-time residents worked for the hotel, the railroad, or as hunters and fishermen. They lived on the south end of town. To get to school, children of workers would walk 3 miles along the railroad track to the nearby town of Alviso. Seasonal residents stayed in cabins on the north side of town, arriving at the island on one of the five trains that stopped there each day. Duck hunters visited in the winter, and families vacationed for the summer months. On the weekends the small island’s population could reach six hundred.

Becoming a Ghost Town

Not long after Drawbridge’s rise came its fall. When the South and East Bay grew in the 1940s and beyond, nearby towns started pouring industrial waste and untreated human sewage into the bay, which harmed the creeks around Drawbridge. Salt ponds were built using levees that closed off the sloughs and marshes surrounding Drawbridge to the cleansing tides of the bay. The once lush bird habitat was destroyed. With polluted water and fewer birds to hunt, Drawbridge lost its luster, and visitors stopped coming. To make matters worse, nearby towns started to tap the same aquifer that Drawbridge relied on. The deep wells ran dry, and the town began to literally sink into the bay. By 1963 just a few residents remained, and life got harder for those who stayed. Local newspapers began writing about

114

Drawbridge as if it were already a ghost town, which ultimately attracted some unsavory characters. “People would come out and do inappropriate things,” Ceal Craig said. “Theft, vandalism, going through people’s houses, things like that, burning them down. It just became a little dangerous.” The remaining residents felt unsafe, and all but one left. Charles Luce was the last resident of Drawbridge and lived alone out there for years. “One character, he came in there. He broke the door, I was inside,” Luce said in an interview for the documentary Drawbridge. “And that’s when I put the shotgun right between his shoulder blades. . . . ‘Don’t move.’ . . . Made him lay down on the floor. What went through my mind at that particular time is, ‘What if he won’t lie down? Will I shoot him? That’d be murder!’” Luce finally left in 1979 when he was in his mid-sixties. By then, the town was largely designated a national wildlife refuge, and he sold his land to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Nowadays, the only way to get on the island is aboard a train that doesn’t stop. Three different rail services use the tracks laid by South Pacific Coast Railroad, and their routes terminate in San Jose or Los Angeles. None will get you to Santa Cruz. Riding by the town, you can see what’s left of its remaining structures. A few are covered in graffiti, and others are nothing but the bones of the buildings they once were. They’ve been left to the elements, and year by year, they sink deeper into the mud. It’s easy to look at this ghost town and be sad for all that was lost. But in closing to humans and prohibiting hunting, the island again became a safe haven for wildlife. More than 280 bird species stop off each year as they make their way along the Pacific Flyway. It may be a hunter’s dream no more, but the island is once again for the birds. Jessica Placzek

115

Interesting Bay Area Place-Names Drawbridge was named after a clear landmark that defined the town. But not all Bay Area place-names are so obvious. Here are a few that went off the beaten path: Alcatraz: A Spanish explorer named it the “Isla de los Alcatraces,” which translates to “Island of the Pelicans,” because there were so many pelicans there. The National Park Service says the name was shortened and anglicized to the “Alcatraz Island” of today. California: The name comes from a bestselling romance novel written in 1510 by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, called Las Sergas de Esplandián or “The Deeds of Esplandián.” In the book de Montalvo describes California as a remote island full of gold and precious stones. The novel was so popular that when Spanish explorers arrived, they named their discovery after the mythical island of California. Dublin: James Witt Dougherty bought a large parcel of land in the area. By the 1870s many Irish immigrants had moved nearby. It is rumored that Dougherty said, “There are so many Irish here, you might as well call it Dublin.”

Oakland: In the era of Spanish colonization, part of the area had been called Encinal del Temescal or “Oak Grove by the Sweathouse” because of a beautiful oak grove. When the area was incorporated as a town, the name was spontaneously chosen. San Ramon: The name doesn’t honor a saint, as you might expect. It actually honors a sheepherder named Ramón. A creek was named after Ramón, and then the city took that name. The “San” was added to make it conform with Spanish custom. The Tenderloin: According to the Tenderloin Museum, the name came from a New York City police captain named Alexander Williams who supposedly called vice-heavy areas the “tenderloin,” in reference to all the bribes he would get for turning a blind eye to illegal activities. Tiburon: Spanish for “shark.” Punta de Tiburón, or “shark’s point,” was first mentioned in the diary of José Sánchez on July 6, 1823. Yerba Buena: Spanish for “good herb.” The name refers to the sweet-scented creeper Micromeria chamissonis. The plant could be found near Mountain Lake in San Francisco in 1776.

WHAT’S THAT THING OFF 280? The Origin of the Flintstone House You may have noticed the bright orange and purple structure while driving northbound on Interstate 280 through Hillsborough. It’s one of the most iconic pieces of domestic architecture in the Bay Area, known to locals as the Flintstone House.

Life in the Flintstone House

Locals gave it that nickname because it resembles one of the domed houses you might see in the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon. And 45 Berryessa Way does look like it could be home to Fred and Wilma Flintstone. A recent owner has even leaned into the home’s cartoonish billing and added giant dinosaur sculptures to the yard—much to the dismay of some neighbors and the city. But take a step inside this 2,700-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home and you might be surprised, said Judy Meuschke, the listing agent for the house when it last sold in 2017. You expect something cave-like—dark, musty, and weird. Instead, the interior is bright and airy, a meditation in cream with orange accents. “It’s cozy,” Meuschke said. “It’s really livable. I love the house.” Everything is round in this multi-domed structure, lending a biomorphic quality to the place. Even the walls are curved. You don’t hang a painting; you set it on the floor and lean it back. Or you build an alcove to house it. In the lounge, natural light pours in through amoeba-shaped windows. The kitchen, remodeled in the 2000s, looks like a biotech lab designed by Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. A glass countertop is spilled into a curvaceous U, and spiral designs are drawn into the stucco walls. The stainless steel appliances are the only conventional things in the room.

118

“You know, it’s an expression of its time,” said Pierluigi Serraino, an architect in Alameda who writes books about architectural history. “I find it, in many respects, endearing. I’ve always seen it from the freeway, and I always thought it was a classic period piece, a bit of a folly.”

The Making of the Flintstone House

The original owners worked with architect William Nicholson to build this place in 1976. “That was an era that was a little hippie, you know? Everyone was looking at accepting something new,” Nicholson said. He came out of architecture school with ambitions to revolutionize the field and break outside the box—literally. “We’ve only lived in boxes for about three or four thousand years,” Nicholson said. “Hundreds of thousands of years before that, we lived in soft structures. Our psychological, our cellular makeup, is that we’re a little more comfortable in soft structures than we are in a box.” Inspiration struck Nicholson while he was visiting the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. He lay down on the floor and looked up at the domed ceiling. When he returned from his trip, he spent several years developing a plaster/fiberglass material that, when paired with a unique construction method, could replicate the domes he’d seen. “You sprayed [the plaster/fiberglass mix] on these balloons and then let the air out, and you’d have this dome structure,” he said. “Then I would put the electrical elements in and spray it with foam. Then put wire and steel on, and gunite it, like a swimming pool.” Ultimately, Nicholson considered his foray into unconventional housing a failure. “You know, I was going to revolutionize architecture when I got out of school, and I didn’t. People like the places, especially once they get inside, but nobody bought them. So I felt like such a failure,” he said. Altogether, Nicholson built only four homes using the same method. In addition to the Flintstone House in Hillsborough, there were two in Apple Valley, California, and one in Palm Springs. The last has also earned a nickname—Santorini House. After that, Nicholson quit architecture and got into land development. Although his work wasn’t appreciated at the time, decades later, Nicholson has come to appreciate the joy the Flintstone House

120

brings. “I’ve talked to so many people . . . and they say the sight of the Flintstone House brings a smile to your face,” he said. “I mean, that’s fantastic. So many people drive by and at least subconsciously realize that, ‘Hey, there’s something other than a box!’”

The Dinosaurs

The Flintstone House changed hands in 2017, when media mogul and former publisher of the San Francisco Examiner Florence Fang bought the home for $2.8 million. The octogenarian said she was looking to downsize from a larger home nearby and was drawn to the round shapes of the house. “I’m always thinking, why do we have to live in a square house?” she told the Guardian in 2019. “The square, to me, is limitation. You limit yourself in the square, in a box. . . . Round is different. Round is inclusive and accepting all ideas. I look at this and think, why are we taught to live in squares?” Fang quickly got to work putting her personal mark on the house. There were practical changes, like the addition of a parking strip and retaining wall, but what drew the most public attention were the aesthetic embellishments on the grounds around the house. Brightly colored mushrooms and 15-foot dinosaurs appeared in the backyard. A giant sign reading “Yabba Dabba Do” was installed. Statues of the Wilma and Fred Flintstone characters were placed in the front and back of the house to greet guests. For anyone who loves whimsy, Fang’s changes were a delight. But the town of Hillsborough saw them differently. In 2019 city officials filed a lawsuit against Fang, alleging she hadn’t obtained the necessary permits for the work. When Fang countersued, she claimed she’d been racially discriminated against for being Chinese. In 2021 a settlement was reached, the details of which have not been made public. What is clear is that the dinosaurs and other yard creatures can stay. Drive by today and you simply can’t miss the Flintstone House, a home Fang calls her “happy place.” Rachael Myrow

121

TREASURE IN THE BAY: How FDR and the World’s Fair Gave Us Treasure Island Treasure Island sits out in the middle of the bay between San Francisco and Oakland. Despite sharing a name with a famous piratical adventure novel, there is no gold to be found in its sandy soil. This low-lying island was actually made by humans and commemorates a celebratory time in Bay Area history.

Before the Island

In the 1930s, as the United States was lifting itself out of the Great Depression, a lot was happening in San Francisco. Engineers were almost done building both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, and the city wanted to celebrate these engineering marvels with a big world’s fair. San Francisco had hosted fairs before and each had been a roaring success, said Anne Schnoebelen, historian and member of the Treasure Island Museum’s board of directors. “City leaders said, ‘We know how to do a world’s fair. This depression isn’t going to last forever; we need something to look forward to. Let’s have a new world’s fair in San Francisco.’” At the same time, passenger air travel was beginning to explode in popularity. San Francisco’s airfield, Mills Field, couldn’t accommodate the demand. The city needed space for a larger airport and was on the hunt for a good location.

How They Made an Island

Yerba Buena Island is the natural, rugged island that modern-day drivers tunnel through on their trip across the

122

Bay Bridge. In the 1930s a shallow shoal to the north posed a danger to boat traffic. A plan was soon hatched to create an island on those pesky shoals that could be used for both the fair and an airport. Of course, San Francisco needed money to build the island, so city leaders made an appeal to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “FDR really loved the idea of an airport and was agreeable to the idea of a world’s fair,” Schnoebelen said. Also on his mind was how the military might use the island down the line. He wanted to make sure the island had features like a submarine turning basin. “The military development of the Bay Area was a very big thing in the ’30s, and Treasure Island was part of that big buildup,” Schnoebelen explained. Ultimately, the federal government provided quite a bit of money to build the island. In 1936 the US Army Corps of Engineers began construction, creating the island’s perimeter with a dam of boulders. Next, mud and sand were scraped from the bay floor and dumped inside. Pumps removed water from inside the dam. Finally, the 400-acre island got a layer of topsoil, and thousands of trees, shrubs, and flowers were planted. The first building to go up was a Pan American Airways terminal, but before they could build a runway, everything was put on hold for the fair.

The Fair

The Golden Gate International Exposition opened February 18, 1939. “People were so excited that the fair’s promoters cautioned people, saying, ‘Well, you better not come on opening day. It’s going to be too busy,’” Schnoebelen said. More than 150,000 people descended on Treasure Island that first day, and California’s governor opened the gates with a jewel-encrusted key, reportedly worth thirty-five thousand dollars. The fair celebrated extravagance with art deco towers, sprawling gardens, and immaculate sculptures. “It was a big

123

theatrical presentation with incredible lighting,” Schnoebelen said. “Purples and aquas and bright orange and gold. At night, it must have really been something to see.” She said people could visit ornate buildings like the “Temples of the East” and the “Court of Pacifica” that were an “effort to make the fair look like what its subtitle was, which was ‘the Pageant of the Pacific.’” With Europe already at war, and tensions rising between Japan and the United States, the fair’s organizers wanted to send a message of unity and peace by including architecture from across the Pacific. “But really, it was just a big movie set,” Schnoebelen said. More than ten million people came during the fair’s first season, but despite the crowds and all the beautiful pageantry, the fair wasn’t making any money. At the end of 1939 there was a lot of uncertainty about whether the fair would continue. “What is said to have saved the fair was entertainment,” said Schnoebelen. “Billy Rose’s Aquacade. It was wildly successful.” Synchronized swimmers and divers performed wearing elaborate costumes, in front of a huge band with drums and trumpets. The aquacade was a hit and extended the life of the fair for months longer than expected. Eventually, the fun had to come to an end in September 1940. The war in Europe was impossible to ignore. Herb Caen, then a young columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, recalled, “Then came the night the lights went down forever at the Fair on Treasure Island, and we knew there was nothing left to do but wait for our war to come along and get us—for what was left of our youth died then and there, out in the black bay.” Kevin Stark

124

THE FOUNTAIN AT THE CIRCLE: The State Capital Almost Moved to Berkeley, and All It Got Was This Sweet Bear Fountain If you’re in Berkeley and wander far enough up Marin Avenue, there’s no doubt you’ll run into a roundabout that connects seven streets and has a grand beaux arts fountain at its center. This is the Fountain at the Circle, and it has become a symbol of the neighborhood. Sitting at the fountain’s center are four grizzly bear cubs, each facing a different direction, toward streets named after California counties. The street names hint at the California history behind this roundabout and how one developer’s dream almost changed that history forever.

Boom Times for Berkeley

The story of this Berkeley circle starts at the turn of the twentieth century, when Berkeley transitioned from open grasslands and rolling hillsides to a boomtown. Between 1900 and 1910, Berkeley’s population more than tripled, growing from 13,214 to 40,434. “A big chunk of it were people [resettling after the 1906] earthquake, but also the university was growing very rapidly, and maybe most dramatically of all, a big electric trolley system was being created in Berkeley,” said Charles “Chuck” Wollenberg, author of Berkeley: A City in History. With the growing population, demand for new housing increased. Enter Louis Titus, head of the Berkeley Development Company. He helped develop a good portion

125

of Berkeley and owned about 1,000 acres of land in or near the Berkeley Hills, including where the Circle sits today. Titus had something special in mind for his land. He announced his proposal at a chamber of commerce meeting on February 18, 1907, and according to the Berkeley Gazette, it created quite a stir: “A bombshell exploded in town hall last night, the echo of which is today resounding throughout the entire state, when the proposition to move the state capital from Sacramento to Berkeley was proposed amid a scene of the greatest enthusiasm Berkeley ever witnessed.”

Berkeley as California’s Capital

Titus offered to donate 40 acres of land as the California state capitol site, right next to where the Fountain at the Circle stands today. Besides wanting tremendous profits for the city and its developers, Wollenberg said supporters of the plan wanted to bring the capital down to the Bay Area, “where the action was.” In 1900 about 45 percent of California’s population lived in the Bay Area. A flyer titled “Ten Reasons Why the Capital of the State Should Be Moved to Berkeley” suggested that Sacramento was too far removed from the citizens and businesses of the state. State legislators were open to the idea because their current building in Sacramento was becoming cramped and needed extensive repairs. Sacramento was also uncomfortably hot in the summer compared to Berkeley’s more temperate climate. In addition, some preferred that Berkeley was a dry city. Sacramento had a lively saloon scene. “The legislators would be much more likely to do their duty,” said Trish Hawthorne, author of the essay “Almost the State Capital,” featured in Exactly Opposite the Golden Gate: Essays on Berkeley’s History. Things moved pretty quickly after the initial proposal. Within days it was voted on and approved locally, and the legislators were invited to look at the proposed site. “There was a plea for anyone who had an automobile to bring it so that legislators could be driven up to the capitol site,” said Hawthorne. “So you can imagine what a small town this was, that every car that was available would be used.” It must have worked because, by March 1907, the state senate, assembly, and governor approved the proposal, placing a Capital Removal Measure on the ballot for the next general election in November 1908. In the meantime, Titus and other developers built homes in the Berkeley Hills, and the Circle was put in place in 1907. Hawthorne said the streets coming off the Circle were named

127

after California counties to garner support from the rest of the state. They include Marin, Los Angeles, Mendocino, and Del Norte, with Merced Street, Solano Avenue, and Santa Barbara Road nearby. Perhaps the thinking went: If your county got a street, you’d vote for the move.

From Dream to Downturn

Before Californians could vote to move the capital, the region was mired in an economic slump. “There was a big boom after the earthquake, but then there was also not exactly a crash, but a recession, because so much building had been done and so much capital expended,” said Trish Hawthorne. “Things weren’t looking as good by November of 1908.” In the throes of a recession, Californians might have been leery of spending money on a costly move to a new capital. The measure lost by a wide margin. It passed only in three counties: San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Berkeley’s own Alameda.

A Future with the Fountain

Though a capitol building was never built, the Circle and its county-named streets remained. In 1911 the beautiful beaux arts fountain was built at the Circle’s center, three years after the vote failed. The fountain was used to publicize the new Northbrae development, and it was advertised as Berkeley’s first public work of art. It has since inspired numerous paintings and drawings, and it even has its own Berkeley Public Library card design. “Sometimes I take two turns around the Circle just because it looks so cool,” said Charlie Wilson, a landscape architect and board member of the Friends of the Fountain and Walk. “We have a two-tier fountain that has a spray at the top and it drops water through two bowls to a large 25-foot-diameter basin.”

128

The fountain and Circle were designed by John Galen Howard. He was one of the main architects of the UC Berkeley campus, designing the Campanile and Sather Gate. The cute little grizzly bear cubs on the fountain were made by Arthur Putnam. His sculpted sphinxes stand guard outside the de Young Museum and his Snarling Jaguar is featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s lit at night, so when you come upon it at night, it’s pretty spectacular,” said Wilson. “I think we’re lucky that they decided to go ahead with the fountain, because the whole Circle and the fountain are a wonderful way to connect all those streets,” said Trish Hawthorne. “It’s a reminder of a way to find the past in the present with something we live with every day and enjoy.” Maggie Galloway

129

Notable Public Art Art is everywhere in the Bay Area. Here are the stories behind a few other pieces you might come across.

DREAM

What: The word dream spelled out 10 feet tall and 50 feet wide, in capital letters. The letters are made of metallic disks that create a shimmering effect when they move. Where: On the east side of Bernal Hill in San Francisco. Get a good view while you are driving on 101 north near the Cesar Chavez exit. About: Artist Ana Teresa Fernández was inspired by the work of the late Oakland graffiti artist Mike “Dream” Francisco, who was known for his pieces that simply read “DREAM.” The sculpture was designed to create a hopeful vision for the Excelsior neighborhood. Students from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School helped create the sculpture, making several trips to the artist’s studio throughout the school year.

Cupid’s Span

What: A 60-foot sculpture depicting a partial bow and arrow made of fiberglass and steel.  Where: Rincon Park on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

About: Artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen say they were “inspired by San Francisco’s reputation as the home port of Eros” to create a sculpture based on Cupid’s stereotypical bow and arrow. It was van Bruggen who suggested turning the image upside down: The arrow and the central part of the bow could be buried in the

ground, and the tail feathers would be the focus of attention. The inversion created a piece that looks like both a ship and a tightened version of a suspension bridge.

Plumed Serpent

What: An 8-foot-tall sculpture of a coiled snake colored a dull, earthy black. Where: South end of the Plaza de Cesar Chavez in San Jose. About: The sculpture is of Quetzalcóatl, the Aztec god of wind and wisdom, commonly referred to as “the feathered serpent.” This iconic dragon-like deity hails from Mesoamerican Teotihuacan, an ancient metropolis that once flourished northeast of modern-day Mexico City. Teotihuacan dominated the regional cultural landscape for centuries, and the art from Teotihuacan continues to resonate today throughout the Americas.

Pink Triangle

What: A 200-foot-wide pink triangle that’s visible from 20 miles away and illuminated at night. Where: On the eastern side of Twin Peaks in San Francisco, just off Christmas Tree Point. About: During Pride Month every June, a massive pink triangle made from 175 hand-painted tarps gets installed on Twin Peaks. It’s the brainchild of Patrick Carney, who initially put the work up as a renegade craft in 1996, and has done so every year since, now with the permission of the city. The Pink Triangle has a triple meaning, Carney said. It’s meant to serve as a reminder of the hate and intolerance the LGBTQ community faces, a celebration of where the community is today, and a warning that

injustices could always return. “The Pink Triangle is a giant in-your-face educational tool,” he said.

Oakland Gnomes

What: Little gnome paintings usually found at the base of telephone poles. Where: All over Oakland.

About: The artist, who stays anonymous, estimates he put up between five thousand and seven thousand gnome paintings over the course of several years. “Who doesn’t like gnomes? That’s something all of us can appreciate,” he said. For a time, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) was threatening to remove all of the paintings, but public pushback proved effective, and in the end, the company chose not to remove them, declaring telephone poles “gnome-man’s land.” Though the original artist has since moved away, others have picked up a paintbrush and continue to add to the ad hoc exhibition.

THE ROBIN WILLIAMS RAINBOWS: Why Are There Rainbows on the Tunnel between San Francisco and Marin? Anyone who has driven from San Francisco to Marin on Highway 101 in the past half century has made the journey underneath a rainbow, regardless of the weather. The southern opening of the Robin Williams Tunnel, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, sports a whimsical rainbow paint job around its entrance. Many motorists whizzing by have wondered: Why the rainbows? And what does famed comedian Robin Williams have to do with them?

Before the Rainbow

The story starts in the 1960s, with a guy named Robert Halligan Sr. driving through what were, at the time, some rather drab-looking concrete tunnels. The first bore of the tunnel was completed in 1937, helping to establish a pivotal connection between San Francisco and Marin. The second bore opened in 1957. “My dad commuted there every single day,” said Robert Halligan Jr. The family lived in Marinwood, and Halligan Sr. thought it would be great if there was something special to welcome commuters home to the North Bay at the end of the day. But Halligan Sr. was not your average commuter. He was also the public affairs officer with the California Department of Transportation, and he had a flair for the creative. At the time, the Bay Area was opening a lot of new freeways, and Halligan Sr. liked to wow the public at ribbon-cutting ceremonies. He had a

133

robot clip the ribbon at one ceremony and a local traffic helicopter drive through the ribbon at another, his son said. The 1960s and ’70s were also a time when highway planners were thinking a lot about the aesthetics and design of the roads they were laying down. Californians were spending increasing amounts of time on the roads, and people thought it would be nice if those roads were a little more beautiful. So when Halligan Sr. proposed painting rainbows on the southern openings of the tunnels in Marin, his colleagues were on board. “The rainbow tunnels were simply part of that kind of experience, trying to improve the aesthetics of concrete in people’s lives,” Halligan Jr. said. But it wasn’t just their colorful presence that made rainbows the right choice. Halligan Jr. said the half-circle shape of the tunnel openings made a rainbow “naturally conducive” to the project.

Debating the Rainbow

When the rainbows first went up, most residents loved them, but a few hated the new paint job. The two sides battled it out in the “Letters to the Editor” page of the San Rafael Daily Independent Journal. “This is a disfiguration of the landscape and an insult to the quiet beauty of this entire county,” wrote Dr. and Mrs. Alan J. Davidson of Mill Valley on November 3, 1970. “The pastels of Cartoonland should be confined to the Sunday funnies.” “Did a muse, en route to an appointment with Andy Warhol, veer off course and land in the Division of Highways? Let us be grateful for an inspired treatment of dull, gray concrete!” countered Lewis W. Stewart of San Anselmo on November 10, 1970. “My dad used to say, ‘If it’s not controversial, it’s not art,’” Halligan Jr. said. His dad never stopped caring about his controversial rainbows. When it eventually came time to give the rainbows a new paint job, however, Halligan Sr. was not impressed with the

134

work. “My dad looked at them and said, ‘Oh my god, they repainted them the faded colors,’” Halligan Jr. said. “So they had to go back and repaint them the original bright colors you see today.” In the end, Halligan Sr. considered the rainbow tunnels to be one of the best things he accomplished during his career. When he died in 1999, the San Francisco Chronicle even mentioned them in his obituary. “He was a simple man,” Halligan Jr. said, “but a simple man that was in a position to have a legacy that lasts far beyond him, which is amazing. Few of us get a chance to do that.”

What’s In the Name

For decades the tunnels sporting the rainbow paint job were officially called the Waldo Tunnels, because they are located on a stretch of highway known as the Waldo Grade. Both honor William Waldo, an 1850s-era politician and gubernatorial candidate whose name pops up in several other places in this part of Marin. Waldo was revered for his work helping overland emigrants make the journey to California, often carrying lifesaving supplies to them. The tunnels were renamed in 2015 to honor celebrity comedian and longtime resident Robin Williams, who died by suicide in 2014 in his Tiburon home. Williams moved to Marin County when he was sixteen and studied theater at College of Marin. Despite his A-lister fame, he was often seen pedaling his bike around town, browsing local shops, or frequenting comedy night at Throckmorton Theatre. His devotion to the San Francisco Giants was also legendary, and Williams was a frequent sight at baseball games. His death weighed heavily on the community, and soon a Change.org petition to rename the tunnels in Williams’s honor began to circulate. The petition’s stated purpose read: “To remember and honor the very important citizen and

135

world-renowned entertainer Robin Williams, for the joy he brought to the world and to bring awareness to the silent illness that eventually took his life.” The California State Legislature took note of the petition and passed a resolution to officially rename the tunnel. Green road signs reading “Robin Williams Tunnel” were put up in 2016. Ultimately, it’s apt that Halligan Sr.’s rainbow tunnels are named for Robin Williams. Both men sought to bring humor to the everyday—Halligan Sr. through his ribbon-cutting antics and Williams through his storied comedic career. Like both their creator and namesake, the rainbow tunnels fill our world with a little more joy.

136

EYESORE TO ICON: How Sutro Tower Became a Defining Feature of the San Francisco Skyline Some call it an eyesore. Some call it art. Maybe it’s a nuisance. Or it’s an icon. No matter how you view it, it’s hard not to have some kind of reaction to Sutro Tower. As far as TV towers go, Sutro Tower does look pretty weird. It’s got three legs and this skinny middle that the architects call the waist. It was built up on a hill in the middle of a San Francisco neighborhood, not on top of a skyscraper like TV towers are in most other big cities. It may come as no surprise that this unique-looking broadcast tower was hugely controversial when it was first proposed in the 1960s.

San Francisco Needs a New Broadcast Tower

Back then, San Francisco had really bad television reception. By many accounts, it was the worst of any city in America. Good reception required a clear line of sight from the broadcast tower to your TV antenna, which was quite the challenge in hilly San Francisco. Broadcasters began the hunt for a location to build a very tall tower that could send a clear TV signal far and wide. ABC already had a 588-foot tower on top of Mount Sutro, and the network started lobbying for the new tower to be built there. Designs were drawn up, and ABC started showing off a tower that looked like a sleek golden version of the Seattle Space Needle. It even had a restaurant at the top. ABC invited residents around Mount Sutro to discuss the plans during two meetings. Initially, neighbors had concerns over safety,

137

property values, and the city skyline. “What the people were told was very simply this: Either you go away and you let us build our tower, or we will make sure the open space around Mount Sutro is torn down and all of the greenbelt is removed,” said Christine Linnenbach, a lawyer who has fought Sutro Tower Inc. in court and whose childhood home is a few blocks from the tower. Linnenbach said ABC delivered an ultimatum: a tower and a park, or no tower and no park. The neighbors didn’t know that this was an empty threat. The park was already included in the city’s plan for a greenbelt. But their fear of losing the park caused residents to keep quiet, and ABC used the “lack of neighborhood opposition” to help push the Mount Sutro site through.

Fighting the Tower

Among the loudest opponents of Sutro Tower was the San Francisco Chronicle. Lawyers representing the paper fought the tower at hearings in front of the San Francisco Planning Commission and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The paper argued Sutro Tower would ruin the skyline, and it questioned the logic of placing a tower within striking distance of an elementary school, reservoirs, and hundreds of homes. But the Chronicle wasn’t an impartial observer. The paper had its own television station and wanted to see the tower built on San Bruno Mountain. Ultimately, the Federal Aviation Authority rejected that proposal because the tower’s location was too close to the airport.

In 1966 the San Francisco Planning Commission approved the site at Mount Sutro, passing the decision on to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The supervisors voted six to four against building the tower, but two more votes were needed to overturn the Planning Commission’s approval. And so the decision was final: A tower would be built on Mount Sutro.

Unusual Design

Leading up to construction, the tower’s design underwent huge changes from the initial Space Needle–style design. Los Angeles architecture firm AC Martin and Associates made it more skeletal looking with a broader top and waist. Eric Dausman, general manager of Sutro Tower, said the architect’s decision to taper the center was entirely aesthetic. “All the engineers since then want to shoot [the architect]. It made it a more difficult structure to maintain, and it is a more difficult structure to keep perfectly upright and in a great condition,” said Dausman. In designing the tower, engineers realized that the antennae would sway in strong winds, so they added girders and a network of cables to keep them in place. “Unfortunately, one of the by-products was that wind would rush through these newly created guide wires, and the whole tower would sound like a moaning harp,” said Christine Linnenbach. The cables have since been redesigned and are not as loud. The other major change was the color. Original plans showed a tower with a golden hue, but aviation regulations required the tower be painted alternating stripes of red and white to ward off possible plane collisions. “The biggest problem with painting is that we also painted a lot of the neighbors’ houses and cars,” said Dausman. “The crew is as careful as they can be, but they’re 700, 800, 900 feet in the air, and a drip goes a long way.”

139

Sutro Tower and Public Opinion

Sutro Tower beamed out its first transmission on July 4, 1973. Prominent San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen did not love the uniquely designed broadcast tower. He once wrote: “I keep waiting for it to stalk down the hill and attack the Golden Gate Bridge.” Eric Dausman said he understands people who consider the tower an eyesore. If it were up to him, the tower wouldn’t even be here. “This is the wrong place for a broadcast tower to serve all of the Bay Area as it has emerged in the last forty years,” Dausman said. “It’s not really in the center.” He thinks the ideal spot would be somewhere in Hayward. But at this point, the tower isn’t going anywhere. These days Sutro Tower is used for more than just broadcast television. Emergency responders, traffic control, taxi dispatchers, law enforcement, and radio stations all use the structure. Despite its controversial beginnings and unusual design, many San Franciscans have come to love Sutro Tower over the years. You can find imagery of the landmark on T-shirts and shopping bags, and even tattooed on people’s bodies. Although some tourists find the structure ugly and strange, many newcomers use the tower’s prominence to navigate the city. Rather than ruin the city’s skyline as many once feared, Sutro Tower has become one of its most beloved components, an icon for the hometown crowd. Jessica Placzek

140

SUTRO BATHS: The Lost Glass Swimming Palace for the Public Any visitor to Lands End at San Francisco’s far western edge will see the remnants of the city’s decadent past in what’s left of Sutro Baths. For more than sixty years the site was home to a massive steam-heated swimming complex fed with saltwater from the ocean and covered by an ornate iron and glass building. At the turn of the twentieth century, the average San Franciscan could hop on a train downtown, pay a five-cent fare, and ride west to a part of the city known as Outside Lands. Upon arrival guests paid a twenty-five-cent fee to access the baths, rent a bathing suit, and use the changing rooms. They entered the baths through a building that looked like a small classical temple, walked past exhibits full of curios, and descended a beautiful set of stairs to the baths below. Sutro Baths are one of the most intriguing and excessive elements of early San Francisco life, but why were they built and what happened to them?

The Man behind the Baths

Sutro Baths were the brainchild of Adolph Sutro, a German-born immigrant to the United States. When he first arrived in San Francisco in the early 1850s, Sutro sold tobacco to other fortune seekers who’d come west looking for gold. Soon, he set out for Virginia City, Nevada, to get rich himself at the silver mines there. While working on the Comstock Lode, Sutro developed a tunnel, patented the “Sutro Tunnel,” that drained water and gas from the mining shafts, making it safer for the men working. The invention made Adolph Sutro rich. He returned to San Francisco and began buying property, focusing his investment at the far western edge of the city.

141

Although now rich, Sutro had a populist bent. He thought San Francisco needed a place where less affluent residents could go to socialize and enjoy the positive health benefits of swimming. He hoped that creating such a place would ensure his family’s name lived on in San Francisco history.

An Engineering Feat

“I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been to a pool that can fit thousands of people at once,” said Hector Falero, an education manager with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. “But that’s what it was.” The baths were enormous; they spread out over 3 acres. Sutro built a huge concrete seawall to form the outer edge of the baths, which would have been right up against the ocean. “It’s built very, very close to the water because the water would rush in at high tide and be able to fill the pools almost instantly,” said Falero. “This was one of the technological aspects that was incredible.” A series of tunnels brought seawater in to fill up the six pools— holding a total of 1.6 million gallons of water. The largest of the pools was 275 feet long and between 3 and 9 feet deep. Its water was the temperature of the ocean—too cold for many bathers. The other five pools were heated to various temperatures so that bathers could play comfortably. “It was a big social environment,” Falero said. “There were swings; there were slides where people would slide down, and a trapeze.” The pools were covered by a beautiful domed glass building supported with iron girders. Rising up from the pool were bleachers for spectators to watch the swimmers, as well as three viewing levels, each with its own restaurant. It was quite a scene.

An Early Civil Rights Battleground

Sutro Baths were also the site of one of California’s first civil rights challenges. On July 4, 1897, just a year after the baths

142

opened, John Harris, a Black waiter, went to the baths with several white friends. He paid his fee but was not allowed to swim because of the color of his skin. Harris sued the Sutro family, citing a recently passed California law—the Dibble Civil Rights Act of 1888. The law stated that citizens “of every color or race whatsoever” shall “be entitled to the full and equal” facilities of “all places of public accommodation or amusement.” Scholars think Harris’s lawsuit was a “test case” brought to strengthen the new legislation and give it teeth. The African American Assembly Club, which had lobbied in favor of the law, set aside money to pay the legal fees for plaintiffs like Harris. “It’s really important when we look at the story of John Harris that we not only see the man that is John Harris, but the fact that he had a community of other African Americans, of other Black people that were living in San Francisco, that would have been able to support him,” Hector Falero said. Harris won the lawsuit. The court ordered the Sutro family to pay damages of one hundred dollars for each time Harris had been denied entry. More importantly, the lawsuit set a precedent. Despite the legal victory, the record is less clear on whether other Black San Franciscans, or other people of color, took advantage of the baths after Harris’s challenge.

A Slow Demise

Sutro Baths remained popular for decades but faltered during the Great Depression when working-class San Franciscans had less disposable income. Additionally, new sanitary regulations were passed, making the operation of Sutro Baths more expensive and onerous. The Sutro family replaced some of the pools with an ice-skating rink to bring in more money, but business continued to decline. The family ultimately sold the property. A real estate developer named Robert Fraser, known for the Fontana and Comstock skyscraper apartment buildings,

143

saw potential in the Sutro Baths site. Fraser planned to raze the massive building over the baths and build a 200-unit apartment complex and restaurant overlooking the ocean. But in 1966 the Sutro Baths building burned to the ground before Fraser could finish negotiating the project. Thousands of people came out to watch the iconic building burn, and the swell of nostalgia that arose after the fire may have impeded Fraser’s development plans. The National Park Service purchased the site in 1973. All that remains of the frolicking good times had at Sutro Baths is the foundation of the pools themselves. Looking a bit like archaeological ruins, the site is preserved as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and attracts tourists and locals alike to take in the scene. The tides still rush in to fill the pools, but visitors must content themselves with imagining the spectacle of the glass building and heated pools in their heyday. Katrina Schwartz

144

The Golden Gate Bridge: Your Questions, Answered

From movies to postcards to the view outside office windows, the Golden Gate Bridge might be the most iconic landmark in the San Francisco Bay Area. The bridge has been connecting San Francisco to the North Bay since May 27, 1937, when it first opened to pedestrian traffic. Vehicles were welcomed the following day, and since then, more than two billion people have crossed the historic bridge. Here are some answers to commonly asked questions about the iconic bridge.

Why is it called the Golden Gate?

The bridge is named for the body of water that runs beneath it, the Golden Gate strait. The strait connects the Pacific Ocean to the San Francisco Bay. Despite the region’s gold mining history, the name has nothing to do with gold. When explorer and politician John C. Frémont first saw the strait in 1846, he named it “Chrysopylae,” or “Golden Gate,” because it reminded him of the Golden Horn in Istanbul, Turkey. The name has stuck ever since!

Who had the idea to make the Golden Gate Bridge orange?

The vermilion color, often called “international orange,” was chosen by architect Irving Morrow. He noticed a striking reddish-orange primer painted on some of the bridge’s steel and thought it offered a nice contrast to the cool colors of the sky and sea. The bright color also helps with visibility for passing ships.

How often is the Golden Gate Bridge painted?

The bridge was painted when it was originally built and received only touch-ups until 1968, when corrosion meant the original lead-based paint had to be removed. It was repainted in 1980 with a zinc primer and acrylic topcoat. The bridge now continually receives touch-ups. Paint superintendent Dennis “Rocky” Dellarocca estimates they go through between 5,000 and 10,000 gallons of paint each year.

Has anyone ever swum under the Golden Gate Bridge?

Yes! There are group swims and races throughout the year. The Dolphin Club, a historic swimming and rowing club in San Francisco, hosts an annual swim under the bridge. “The Dolphin Club has been doing it for over one hundred years, well before the bridge was even built,” said swimmer Denise Sauerteig. “We take a boat out to just outside the gate on the San Francisco side of the bridge. We jump off the boat and then swim the length of the bridge until we reach the north side just inside the gate. Then we jump back on the boat and celebrate with Irish coffees and doughnuts.”

Did builders put a steel net in the water under the bridge so submarines couldn’t pass into the bay?

During World War II, the San Francisco Bay was fortified with a system of guns, underwater mines, and anti-submarine nets. According to a historical study published by the Department of the Interior in 1979, the net extended from around Yellow Bluff (south of Sausalito) to the eastern end of the Presidio. Tugboats were used to open and close the net for friendly ships to pass. So while there was a net nearby, it was not attached to the Golden Gate Bridge.

How are the towers of the bridge anchored to the bay floor?

The south tower stands in the middle of the Golden Gate strait and presented a huge engineering challenge when the bridge was built. First, they needed to smooth the surface of the bay floor where the tower would sit. Divers were sent 110 feet below the surface, where they set off dynamite charges and used high-pressure hoses to remove loose material. Next, workers had to build an oval-shaped concrete barrier big enough to fit a football field inside. It was meant to protect the tower in the event of a collision. To make it, divers assembled wooden forms on the bay floor, often working with little or no visibility. Those forms were then filled in with concrete sent down from the surface via a tube. The process was repeated until the barrier was built up enough to be visible above the water. Workers called it a “giant bathtub.” Then they filled the bottom of the barrier with more concrete to serve as the foundation of the tower. The remaining 9.4 million gallons of seawater were pumped out of the “giant bathtub,” and workers reinforced the structure with even more concrete and steel. From there, the steel tower was assembled inside the barrier.

How is the concrete barrier that separates the northbound and southbound lanes moved?

Bridge staff drive one of the bright yellow “zipper” machines across the bridge to change the number of lanes headed in each direction based on rush hour traffic. At the front-left corner of the machine, the heavy barrier gets picked up. Then it snakes through the machine and comes out the back— moved to the right by one lane. The whole process takes about an hour and doesn’t require staff to close any lanes. Jessica Placzek, Olivia Allen-Price, and Kelly O’Mara

GREEN GODDESS: The San Francisco Origins of a Beloved Salad Dressing You’ve likely seen green goddess salad dressing on the shelves at the grocery store or sitting in a carafe on the salad buffet. Its vibrant green color and tangy, herbal flavor are often thought of as distinctly Californian—and for good reason! The dressing was first made at one of San Francisco’s historically notable landmarks: the Palace Hotel.

Green Goddess Is Born

The Palace Hotel was once a popular spot for well-known celebrities and wealthy people to stay downtown. Famous guests included Italian opera star Luisa Tetrazzini, whom the hotel claims to have named their turkey tetrazzini after, and Warren G. Harding, who died at the hotel while he was the sitting president of the United States. In 1923, actor George Arliss stayed there while starring in a play called The Green Goddess. A banquet was thrown in his honor, and the head chef at the time, Phillip Roemer, created a special dressing to be served on the starter salad. The rest, they say, is history.

What Makes the Dressing?

“It is a favorite,” said Renée Roberts, who’s worked with the Palace Hotel for more than twenty years. “There was a point when someone thought they could change it and took it off the menu. It lasted for like a day.” The recipe has evolved over the years, Roberts said. The original was heavy on the mayonnaise and came served on a

150

canned artichoke, considered a luxury back then. Today, the Palace Hotel has lightened the dressing with olive oil, and there are no canned vegetables in sight. In the kitchen a chef throws all the modern ingredients in a blender: ice, pasteurized eggs, whole-grain mustard, shallots, capers, chives, spinach, fresh tarragon, chopped parsley, tarragon vinaigrette, salt and pepper, some olive oil, and lemon juice. The result is a far cry from the original invented in this kitchen almost one hundred years ago. Even so, the dressing is still recognizable as a crucial part of the Palace Hotel’s history. “If you wear a green dress to work, everybody’s calling you the green goddess,” Roberts laughed. “It’s just kind of a thing around here.”

The Unsavory Side of the “Green Goddess”

What about the dressing’s namesake? Who exactly was the green goddess? This is where things get complicated. After the play finished, two film versions of The Green Goddess were made—a silent film in 1923 and a remake with sound in 1930. Neither has aged well. In them, Arliss, a white British actor, played an Indian maharajah. He and his white costars fake horrendous Indian accents and portray Indian characters as savages. The green goddess herself was a made-up deity, appearing in a bad Hollywood version of a Hindu temple. This backstory is a reminder that even something as innocent as salad dressing can carry serious baggage. But green goddess is a California classic not because of these film associations, but because of the brightness that makes it so Californian: the fresh herbs, its vibrant color, and simply how good it tastes. The dressing is clean and bright. It’s herbaceous and tangy. And it’s forever a part of San Francisco history and the Palace Hotel.

151

The ORIGINAL Palace Green Goddess Dressing Recipe 1 cup [240 g] mayonnaise

1/2 cup [120 g] sour cream 1/4 cup [12 g] fresh chives, snipped, or scallions, minced 1/4 cup [10 g] fresh parsley, minced

1 Tbsp [15 ml] fresh lemon juice 1 Tbsp [15 ml] white wine vinegar 3 anchovy fillets, rinsed, patted dry, and minced Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Preparation

Stir all the ingredients together in a small bowl until well blended. Taste and adjust the seasonings. Use immediately or cover and refrigerate. Sasha Khokha

152

ROCKY ROAD ICE CREAM: How Two Oakland Ice Creameries Claim to Have Invented the Depression-Era Treat It’s hard to imagine in this era of salted caramel and matcha teaflavored ice creams, but there was a time when the American palate was limited to chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. The invention of Rocky Road in the 1920s changed the ice cream game with “mix-ins”—adding the bumpy texture of nuts and the soft, pillowy chew of marshmallows. Nearly a century has passed since Rocky Road ice cream was invented, but there’s still a dispute over just who thought up the recipe: Fentons Creamery or Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream. The one certain thing is the flavor was invented in Oakland, California.

Dreyer’s Antidote to the Great Depression

In a shopping district that runs along College Avenue in North Oakland sits the home of the original headquarters of Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream. The business was founded in 1928 by a German immigrant named William Dreyer. A year after its opening, the

American stock market crashed. Shantytowns soon developed along Oakland’s waterfront. “William Dreyer decides, ‘What I want to do is make a new ice cream flavor that puts a smile on people’s faces during this rocky road of life,’” Local Food Adventures guide Lauren Herpich said. “Rocky Road becomes America’s first blockbuster ice cream flavor after chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. So really, we can say thanks to Mr. Dreyer for starting the whole idea of new ice cream flavors.” “[It was] the first time marshmallow was ever used in ice cream,” said John Harrison, who invented Cookies ’N Cream ice cream and some seventy-five other new flavors for Dreyer’s starting in the 1980s. In an interview as part of an oral history project with UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Harrison said that in making Rocky Road, William Dreyer was adapting a popular candy of the period, made with marshmallows and walnuts—but he used almonds instead. “Originally, it was walnuts [in the recipe], but they didn’t have that bite, that crispness, that freshness. . . . It’s too porous. It absorbs and gets soggy,” Harrison said. Almonds simply worked better. Finding the right marshmallow for the ice cream was a challenge too. “The only marshmallow that was available in 1929 was the large fireside marshmallow that their wives used to cut up, bite-size. You can’t put a whole [marshmallow in ice cream]. Wouldn’t work,” Harrison explained. Dreyer’s ultimately took its Rocky Road flavor well beyond Oakland. The company was bought by Nestlé in 2002, and its ice cream is stocked in nearly every supermarket freezer. (It’s branded as Edy’s on the East Coast.) Nestlé continues to market the brand and the claim that Dreyer invented Rocky Road.

Fentons WALNUTS

Not far from where Dreyer’s got its start, there’s a smaller ice cream company on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland that also claims to have invented Rocky Road.

154

At Fentons Creamery, owner and master blender Scott Whidden puts fistfuls of nuts and marshmallows into freshly churned chocolate ice cream to make Rocky Road. He adds walnuts, instead of almonds—just like the original candy bar. “I’m looking for equal parts [in each bite],” said Whidden. “If you have a marshmallow, I want you to have maybe one or two of the walnuts.” Whidden said small batch and handmade is the way Fentons has made its ice cream since the 1920s. That’s when Melvin Fenton—grandson of the original owner—came up with the idea for Rocky Road. There’s a picture of Melvin Fenton in the ice cream parlor, where dozens of families can sit in red vinyl booths, enjoying giant sundaes in old-fashioned glass dishes. In the photo Fenton is loading fresh cream off a tiny airplane that he flew as an amateur pilot. “He’s a visionary. Forward-thinking guy,” said Whidden. Fenton thought beyond the trifecta of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. “He goes, ‘Whoa. Mix-ins!’ So the thought process on it was, ‘We’re into the Depression, it’s bad times. [We’ve got] smooth ice cream, and then there’s these bumps. It gets rocky.’” That sound familiar? Rocky Road, the bumpy road of life during the Depression. Chocolate, marshmallows, nuts. Whidden claims Dreyer’s stole the credit, even though they knew Fentons had invented it. Dreyer’s former president Ken Cook, who ran the company from 1963 to 1977, was Whidden’s mentor and encouraged him to buy Fentons. Whidden said Cook even admitted to him that Fentons actually invented Rocky Road. But Cook passed away in 1991, and there’s no way to verify that claim.

The Rocky Road to Credit

There’s another theory that’s been floated: Fentons’ original candy maker, George Farren, was friends with Dreyer and may have shared his idea for a Rocky Road ice cream with both companies.

155

It’s unclear whether the candy bar, popular in the 1920s, was called Rocky Road. There’s a Rocky Road candy bar today, and it was invented in San Francisco—but not until the 1950s, and it uses cashews. It’s all a bit nutty! “It’s very common in ice cream history to have these kinds of disputes,” said Amy Ettinger, an ice cream historian and author of Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge across America. “The 1904 World’s Fair was when the ice cream cone was invented, and six different vendors claimed that they were the ones who invented it. Unless you have a time machine, or you know you were actually the inventor, there’s no way really to tell.” Ettinger said Rocky Road is the flavor of her childhood. Not the Fentons version, but the Dreyer’s kind you can buy at the grocery store. She said she feels a little sheepish saying that, because it’s kind of a David and Goliath story: the mom-and-pop parlor versus what is today a multinational giant. “What’s very interesting is Fentons is a very beloved Bay Area institution,” said Ettinger. “But it is not well known outside of the Bay Area. So regardless of who actually invented it, Dreyer’s is hands down the marketer of Rocky Road. They built their brand on the invention and the marketing of Rocky Road. Just because the other company is the one that got the word out about it, doesn’t mean that Fentons didn’t invent it. There’s no way for us to know.” “At the end of the day I don’t know that it matters,” said Ettinger. “I mean, if both places are creating really good scoops of Rocky Road ice cream now, and they both have their little twist on it, how important is it who the original inventor was?” What is certain is Rocky Road hails from Oakland, and both Fentons and Dreyer’s serve up a mighty fine scoop. Sasha Khokha

156

SAN FRANCISCO SOURDOUGH: The Microbes That Make the City’s Favorite Bread San Francisco is known the world over for our sourdough. Just ask the tourists who line up outside Boudin Bakery at Fisherman’s Wharf for a taste of that moist, tangy, fogbound delight. Local lore says there’s something in the water or the air here that makes our sourdough special, impossible to replicate anywhere else. But is that really true?

Taste the Microbes

To understand what makes our bread taste the way it does, let’s first explore how sourdough gets its start. At Semifreddi’s bakery in Alameda, the fermentation room is the inner sanctum of the bakery—a very cold, stainless steel vault where three hundred yellow buckets brim with slow-bubbling beige goop: future sourdough. “Can you hear it? It’s hungry,” said co-owner Mike Rose, who talks about sourdough with wonderment, as if it’s alive—which it is, with millions of microbes. “It will be fed later today. It gets fed once a day. Equal parts flour and water.” Before sourdough gets baked, it has to be grown. It is born as a primordial glop, aptly called starter. All it needs to grow is flour, water, and time. If you add anything else, it’s not real sourdough. The starter is alive with millions of wild yeast cells and naturally occurring bacteria. The yeast makes the bread rise, and the bacteria create the acids that make the bread sour. It’s reasonably easy to create a starter from scratch, but tricky to master the triple arts of crust, crumb, and flavor when baking.

157

“We try to control it by temperature and time. And our hands. It’s never fully totally under control, because we’re dealing with natural organisms,” said Rose. “I love it.”

The Boudin Lore

No one has convinced more people about the unique qualities of San Francisco sourdough than Boudin Bakery, which says it’s been selling the same loaf of bread for more than 150 years. The company’s mother dough follows an unbroken line back to the gold rush in 1849. The bakery even sends its retail stores some fresh starter every twenty-three days. Without it, the company says the sourdough those stores produce would stop tasting like San Francisco sourdough and start tasting like San Diego or Sacramento sourdough. Why? Well, according to the bakery museum, Boudin bread owes its special flavor to a strain of bacteria that thrives only in San Francisco’s climate. Scientists identified it here in 1970, so they named it Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. It’s a great story. Too bad it’s not quite true.

The Science of Sourdough

Scientists did identify Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis here, but recent studies have found it in up to 90 percent of countries where sourdough is produced. So from a biological standpoint, San Francisco sourdough is not all that distinctive. “It’s something that everyone thinks is unique to San Francisco, and that is not true at all,” said Ben Wolfe, a microbiologist at Tufts University in Boston. His lab studies fermentation, including the microbes you find in sourdough. So, case closed? Not quite. Scientists are still learning about the lactic acid bacteria (like L. sanfranciscensis) that give sourdough its distinctive sour flavor.

158

“This is one of the big questions we’re trying to answer in our story of American sourdough: Where are the lactic acid bacteria coming from?” said Wolfe. One explanation is that the bacteria could be in the flour to begin with. Or they might be on your skin, or floating around your kitchen. But Wolfe said those bacteria are less likely to become the dominant kind in your starter. Wolfe’s lab has partnered with the Rob Dunn Lab at North Carolina State University on the Global Sourdough Project, the first comprehensive effort to test the DNA of sourdough starters— and understand the evolutionary biology that underlies the differences among them. Scientists analyze samples to answer the baseline questions: How variable are the microbes from region to region? And how much variability can be attributed to the grain of the bread versus the air, the water, or the humans involved? “It could be the time that people ferment their breads. It could be the temperature. It could be a special set of recipes used in San Francisco than in other places,” said Wolfe. While science may yet discover something special lurking in our sourdough, Wolfe isn’t holding his breath. Not even the bakers at Semifreddi’s, a company in a position to benefit from the reputation of local sourdough, embrace the cachet. “If we take our local starter and bake with it in Los Angeles, I think it will taste very similar to what we’re making here,” said Mike Rose. Blasphemy! But possibly . . . true. Even if our air doesn’t hold any magic ingredient to making sourdough, you’ll be hard-pressed to find people more devout about eating it. Venture into any sandwich shop or bakery in the area, and you’re sure to find it on the menu. A little wild and difficult to replicate, just the way we like it. Julia Scott

159

BRINGING BACK OLYS: The Story of the Bay Area’s Native Oyster Oysters are a controversial food. Some people slurp them down by the dozen, while others would rather go hungry for days than be forced to eat a single slimy specimen. For those in the first camp, it’s natural to wonder if you might sample an oyster from Bay Area waters. After all, just like wine tasting, much of the appeal of eating oysters comes in comparing how different environments impact flavor.

Introducing the Bay’s Native Oyster

There’s one type of oyster that’s long been found in the San Francisco Bay, and that’s the Olympia oyster (Ostrea lurida). It’s named after Olympia, Washington, though these small, tangy oysters can be found up and down the west coast from Alaska all the way to central Mexico. Olympias—or Olys for short—can still be found in the San Francisco Bay today, though scientists say pollution from agricultural runoff is too high for us to eat them. Olys sold in local restaurants and markets around here likely come from farther away places like Washington State. For thousands of years, Olys grew in the San Francisco Bay in vast numbers. The shellmounds that can still be found in the East Bay are a testament to the importance of oysters and other shellfish in the diets of local indigenous tribes. “They would be eaten raw. They would also be cooked in earth ovens underneath the ground and eaten with sea lettuces and different types of seaweed, and acorn soup,” said East Bay Ohlone chef and food activist Vincent Medina. “Three generations back our family were gathering oysters from the bay shore.”

160

Oyster-Guzzling Settlers

The settlers who came to the Bay Area hungry for gold in the 1800s were also hungry for oysters. They foraged aggressively for whatever the bay had to offer—oysters, crabs, and clams. There are differing opinions on just how plentiful the San Francisco Bay oyster population was when the gold rush began. Environmental historian Matthew Booker, who has written a book all about the bay’s oyster-full past, takes the more conservative view. He argues that by the 1840s, the Oly population had likely dwindled, owing to thousands of years of slow sea level rise and melting Sierra glaciers that muddied the bay and destroyed the Olys’s native habitat. “We know that native oysters existed in San Francisco Bay in the 1840s and they still exist today,” Booker said. “But I have not found evidence that they existed in large enough numbers to support any fishery at all.” Booker said it didn’t take long for local native oyster supplies to run out. So the oyster-hungry gold miners were forced to look farther afield. “All the estuaries of the West Coast are essentially mined for their oysters to satisfy this endless demand from San Francisco,” said Booker. “The most famous is Willapa Bay (in Washington State), which shipped huge numbers of oysters to San Francisco Bay before collapsing from overharvesting in the late nineteenth century.”

Importing East Coast Oysters

Matthew Booker said the trade was unsustainable and essentially mined the wild native population until it disappeared. So entrepreneurs took to importing non-native varieties from the East Coast. “You could capture baby oysters, barrel them up, put them on schooners, and later on unrefrigerated train cars, and ship them across the entire United States,” Booker said. “And then they would be placed into San Francisco Bay on privately owned tidelands and harvested as a crop.”

161

Demand for oysters at this point was so high, pirates frequently raided the oyster beds. Bay Area author and erstwhile oyster pirate Jack London glamorized the experience of stealing oysters from the San Francisco Bay by night and selling them in the Oakland markets the next morning in several of his literary works, including his autobiographical novel John Barleycorn. But even the imported oysters didn’t survive in San Francisco Bay for long. Hydraulic mining in the Sierra Nevada during the gold rush years churned up mud and sand that swept downriver to San Francisco Bay. Booker said growers moved their Atlantic oysters to the South Bay where mud was less of a problem. But the pollution in the bay from industry and human sewage worsened as the population grew and established itself. A rash of deaths connected to eating contaminated oysters put an end to the San Francisco Bay oyster industry. “By the early twentieth century, there are plenty of oysters in the bay,” Booker said. “But the people eating them are no longer so sure if this is the right food.” In the 1930s oyster farming resumed in the cleaner waters of Drakes Bay and Tomales Bay north of San Francisco. But the focus, especially after World War II, was on Pacific oyster varieties from Japan—like the Miyagis and Kumamotos that are still popular here to this day. Interest in cultivating the native Olympia oyster as a food source dwindled. It still hasn’t really come back.

Bringing Olys Back

It’s hard to find Olympia oysters in restaurants and seafood markets in the Bay Area. The Hog Island Oyster Company at the San Francisco Ferry Building is one of few Bay Area retailers that sells them to the public. Hog Island started cultivating small amounts of the native Olys at the company’s facility in Tomales Bay. But the process is far from easy. “Olympias are very slow growing,” said Hog Island Oyster Company founder and CEO John Finger. “They only seem to have a really good

162

bigger spawn every three to four years. That’s problematic, because if you have a bad year and you’re not going to have another spawn for three or four years, it really makes it hard to get the population to some sort of critical mass.” On top of this, Finger said the Olys’ small size means they’re difficult to shuck. And their intense, coppery flavor makes them a bit of an acquired taste. “But certain people know them and appreciate them,” he said. In other words, Olys are definitely not a big seller. But reviving these oysters isn’t so much about growing food, said Finger. He’s among a growing number of Bay Area producers, scientists, and community activists interested in bringing them back to the bay in large numbers for an entirely different reason— environmental conservation. “Can we improve the overall habitat quality for all creatures in San Francisco Bay?” Finger wondered. One local nonprofit community group working toward this goal is the Wild Oyster Project. “Oysters have superpowers!” said Linda Hunter, the group’s founder and director. “They have so many wonderful benefits.” Oysters help maintain the balance of a marine ecosystem by reducing excess algae and sediment that can contribute to low oxygen levels, causing other marine life to die. “One grown oyster can filter 50 gallons of water a day,” Hunter said. Oysters cluster on discarded shells, rocks, piers, and other hard, submerged surfaces. They fuse together as they grow, forming rock-like reefs that make ideal homes for other marine animals and plants. “Oysters provide habitat for other critters,” Hunter said. Oyster reefs also protect coastal lands by reducing the impact of storm waves. “It’s been proven that oyster reefs attenuate the effects of rising tides caused by climate change,” Hunter said.

Building Oyster Reefs

Bay Natives is one of several local businesses the Wild Oyster Project partners with around the Bay Area. The nonprofit collects discarded oyster shells from local restaurants and piles them up at partner sites to dry out over several years.

163

Linda Hunter said eventually the shells will be built into oyster reefs and placed in the bay. The idea is for these reefs to attract native oysters and, as a result, other wildlife—like eelgrass, salmon, crabs, and egrets. Hunter said her group has installed—or is working on installing— reefs at several locations including Alameda and Point Pinole in Richmond. She said even skeptics are starting to see the benefits of restoring oyster populations. “The first oyster reef we built at Point Pinole, I got a phone call from a fisherman who was complaining that his fishing line had been snagged on one of our reef balls,” said Hunter. “And I said, ‘Hmm, have you noticed more fish?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I have! Thank you very much.’” Even though scientific research teams, oyster farms, and community groups are working hard to reinvigorate the bay, it’s an uphill struggle. “We’re so far below where we were historically,” said Ted Grosholz, an ecologist at UC Davis who studies marine biodiversity. “As long as we sort of just increase the populations, we’re moving in the right direction.” The issue is climate change. Grosholz said rising air temperatures, especially in the warmer months, can be fatal to oysters exposed on reefs for hours at a time. He’s also worried about the heavy rainfalls we’ve been getting on and off in recent years. Rain increases the runoff from rivers into the bay and lowers the salinity to levels that kill oysters. But Grosholz said it’s important to continue the work of restoring oyster populations, even if it’s slow going. “Just remember that this oyster restoration is part of a living shoreline,” he said. “It’s not just restoring one species. It’s restoring all the species that oysters support.” It could be several decades before the natural filtering system that comes with a healthy bay ecosystem has sufficiently cleaned out lingering pollutants. He estimates it will be at least fifty years before people can safely eat oysters out of the San Francisco Bay again. Chloe Veltman

164

MAKING THE MAI TAI: Yes, Your Favorite Tropical Drink Was Invented Here in Oakland You’re sitting on the beach, sand between your toes, sunglasses on. What else could make this picture complete? How about a mai tai? The rum cocktail probably makes you think Hawai‘i, though a lot of people and places have claimed the drink as their own, including a spot right here in the Bay Area.

What Makes a Mai Tai?

One such place that bills itself as the “Home of the Original Mai Tai” is Trader Vic’s in Emeryville. The chain’s flagship restaurant sits tucked away on the shores of the San Francisco Bay, nestled between a marina and the Bay Bridge. According to Daniel Veliz, Trader Vic’s corporate beverage director, they serve about forty thousand mai tais a year at this location alone. As he began mixing one, he said their mai tai has just five ingredients: “Fresh lime, orgeat [almond] syrup, a touch of rock candy syrup, orange curaçoa, and 2 ounces [60 ml] of amber rum.” He gave it all a shake and poured it into a glass, then added a spent lime wedge and a touch of mint for garnish. Unlike some other mai tais you might have seen, there was no rum float, no pineapple, and no orange juice. And it wasn’t red. Veliz presented a drink that was a lovely golden brown. And wow, was it delicious.

165

The Man behind the Drink

Tiki bar historian and author Jeff “Beachbum” Berry said the story of the mai tai starts at 65th Street and San Pablo Avenue in Oakland. That’s where the Vic behind Trader Vic’s, Victor Bergeron, opened a successful little saloon in 1934 called Hinky Dinks. Vic’s bartending interests soon grew beyond the standard fare, as he took notice of the tropical-themed drinks he was seeing at a few bars in his hometown, San Francisco. He set off to learn from the masters, stopping in New Orleans and the Caribbean. In 1938 he spent a week at the legendary Havana bar El Floridita, trying to learn all he could from the man known as the “Cocktail King,” Constantino Ribalaigua Vert. “One of Constantino’s famous drinks was called the Golden Gloves and it calls for gold Jamaican rum, orange juice, orange curaçoa, lime juice, and sugar,” explained Berry. “Now if you add orgeat syrup to that, you have a mai tai, more or less. And that could have been Vic’s inspiration.” When Bergeron returned to Oakland, he added the drinks he learned to make during his travels to the Hinky Dinks’ menu. “We went to work and made up a lot of new ones, ones that would sell in America,” he wrote in his 1973 autobiography, Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story. His granddaughter, Eve Bergeron, said he created the mai tai in 1944 and asked some visiting friends from Tahiti to try it. After one of them tasted it, she exclaimed, “Mai tai roa ae!” which means “awesome” in Tahiti. And thus the drink was named.

Inspiration Closer to Home

Bergeron may also have found inspiration at a Los Angeles bar called Don the Beachcomber, said Martin Cate, owner of San Francisco’s Smuggler’s Cove and a former Trader Vic’s bartender. “[It was] absolutely all the rage from almost day one

166

when it opened in Hollywood,” said Cate. “[Vic] traveled down and he not only fell in love with the place, he would try to grill bartenders all day long about what was there.” Don the Beachcomber opened in 1933 and was essentially the first tiki bar, according to cocktail historians. It served a couple of drinks that may have been of interest to Bergeron, including the Q. B. Cooler, which Jeff Berry said tasted like a mai tai. There was even a drink called the mai tai swizzle in the early ’30s, but it was off the menu by the time Bergeron visited. The bar’s owner, Donn Beach, was notoriously protective and had his bartenders mix drinks from bottles labeled with numbers. Even though Bergeron didn’t walk away with any of Beach’s secret recipes, he bought some decor from him, according to Cate. The visit would be a catalyst to transforming Hinky Dinks. “When I got back to Oakland and told my wife what I had seen, we agreed to change the name of our restaurant and change the decor,” Bergeron wrote in his autobiography. “We decided Hinky Dinks was a junky name and that the place should be named after someone we could tell a story about. My wife suggested ‘Trader Vic’s’ because I was always making a trade with someone. Fine. I became Trader Vic.” After Hinky Dinks became Trader Vic’s, business boomed. Bergeron’s pal, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, helped drive its popularity, exclaiming, “the best restaurant in San Francisco is in Oakland.” But the mai tai itself wasn’t the only draw—it was just one of many drinks on Vic’s expansive menu.

The Mai Tai Crosses the Pacific

Martin Cate said that it wasn’t until 1953, nearly ten years after the mai tai was first introduced, that the cocktail took a cruise to Hawai‘i and really gained popularity.

167

“He sent the recipe on board the Matson steamship lines, which were sailing out of San Francisco to Hawai‘i starting in the early 1950s,” Cate said. “The mai tai was on the menu because they asked Vic to not only do the menu for the ships, but also for their hotel, the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki. And when the mai tai got to Hawai‘i, it mutated basically into something Hawaiian . . . meaning, namely, pineapple juice.” Jeff Berry said travel writers picked up on it and the mai tai soon became a smash hit. Because the recipe wouldn’t be published until two decades later, restaurants and bars put their own spin on the drink—thus the multitude of recipes. “A mai tai became sort of like the symbol of your Hawaiian vacation,” said Berry. “It was like paradise in a glass. I think that name more than anything else is the reason why that happened.” So who’s the true originator of the mai tai? Was it Constantino Ribalaigua Vert in Cuba? Donn Beach in LA? Or Victor Bergeron in Oakland? Well, for most cocktail historians, including Martin Cate and Jeff Berry, the original mai tai has just five ingredients and was created in Oakland by Victor Bergeron. As for Vic? As he wrote in his autobiography, “Anybody who says I didn’t create this drink is a dirty stinker.” Suzie Racho

168

Cocktails of the Bay Area Getting to the true origins of a cocktail can be a murky business. Bars aren’t exactly known for keeping meticulous records. But legend has it, these drinks have local ties.

Martini

It’s hard to find a more classic cocktail than the martini, which has two competing origin stories. One theory goes that the drink was invented in the East Bay city of Martinez, when in 1874 a bartender named Julio Richelieu served up the first martini to a miner who came into his saloon with a fistful of nuggets and asked for something special. Another theory has a similar chain of events—a miner, a bartender, a “special” drink—taking place at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco. 2 oz [60 ml] dry gin 1 oz [30 ml] dry vermouth Dash of orange bitters

Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass. Fill with ice. Stir well and strain into a martini glass.

Pisco Punch

In the late 1800s, pisco punch wasn’t just a drink. Ordering a glass was a status symbol. These elaborate concoctions would cost about twenty-five dollars each in today’s dollars. It all started at a fancy bar called the Bank Exchange, where celebrity bartender Duncan Nichol served the drink to San Francisco’s well-to-do. It used luxury ingredients like pisco and pineapple. But one key ingredient remains a mystery that Nichol never divulged. Theories abound, but one cocktail historian thinks it may have been a fortified wine from Bordeaux. The principal ingredient in that, until it got banned, was coca leaves from Peru. In essence: cocaine.

Not the recipe, but a recipe: 2 oz [60 ml] pisco

¾ oz [45 ml] pineapple juice ½ oz [15 ml] simple syrup ½ oz [15 ml] fresh lemon juice Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass. Fill with ice. Shake and strain into an old-fashioned glass.

Irish Coffee

Though its origins are in Ireland (of course!), San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe is credited with popularizing the drink in the United States. The tale goes that San Francisco Chronicle travel writer Stanton Delaplane tried the cocktail at the Foynes Airport while traveling in Ireland. He came home raving about the drink and wrote about it in his newspaper column. One night, Delaplane worked with Buena Vista Cafe bartender Jack Koeppler to recreate the drink. They got close, but not quite there. Ultimately Koeppler flew to Ireland himself to perfect the recipe. Visitors still flock to the Buena Vista to drink one! 2 sugar cubes 4 to 6 oz [120 to 180 ml] brewed coffee 11/3 oz [40 ml] Irish whiskey (Buena Vista uses Tullamore D.E.W.) Heavy cream, lightly whipped

Fill a glass with hot water to heat it up, then dump out the water. Drop in two cocktail sugar cubes. Pour hot coffee over the sugar cubes, to fill about three-fourths of the glass. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add Irish whiskey, leaving a bit of room in the glass. Spoon heavy, cold cream on top.

THE FILLMORE APPLES: How Bill Graham’s Nazi Escape May Have Inspired an Enduring Symbol of Rock and Roll in San Francisco San Francisco was home to some of the best music in the country during the 1960s, and the Fillmore Auditorium was the place to go if you wanted to be tapped into the rock and roll renaissance. The man behind it all was legendary music promoter Bill Graham, known for booking unusual shows with unexpected opening acts. But the oddest aspect of Graham’s Fillmore shows may have had nothing to do with the performances at all. At every show, concertgoers were greeted at the front entrance by a barrel of Red Delicious apples, free for the taking. Free fruit seems a strange choice, but it’s a tradition that continues to this day.

The Fillmore Auditorium

The Majestic Hall and Majestic Academy of Dancing opened in 1912 on the corner of Fillmore and Geary in San Francisco’s Western Addition neighborhood. The popular dance hall became a roller rink in 1939, but by 1954 local Black entrepreneur Charles Sullivan had taken over and started booking some of the country’s top Black performers: James Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner. Sullivan renamed the dance hall the Fillmore Auditorium, and on December 10, 1965, he allowed Bill Graham to stage a benefit concert there. It was such a hit that Sullivan let

171

Graham keep booking acts when Sullivan didn’t already have someone scheduled. Over the next two and a half years, Graham filled the Fillmore with the musicians who would provide the soundtrack to the counterculture revolution, bringing in the likes of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, and more. But even while showcasing some of the most popular musicians in the country, Graham always made his concerts unique. “He used to book very unusual opening acts,” said Bonnie Simmons, executive director of the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation. “You might be coming to see Jefferson Airplane, but the opening act would be Andrei Voznesensky, the Russian poet.” Graham left the Fillmore in 1968, and the location went through a series of owners in the following decades. But when the venue reopened after a major renovation in 1994, a touch of Bill Graham’s magic was still there: the apples.

Why the Apples?

Just like in the 1960s, the first thing visitors see as they walk up the stairs at today’s Fillmore is a brass barrel overflowing with apples. A sign hanging nearby reads, “Have one or two.” Some say Graham started putting out the apples because he wanted to give the broke hippies who came to his shows something nutritious to eat. Many believe that it was an extension of his famous hospitality, which he learned working as a waiter in the Catskills. “To my mind the barrel of apples was Bill’s attempt to welcome people to his house,” said Bob Greenfield, who cowrote Graham’s autobiography. Graham, who was killed in a helicopter crash in 1991, never explained his reasoning behind the apples, leaving others to guess at his motivation. But one intriguing explanation dates back to Graham’s experience fleeing Nazi Germany as a child.

172

Fleeing the Holocaust

Graham was born Wolfgang Grajonca, to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1931. After the Nazis’ brutal attacks on Jewish synagogues, homes, and businesses during Kristallnacht in 1938, Graham’s single mother sent him to an orphanage to try to keep him safe. But nowhere in Germany was safe for a young Jewish boy. “I left Germany in 1939 as an exchange with a children’s orphanage right outside of Paris,” Graham said in a 1974 interview with New York Public Media. What followed was an arduous journey that took him through Europe and Africa, before ultimately landing in the United States. Also on that journey was a boy named Ralph Moratz, who became friends with Graham when they met at the German orphanage. “We became best friends sharing, for the next few years, the hardships imposed by the German invasion of its surrounding countries,” Moratz wrote in his chronicles of their friendship and journey. One of the kids’ early stops was a château in Quincy-sousSénart in northern France. The neighborhood was filled with German soldiers, and the kids were stuck inside with little to eat. “For breakfast we got a cup of watery porridge and a thin stale slice of bread. No lunch. Dinner consisted of half a cup of rice from the one bag still stored in the cellar,” Moratz wrote. “We spent most of our time trying to sleep. Only with sleep could we get some relief from the constant hunger pangs.” According to Moratz, a few of the older boys decided to organize the kids into groups to sneak out and forage for apples from the many orchards in town. Groups of four boys would be lowered out a window in the château, six feet down to the ground. They carried empty rice bags, which could fit fifteen to twenty apples. Younger boys, like Moratz and Graham, were sent out most often, under the assumption that they would attract less attention from German patrols. The older boys liked to vary who went out to try to avoid detection, but Moratz said Graham found a way

173

to be a part of the raiding party more often than not. “Would it surprise you to find out that Wolfgang [Graham] volunteered to go out and forage every day?” Moratz wrote. Graham never spoke publicly about this experience, and he rarely talked about his time during the Holocaust at all, telling people that he remembered very little of his life before making it to the United States. But that hasn’t stopped Moratz’s memory from catching people’s attention. “Many of us now believe [giving away apples] was some kind of hidden impulse to share the life-preserving fruit, which saved us from certain starvation, with the public as a form of thanksgiving,” Moratz wrote. Bob Greenfield is not convinced. “He’s making a link that I don’t think Bill ever made even unconsciously,” Greenfield said of Moratz, who died in 2016. “Bill always lived in the moment. He wasn’t someone who was possessed by or living in the past.” With Graham gone, we will never know for sure why the apples became a Fillmore staple. But for some, Moratz’s story allows them to imagine that across time, tragedy, and triumph, Graham always recognized the simple power an apple could have. Ryan Levi

174

TEA GARDEN FORTUNES: Unwrapping the Bay Area Origins of the Fortune Cookie What comes with the check at almost every Chinese restaurant? Fortune cookies. Like orange slices after a blood draw, or apples at San Francisco’s Fillmore, they’re a given. What you might not expect is that the history of this cookie runs right through San Francisco. To understand the origins of the fortune cookie we know in the United States today, you need travel no farther than the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Fortune Cookies at the Japanese Tea Garden

“I think a lot of people put the Japanese Tea Garden in the same box as Alcatraz or Fisherman’s Wharf,” said Steven Pitsenbarger, a longtime gardener at the site. “But we are really a gem that’s for San Francisco just as much as it’s for the tourists.” The garden was originally an exhibit in the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894, a grand fair that took place in Golden Gate Park and drew more than 2.5 million visitors. A landscape architect named Makoto Hagiwara, who had emigrated from Japan in 1878, tended the grounds. When the exposition closed, park officials allowed Hagiwara to continue to operate the Japanese-style garden as a permanent part of the park. Hagiwara started serving visitors a small treat along with green tea in the garden’s tea house. “He took a Japanese [cracker], senbei, and he got the idea to put a little note in it. He originally started making them by hand here with just a little flat press,” said Pitsenbarger.

175

Inside the tea garden’s gift shop, you’ll find the original flat presses on display, known in Japan as kata. They’re made of iron and have long, thin handles. Inside they’re engraved with an H and an M—inverted, they would appear on the treats as MH for Makoto Hagiwara. “If you came to the garden while he was managing it, everything had his name on it. Napkins would say M. Hagiwara. There would be pots in the garden with M. Hagiwara . . . teapots, teacups. His name was everywhere, and the fortune cookie is one of those things that helped spread his popularity,” Pitsenbarger said. Since each fortune cookie was made by hand, demand ultimately became too much for the Hagiwara family to manage. Hagiwara asked a local confectionary shop, Benkyodo, to take over making the cookies.

Large-Scale Production of Fortune Cookies Begins

Suyeichi Okamura opened the Benkyodo Company bakery in 1906. “My grandfather was a service person to Makoto Hagiwara,” said Gary T. Ono, the family’s historian who has written articles about their connection to the fortune cookie. Ono keeps several kata in his closet, wrapped carefully in newspaper and stored in a heavy suitcase. They sport the familiar initials: MH. He said Benkyodo helped develop a machine to mass-produce the cookies for the tea garden, sometime around 1911. “[Okamura] advised Hagiwara in converting the taste of the fortune cookie to something more palatable to American tastes,” said Ono. “So they came up with a vanilla extract flavor that we know today.” But Ono isn’t the only one to make family claims to the origins of the fortune cookie. A few Chinese companies have also claimed the invention, as well as a Japanese sweet maker in Los Angeles called Fugetsu-Do, which opened three years before Benkyodo. Ono said, no matter the truth, there’s goodwill among the businesses.

177

“We were never confrontational about it or argumentative. We didn’t know precisely that our grandparents did this or did that,” Ono said. “[Fugetsu-Do’s owner] even said, ‘Well, if it wasn’t my grandfather, I hope it’s your grandfather.’”

The Cookie’s Japanese Roots

While we can probably trace the history of fortune cookies in America back to San Francisco, the true origin of the cookies goes back to Japan, said Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. “In Japan they’re called tsujiura senbei or bell crackers,” Lee said. A woodblock print that dates back to 1878 depicts a Japanese man grilling fortune cookies. “Around the shrine in downtown Kyoto, there are actually a bunch of families that still make ‘fortune cookies’ in the Japanese tradition,” said Lee. “But they’re actually bigger and browner. They’re made with miso paste and sesame, so much nuttier than the American versions, which tend to be yellow and buttery, reflecting the American palate.” Those cookies also have paper fortunes, but they’re not baked inside. Instead, the fortune is found outside the cookie, tucked into its tight center fold. Otherwise, they look almost exactly the same.

Why So Common in Chinese Restaurants?

But how did this American adaptation of a Japanese cracker become so associated with Chinese restaurants? “When the Japanese first came to the United States, a lot of them actually ran Chinese restaurants, because back in the 1910s and 1920s Americans were not eating sushi,” said Jennifer 8. Lee. “You had Japanese opening Chinese restaurants because that was familiar, with chop suey and chow mein and egg fu yung.” In this mix of Japanese families opening Chinese restaurants, they began serving fortune cookies as a form of dessert. “Back then, they were not called fortune cookies; they were called fortune tea cakes, which is actually a better reflection of their name in Japanese,” said Lee.

178

Bakeries like Benkyodo and Fugetsu-Do manufactured fortune cookies for decades, until 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering people of Japanese descent into concentration camps. Japanese fortune cookie makers were among those sent to the camps. “You have these bakeries that were shut down at the same time you had a huge rise in popularity of Chinese restaurants during World War II,” said Lee. “The Chinese started serving fortune cookies and started manufacturing them en masse. I like to say that the Japanese invented them, the Chinese popularized them, but the Americans ultimately consume them.” After being released from the camps, Gary Ono’s family resumed their business in San Francisco and reclaimed their property. But many Japanese confectionaries stopped making the cookies after the war. Three of Benkyodo’s katas now reside at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, cementing Ono’s family connection to the fortune cookie. Suzie Racho

179

THE GOLDEN GATE HERD: What’s with the Bison in Golden Gate Park? San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is among the most beautiful and diverse urban parks in the world. There’s a pair of windmills that look like they were plucked right from the Dutch countryside. The Conservatory of Flowers brims with tropical plants. And through an elaborate gate you’ll find the oldest public Japanese tea garden in the United States. But perhaps the wildest treasure in the park is also one of its oldest attractions—the herd of American bison.

Bison History

In the 1500s an estimated sixty million bison roamed the North American West, from northern Mexico through Canada. They traveled in vast herds, constantly moving to find fresh grazing grounds. Times were good for the bison, until European Americans started arriving in the 1800s. Bison habitat was crisscrossed by railroads and turned into farms. Imported cattle brought new diseases to the herds. The biggest threat, however, came from being at the wrong end of a firearm. A male American bison tips the scale at 2,000 pounds, and females can weigh around 1,000 pounds—quite a hefty payoff for a hunter. Bison were killed for their meat. Their hides were turned into leather goods. Even their bones had value and were ground up to make things like fertilizer and bone china. Bison were also killed for sport. Competitions were held to see who could kill the most bison. Tourists on trains would shoot the animals from their seats, leaving the carcasses where they

182

fell. In 1873 a railway engineer in Santa Fe said it was possible to walk 100 miles along the railroad by stepping from one bison carcass to another. As the US government clashed with Native Americans over land, the army encouraged the rampant slaughter of bison, which were an important native resource. By 1889 bison numbers had dwindled to about one thousand, and the species was on the brink of extinction. It was around this time that work began on Golden Gate Park.

The Bison Come to Golden Gate Park

“When Golden Gate Park was created, the idea was to honor the Wild West,” said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of San Francisco Recreation and Parks. To recreate the Wild West, the park planners needed bison. The first one was brought to the park on February 1, 1891. It joined an assortment of animals that roamed in open pens, including bears, goats, and elk. “Bison and several other animals were actually first put in a paddock, which is very close to where Kezar Stadium is today,” Ginsburg said, referring to the eastern edge of the park, right next to Haight-Ashbury. Soon, more bison were brought in from private and public herds, including three from Yellowstone National Park. By 1918 the herd had grown to thirty bison. For a time, the park had a captive breeding program that produced more than one hundred bison calves over the years, though that program has since ended. It’s one of the many conservation efforts that have brought the North American bison population back to the hundreds of thousands.

Today’s Herd

The bison currently living in the paddock, which is now on the west side of the park near the polo field, are not descended from the original animals brought to the park. New bison have been added over the decades—most recently in 2020, when five new females were brought in. These days all the bison are female. “Having all females just keeps everything a little bit more calm,” said Ginsburg. When there were bulls, the bison could get aggressive. One tried to maul a policeman on horseback, and another tried to escape by running into the Sunset District. “Males become very aggressive around August because they’re fighting for dominance in order to breed with the

184

females,” said Sarah King, assistant curator at the San Francisco Zoo. The zoo staff takes daily care of the herd, including feeding and veterinary services. “Then calves are generally born in the spring, nine months later, and that’s when the females get aggressive because they’re very protective of their offspring.” Though they may appear to be slow, bison are quick, powerful creatures. They can run more than 30 miles per hour, jump up to 6 feet in the air, and swim over half a mile, said King. But don’t expect to see such athletic feats if you visit the paddock yourself. Most often the bison can be found resting or slowly making their way around their pen, munching on the grass. For an animal that once faced extinction, the life of San Francisco’s bison seems pretty good. Jessica Placzek

185

WILD TURKEYS: Why Are They Strutting around the Suburbs? The Morcom Rose Garden in Oakland is a beloved public space, featuring walking paths lined with roses of all colors and serene ponds that cascade one into the next down a hillside. For Oaklanders, it’s typically a great spot for a tranquil walk, but for a period of time in 2020 hundreds of visitors were terrorized by an unexpected menace in this bucolic urban space. The perpetrator? A 25-pound turkey named Gerald.

Turkeys in California

Technically, turkeys have a long history in California. Thousands of years ago a native species called Meleagris californica thrived in the southern part of the state. The animals looked a lot like the turkeys you’d imagine today, but were stockier and had shorter, wider beaks. These Californian turkeys are some of the most common fossils found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. But that species went extinct about ten thousand years ago. The turkeys you’ll find around today—the Geralds of the Bay Area—are not native. They were introduced by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife between 1959 and 1999 to encourage recreational hunting. “There were attempts in the late ’30s and ’40s to raise turkeys on game farms. They would then be released throughout the state,” said Scott Gardner, supervisor for upland game at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “But the problem with game farm birds is they don’t know how to survive in the wild.” Instead, the state began livetrapping wild turkeys in places like Texas and Nevada, then releasing them in the California wilderness.

186

These live-trapped turkeys thrived, successfully reproducing and growing their population in the state into the hundreds of thousands today. These days—if you’re looking for dinner and have met the legal requirements—you can hunt wild turkeys twice a year. “It wasn’t controversial until they started popping up in backyards and vineyards,” said Gardner.

Turkeys in Neighborhoods

Turkeys like low- to mid-elevation forested-type habitats, like you’d find in California’s coastal foothills. Suburban neighborhoods make for some pretty sweet turkey habitat, too, especially those around Sacramento and in the East Bay. “Turkeys are largely grounddwelling birds and like open areas and grasslands, like lawns,” said Gardner. “They also need trees, and most of our residential areas have trees.” For the most part, suburban turkey flocks seem unfazed when humans are nearby. It’s not unusual to pull into a gas station and find a gang of them loitering around the pumps. They might offer a stern look, but they’re rarely scrambling to get away. Despite it being illegal in California, some people feed the turkeys, which can quickly turn a few stray birds into a large flock of regulars with no fear of humans. But don’t let their nonchalant behavior fool you. Turkeys know how to defend themselves and will become more aggressive in the spring during breeding season. Still, they’re more likely to be a pest than a danger, said Gardner. “They’ll poop on your roof and your sidewalk. They’ll scrape up your lawn. They’ll get in the middle of the street and cause traffic jams, or they’ll scratch your car up. That’s the kind of nuisance you can expect,” he said.

The Saga of Gerald

Well, for the most part anyway. Every now and then a bird like Gerald comes along and defies typical bird behavior. Initially, when he started showing up in Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden, Gerald

187

was just another suburban turkey. He’d sometimes find his way to a bus stop and hang out among commuters. Visitors to the park would see him strolling idly around the fountains. But around late 2019, Gerald changed. “I swear I was getting flashbacks to the velociraptor scenes in Jurassic Park as he was ‘cooing’ at me, sizing me up,” one resident wrote in a complaint sent to Oakland Animal Services. “And before you laugh at all this, I’m telling you he was relentless!” The bird started harassing people. He would spot a potential victim, often older women or young children, and make a beeline across the garden, running at them full speed. If they couldn’t escape, Gerald would peck, mount, or scratch his victims until they fled. Nearby residents took to Nextdoor and Facebook to complain about Gerald’s hostile behavior. Over the coming months what to do about the bird turned into a hot button issue. Online arguments would garner hundreds of comments, with community members breaking down into pro-Gerald and anti-Gerald camps. Some wanted to see him euthanized. Others were ready to give the park over to the bird. In May 2020 the park was briefly closed, in hopes that a little time away from humans might calm Gerald down. No luck. In June the city of Oakland got a permit to euthanize Gerald, but pushback from animal lovers was swift. An online petition called “Protect Gerald the Rose Garden Turkey” quickly got more than thirteen thousand signatures. Finally, officials settled on a rarely chosen path in situations like this. Gerald would be relocated. In October, more than six months after his reign of terror began, the Department of Fish and Wildlife captured Gerald and moved him to some nearby wild lands. An urban turkey no more, Gerald lived out his days just like the native turkeys that came long before him might have. Jessica Placzek and Olivia Allen-Price

188

A PROLIFERATION OF PALMS: Why Are There So Many Palm Trees in the Bay Area? The Bay Area isn’t an obvious home for palm trees. The narrow stalk and long fronds are usually associated with desert climate, or at the very least more sun and heat than the famously foggy San Francisco summers provide. So where did all the palm trees come from?

How Did They Get Here?

Foreign palms were originally brought to California with the Spanish missions in the 1700s for use in religious services the Sunday before Easter, said Joe McBride, a professor emeritus of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley. “They used the palm fronds for processionals on Palm Sunday once a year at their churches,” he said. “There was nothing like this growing in the vicinity of the missions.” As more European settlements were built over the following decades, more palm trees were planted. And palms gained more ground in the nineteenth century when they became trendy in Europe, as a symbol of the tropical world. The well-to-do began keeping palms in rooms or greenhouses as status markers, McBride said. “It was a fashionable thing for the rich and famous to have . . . and that idea sort of spread to hotels, where they had these indoor palm gardens that were basically lavishly furnished dining rooms with potted palm trees.” By the late 1800s, that same fascination had taken hold in Los Angeles. It became part of Southern California’s style—its image and its sales pitch. Growing palms for dates eventually factored in, as noted in a 1950s Palm Springs tourism film. Some 4,000 acres

189

near Palm Springs were growing dates at the time, the film noted. These days, rows of palm trees are almost synonymous with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood.

Common Bay Area Palms

You can spot dozens of species of palms in the Bay Area, but only one in the state is native. Washingtonia filifera, the California palm or desert fan palm, prefers the arid region hundreds of miles farther south over the mist of the Bay Area. Many of the other species you see in Northern California have names hinting at distant origins, like the Chinese windmill palm, the Canary Island date palm, or the Mexican fan palm. Mexican fan palms particularly tend to stand out in neighborhoods because they may be twice as tall as the surrounding houses. The leaves are like the fingers of your hand and can be more than 4 feet long. In the Bay Area, they make a great location for local bird and squirrel nests, high above the power lines. Canary Island date palms are recognizable for their thick trunks and long 7- or 8-foot leaves that resemble feathers more than fingers. They’ve been widely distributed around the world as a landscape tree. You might notice this species along the Embarcadero in San Francisco or passing through the Bay Bridge Toll Plaza. Despite their name, they weren’t planted for their fruit. To get tasty dates, like the ones grown in Palm Springs, you’d want a different species: Phoenix dactylifera.

Palms Proliferate

Over the last century, palms have turned out to be highly practical street trees in both Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Martha Ketterer, a San Francisco landscape architect, has presided over the planting of hundreds of palms—and not just because she’s fond of them. “Palm trees are very sexy-looking creatures,” Ketterer said, but also, when it comes to streetscaping, they solve a lot of logistical

190

challenges compared to woody trees. For example, urban survivability: Palms can often cope in salty places, like right next to the bay, or amid gusty wind, like the kind that “whips down Market Street,” she said. Palms also have small roots that make them less likely to lift up nearby sidewalks and much easier to transplant successfully. Ketterer said installing a nice oak tree might cost taxpayers around fifty thousand dollars, so public officials may be reluctant to gamble on the oak’s survival when palms are a safer, more affordable bet. You can also plant a palm right between a brick building and a power line and know that it will grow pretty much straight up, with no growing branches to snag on masonry or Muni wires. Granted, palms have their detractors. In the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, some decried the planting of more palms in the city as a tacky wannabe-SoCal look. “It was going to be ‘the Los Angeles–ation of San Francisco,’” Ketterer said. And in some wet habitats, both Mexican fan palms and Canary Island date palms are considered invasive, crowding out native plants. But palm trees also enjoy a certain cachet, reminding people of slivers of paradise. Jason Dewees, a San Francisco horticulturist who wrote the book Designing with Palms, said part of the reason many people feel that way involves a history with palm trees dating back to the dawn of agriculture. “Some of the earliest representations of plants by the human hand are representations of palms in the deserts of North Africa,” Dewees said. From petroglyphs to ancient coins, palms are a potent symbol, connoting hospitable oases. “They show you that you’re in a place where you can grow food and where there’s water, and where the palm tree itself is going to provide dates,” Dewees said. Palms have also long been planted simply for beauty and pleasure. They show that the land is taken care of—that you’re somewhere nice. Daniel Potter

191

Name That Team

The Bay Area is home to lots of sports teams, and a few have unusual origin stories for how they came up with their nature-inspired name or mascot. San Jose Sharks: When the the Stanford Cardinal, as in the hockey franchise was getting vivid red hue, not the songestablished in 1990, they bird. But if you attend a major held a contest to name the sporting event at the school, team. More than six thousand you might see the school’s suggestions poured in from unofficial mascot dancing all over the world. There were around—the Tree. Technically some unusual submissions, a member of the Stanford like the Integrated Circuits Band, the Tree was meant to be or the Rubber Puckies, but a one-off addition to the band’s most ideas were much more lineup in 1975. But fans loved traditional. A few of the most the Tree, and the band made the commonly suggested names mascot a permanent fixture. were Blades, Breakers, Condors, The costume is based loosely on Fog, Gold, Golden Skaters, El Palo Alto, a nearby tree that Grizzlies, Redwoods, Sharks, shows up in Stanford’s seal and and Waves. Blades was the most is the namesake for the city of frequently suggested name, but Palo Alto. it reminded some people of gangs. So in the end, the team UC Berkeley Golden Bears: went with the second-most Here’s something that might submitted name, the Sharks. blow your mind. Until 1941 UC Berkeley used live bears as their Stanford Cardinal mascot. A few bear cubs would (err . . . Tree): Officially, be on the sideline at every Stanford University doesn’t football game. Ultimately, that have a mascot. They are simply was deemed unsafe (they don’t

stay cubs forever!), and a new mascot was introduced: Oski the Bear. Named after the Oski Yell, a popular chant used by Berkeley sports fans, Oski is, thankfully, more likely to cuddle a fan than maul one. As for how the school became the Golden Bears in the first place? In 1895 the school’s track team had several successful showings at competitions on the East Coast. They carried banners with the state’s bear emblem emblazoned in gold and have been the Golden Bears ever since.

wanted a statelier mascot. He declared a new mascot: the Sea Lions. The decision didn’t go over well. Even after a sea lion was painted on the basketball court, students still cheered for the Banana Slugs. In 1986, after five years with two mascots, the students voted overwhelmingly to officially become the Banana Slugs.

Mills College Cyclones: This is an unusual choice of a mascot, considering cyclones are not a California weather pheUC Santa Cruz Banana nomenon. When the college’s Slugs: How does the lowly athletic department was estabbanana slug come to be a collished in the 1970s in the wake lege mascot? The vivid yellow, of Title IX, they held a contest slimy mollusk is a common to choose the mascot. Cyclones sight in the forests on campus. won. Exactly why is lost to hisFor decades the banana slug was tory, but one theory is the name the unofficial mascot for the was inspired by Cyrus Mills, school’s low-key athletic proone of the school’s founders. In grams. But in 1980, when they 1997 there was a second mascot joined NCAA’s Division III in contest, but it only cemented the five sports, the college president school as the Cyclones.

SUMMERTIME CHILL: Wind, Fog, and Microclimates . . . Understanding Bay Area Weather You can’t read a story about San Francisco’s summertime weather without stumbling across the quote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” commonly misattributed to writer and humorist Mark Twain. Though there is no evidence Twain ever wrote such a thing, the quote remains a Bay Area classic because it so perfectly captures our sometimes befuddling weather patterns. As visitors pull on their down jackets each summer, they wonder: What makes San Francisco’s weather so windy and foggy? And why does everyone keep talking about microclimates?

What’s the Deal with “Microclimates”?

Locals will attest: You can enjoy clear skies and mild temperatures the same day you experience whipping winds and clammy fog, often just a few short miles apart. Whether it’s said with pride or as a complaint, you can’t get away from Bay Area weather conversations about microclimates. First, let’s define the word microclimate. Casually, it refers to the phenomenon of sometimes vastly different weather in what feels like adjacent zip codes, like how it’s routinely foggy in San Francisco’s Richmond District, while a few miles away the Mission enjoys sunshine. But this usage of the term microclimate isn’t the most scientific, said Andrew Oliphant, who studies micrometeorology as a professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at San Francisco State University. “When we talk about micro­climates

194

of the Bay Area, we’re actually a little bit beyond the traditional scales of micro,” Oliphant said. A proper microclimate might range from less than a city block up to about half a mile. So when denizens of the Bay Area bemoan its microclimates, “we’re really talking more neighborhood-to-neighborhood scale.” These many variations don’t lend themselves to neat lines on a map. They’re more like fine gradations, making it tough for experts to pinpoint how many microclimates there are in the Bay Area, or even where exactly you might find them. There are a few reasons for our variable conditions, said Darrel Hess, instructor at City College of San Francisco. “One is our location next to the water,” Hess said. San Francisco, with water to its north, east, and west, rarely gets much hotter or cooler than the ocean. The farther inland you get, the less of that benefit you enjoy. “As you go over each ridge in the coast ranges, as you move away from the ocean, the weather and climate become increasingly continental—in other words, you have less ocean influence,” Hess said. That’s why a city like Livermore, some 20 miles east of the Bay, can get downright hot in summer and chilly in winter. Terrain is also a factor, especially for rain. When a winter storm makes its way east from the ocean, mountains in the storm’s path are sure to get drenched, while the sheltered places behind them . . . not so much. The windward side of the Santa Cruz Mountains might soak up several inches of rainfall while, farther east, San Jose gets just a fraction of that.

Windy Afternoons

Another fun feature of Bay Area summer weather is afternoon gusts off the Pacific Ocean. “Air always flows from high pressure to low pressure,” said Bay Area meteorologist Jan Null. “And high pressure is most often associated with cooler air, and low pressure with warmer air.”

195

During summer the sun heats up the interior of California through the course of the day, and the air pressure is low. But out over the Pacific Ocean, temperatures stay fairly cool, because the temperature of the water doesn’t change much. Air pressure there generally remains high. “So now you have high pressure over the ocean. You have low pressure over the Central Valley or the inland valleys,” Null said. By afternoon the pressure difference is big enough that ocean air starts rushing inland, resulting in wind. The winds take the path of least resistance, squeezing through sea level gaps in the coastal mountains and ridges—the biggest of which is at the Golden Gate. Bay Area winds are strongest on the days when it’s hottest inland and still cool on the coast. That’s when the temperature and pressure difference is the biggest.

Have You Met Our Fog?

The San Francisco fog is so well known, he even has his own name, Twitter account, and self-titled book, Karl the Fog. But why does the Bay Area get so foggy in the first place? Those same inland-coastal temperature differences also explain the summer fog. There is a system of high pressure over the Pacific Ocean called the North Pacific High. In the summer it gets stronger, creating big clockwise winds over the ocean. Those winds push the surface water of the ocean away from the California coastline. Very cold water from deep in the ocean rises to the surface in its place, in a process called upwelling. Something known as the California Current also brings cold water south from Alaska. When the sea breeze blows over this much colder water, condensation forms—creating fog. The fog comes inland for similar reasons as the wind: While it stays cool by the ocean, the high temperatures inland create lower pressure, and the fog is sucked in through gaps in the coastal range. That’s why we see picturesque summer

196

fog rolling in past the Golden Gate Bridge in the afternoon. “Nothing’s going to move [the fog] out until the sun comes up the next morning and evaporates it,” said Jan Null. But warming oceans and climate change could affect the complicated weather systems that create our unique Bay Area fog and wind. The amount of summer fog has decreased 33 percent over the last century, studies have found. Every year thousands of tourists arrive in San Francisco expecting the warm, sunny California on display in movies, only to be blasted by our fog, cool winds, and temperatures that hover just under “comfortable” if you don’t have a sweater. But for locals the cool summer weather can be a point of pride. It may seem like dealing with microclimates, afternoon winds, and dense fog makes living in the Bay Area hard to predict. But locals will tell you, “Never leave home without a light jacket,” and you should be just fine. Kelly O’Mara and Daniel Potter

197

THE VIEW FROM MOUNT DIABLO: The Biggest View in the World? Mount Diablo is one of the Bay Area’s grandest landmarks and often the first glimpse of the area you might see on your way into town. The mountain sits on the eastern edge of the Bay Area, in Contra Costa County, and its peak is visible from most spots around the Bay. At 3,849 feet, Mount Diablo stands apart from other mountains nearby, not just because of its prominence but also because of the legends that surround it. One oft-repeated legend goes something like this: From the summit of Mount Diablo you can see more land than from any other summit on Earth—except Mount Kilimanjaro. Quite the sweeping claim.

Taking in the View

“The view when you come up here is really amazing,” said Sharon Peterson, interpreter at Mount Diablo State Park. “How it compares to Kilimanjaro is up for debate, but I’m partial to the view from Mount Diablo, and I think most people are pretty amazed by it.” At the Mount Diablo Summit Museum and trailhead viewing deck, Peterson said that forty of California’s fifty-eight counties are visible on a clear day. As little as 1 percent of some counties can be seen, but still, it’s an impressive tally. To the west you can often see the Golden Gate Bridge with the naked eye, and to the north, the point where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers merge to form the California Delta. Turn south and you can see the sweeping view of the Diablo

198

Range, Livermore, and Pleasanton. Finally, the view to the east gives you a glimpse of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada over 100 miles away, rising above the Central Valley. On a super clear day, you can even see Yosemite.

Where Does the Kilimanjaro Claim Come From?

Visitors to the mountain have been awed by the stunning view for centuries. Botanist William Brewer, who visited the mountain in the 1860s, wrote, “The view was one never to be forgotten. . . . Few views in North America are more extensive— certainly nothing in Europe.” An article published in the Contra Costa Gazette on April 18, 1874, said that the view from the summit “[showed] more of the earth’s kingdom than is visible from any other known spot on the globe.” Despite the view’s magnificence, Seth Adams, land conservation director for Save Mount Diablo, is adamant that the Mount Kilimanjaro myth has no merit: “It’s absolutely not true that Mount Diablo has the largest view in the world except for Mount Kilimanjaro.” Adams has spent a lot of time myth busting the Kilimanjaro claim. “I never quite believed it,” he said. “It just didn’t have the ring of truth to me because it’s a small mountain. Common sense would tell you the taller the mountain, the bigger the view.” Considering the myth has been repeated countless times, Adams said it makes sense people would believe it. He traced the myth back to the 1850s and ’60s, when geologists like Josiah Whitney first surveyed the mountain. Whitney wrote, “It is believed that there are few, if any, points on the earth’s surface from which so extensive an area may be seen as from Mount Diablo. The whole area thus spread out, can hardly be less than 40,000 square miles.” The legend snowballed from there.

199

Myth and Marketing

As visitors flocked to Mount Diablo for the views, entrepreneurs saw a chance to make a buck. “More than half of Mount Diablo was locked up successively by two big real estate land speculators named Robert Noble Burgess and Walter P. Frick,” Seth Adams said. “Both of them printed brochures by the thousands that included the claim of Mount Diablo having the largest view in the world.” Boasting that claim was a smart business move for Burgess, who had bought a portion of the mountain in 1912 and subsequently built the Mount Diablo Scenic Boulevard taking visitors to the summit. In 1917 he had a dream of building thousands of homes on the mountain’s western flank, and those amazing views helped push his agenda forward. Burgess eventually went bankrupt and the deal flopped, but the brochures had done their work. “You can definitely credit the brochures for spreading the misinformation, but it’s just too good to claim the largest view in the world,” Adams explained. “And understand that California was a promoter’s dream.” Which brings us to another promoter, the Oakland entrepreneur Walter P. Frick. Initially, Frick, who had been Burgess’s business partner, hired a publicist to help him spread the rumor that Mount Diablo’s view was the greatest on Earth. The rumor came in handy as he built an 8-foot beacon tower known as the Eye of Diablo. However, the engineers Frick worked with at Standard Oil Company were skeptical of the claim’s validity. The 1928 Standard Oil Bulletin subsequently added a footnote to their brochure promoting the view as the world’s grandest: “Except for a point in Africa.” The reference to Mount Kilimanjaro was clear. From there, the legend shifted from Mount Diablo having the largest view in the world to the second largest. The claim about Mount Diablo’s view was repeated for decades, through the end of World War II, when recreation at parks and

200

mountains grew in popularity. Mount Diablo became a go-to tourist spot as the Kilimanjaro claim circulated in travel guides and hiking maps, by railroad companies and auto associations. Even the Contra Costa Development Association published materials in the 1940s describing the mountain as “the world’s greatest view! More territory visible than from any point in the world.”

The Mathematical Truth

That new myth persisted until 1994, when engineer and mountaineer Edward “7.389056099” Earl set out to mathematically debunk the theory. Earl used topographical atlases and aeronautical charts to determine the viewshed from the summit of Mount Diablo compared to others in North America. A viewshed is the area visible from a specific vantage point, including land and water. According to Earl’s calculations, Mount Diablo’s viewshed is between 13,000 and 21,000 square miles. That might sound like a lot, but Earl concluded that from other taller North American mountains, it’s possible to see over three times as much. With a 19,341-foot elevation, Mount Kilimanjaro soars five times as high as Mount Diablo. In practical terms, a mountain as small as Mount Diablo couldn’t possibly have a greater viewshed than Mount Kilimanjaro—even if it is an isolated peak. “He conclusively showed the Mount Diablo viewshed claim was bogus,” said Seth Adams with a laugh. “But it doesn’t really matter because the claim had already done its work. Mount Diablo became famous. It became beloved. And as I said, Mount Diablo may not have the largest view in the world, but it certainly has the most extraordinary view in the world.” Luckily for visitors, extraordinary can’t be measured with math. Asal Ehsanipour

201

Myth Busting Although this remarkable region is undeniably full of wonders, some claims about the Bay just don’t hold water. Here are a few we hear most often.

“George Lucas was inspired by the cranes at the Port of Oakland when he created the AT-AT walker in Star Wars.” Lucasfilm may be based out of San Francisco, but George Lucas is on the record telling the San Francisco Chronicle, “That’s a myth. That is definitely a myth.” An animator who worked on the AT-AT walkers confirmed it and even said earlier designs of the creatures had wheels.

“El Camino Real is an ancient road built by the Spaniards to connect California’s missions.” This myth got a big push from the Automobile Club of Southern California, which used it to sell cars and encourage people to drive the “ancient road.” In reality, the road connecting the missions was built along a network of trails that had already been built by Indigenous peoples.

“When Gertrude Stein wrote ‘there is no there there’ in Everybody’s Autobiography, she was taking a jab at Oakland.” In modern usage this quote has come to mean something is meritless or insubstantial, but that’s a misinterpretation of how Stein used it. In her book she returns to the address in Oakland where she once lived, only to find her childhood home had been razed and the land around it drastically altered. Her usage is more of longing nostalgia for Oakland, rather than disdain.

“There are dinosaur bones in UC Berkeley’s Campanile.” No dinosaurs, but there are fossils from many animals that once roamed around California, including dire wolves, mammoths, and even a prehistoric miniature camel.

ANCIENT HISTORY: The Bay Area during the Last Ice Age What was the Bay Area like during the ice age? It’s a deceptively simple question meriting quite a few follow-ups: Was the whole place covered in ice, or were there many plants? Was the coastline different? What animals were here? Were there people here too? It turns out there have been several ice ages throughout our planet’s long history. We’ll focus on the most recent, and specifically what the Bay Area was like around twelve thousand years ago, near the end of a geological period called the Pleistocene.

Not All Ice

If your mental picture of the ice age involves a frozen wasteland, you’re thinking of some place besides the Bay Area. “The Bay Area during the peak of the ice age was not covered with snow and ice. In fact, not much of California was,” said Doris Sloan, a retired UC Berkeley geologist and author of Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region. “The main ice sheets covered Canada and the northern parts of the states in the Midwest. Here in California, the ice sheet covered the Sierra Nevada.” By contrast, the Bay Area would have been lush, verdant, and grassy, with several species of oak and perhaps more annual rainfall. Also, in place of the bay, picture a valley, with a river flowing through what’s now known as Raccoon Strait, in between Angel Island and Tiburon. And the Pacific coastline? It’s not where you remember leaving it. “Sea level went down about 400 feet because so much of the earth’s water was tied up on land in glaciers and ice sheets. Ocean level dropped. And that put the shoreline out past the Farallones, which is really quite amazing,” Sloan said.

204

If you’ve ever squinted west out over the ocean on a clear day, you may have seen the Farallon Islands. Or maybe you’ve been lucky enough to go whale watching out there. During the last ice age, Sloan said, there wouldn’t have been so much pesky water between you and what she refers to as the Farallon Ridge—just a 20-odd-mile hike slightly downhill along a coastal plain.

Ice Age Inhabitants

The question of whether humans lived in what is now California during the last ice age is a tricky one. “When people got to California is very controversial,” said Pat Holroyd, the scientist in charge of Vertebrate Collections at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley. “There’s no doubt that people were here by twelve thousand years ago, and would have overlapped with some of these megafauna.” Megafauna is a slightly fancier term for the “terrific beasts” that lived in the region at the time. Part of the challenge, according to Holroyd, is that key early sites of human dwellings were likely inundated as sea levels rose. “Just like today, the coastline is a great place to travel along,” Holroyd said. “And so there were probably many coastal archaeological sites of the first peopling of North America that are now underwater out in the bay.” Alas.

Megafauna

Holroyd’s nonexhaustive list of the remarkable creatures that roamed the Bay Area during the last ice age would include mammoths, mastodons, camels, sloths, a musk ox relative called a shrub-ox, short-faced bears, dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats. Let’s take a closer look at a few from that list. Mammoths and mastodons are both extinct elephant relatives, but they have a few notable differences. “They have different types of teeth, and that made it possible for them to eat different things,” Pat Holroyd said. Mastodon teeth have big cusps suited to crushing

205

basically whatever. “They would have been eating shrubs, parts of trees, even fruit. It gives them the ability to eat quite a bit of food,” she said. Mammoths, on the other hand, were grass specialists, with teeth more like flat grinding surfaces. Saber-toothed cats in the area would have preyed on herding animals like horses, Holroyd said, not necessarily on mammoths or mastodons, except perhaps young ones. And there were other cats here as well, including cougars, also called mountain lions, which are still present today. Another extinct cat called the American lion may have been hanging around the Bay Area too. Their bones have appeared elsewhere in California, and Holroyd said it wouldn’t be a shock for some to turn up here. As it happens, ice age bones are discovered here all the time. People have found mammoth teeth and bones at construction sites and on dog walks. There was even a sloth femur a short walk from Holroyd’s office, in what’s now the Downtown Berkeley BART station. “What I tell people who call and ask about the likelihood of finding a fossil when they’re doing construction work in the Bay Area is that if you dig a big enough hole, you’ll probably find a fossil,” Holroyd said. Among the fossils found locally are those of two more creatures from our list: camels and dire wolves. California was home to llama-like camels during the ice age, as well as a tiny pet-size ur-camel millions of years before that. “The skull of one of the first camels would be about the size of your hand, so it was a tiny animal, but with very, very long legs. It would maybe come halfway up your leg, so maybe its head would be near your hip—but just a very delicate, tiny animal,” Holroyd said. And then there were the dire wolves. Whatever Game of Thrones has led you to imagine, dire wolves were real and lived in the Bay Area. A larger version of the modern gray wolf, they roamed the Americas, including in California, before their extinction. They had tremendous bite force and were known to eat horses, bison, and mastodons. Dire wolves? In Berkeley? Awooo! Daniel Potter

206

CORVID CRUSH: Why Crows Are Crowding Your Bay Area Skies If you were to ask most Bay Area residents, “What’s the one bird you see and hear the most, day in and day out, without fail?” there’s one avian species that would probably be the overwhelming answer: Corvus brachyrhynchos, better known to most of us as the American crow. Many longtime residents have noticed this bird seems to be around more and more, and it turns out those hunches are backed up by data.

How the Crow Population Grows

The most persuasive evidence that the Bay Area’s crow population is growing comes from the National Audubon Society, which holds a regular bird count with volunteer observers tallying birds in a predefined 15-mile-diameter “circle” over a twenty-four-hour period. The number of crows in the Oakland circle grew from 167 in 2000 to nearly 2,500 in 2018—an increase of nearly fifteen times in fewer than twenty years. The numbers for San Francisco are impressive, if not as dramatic. The 2000 count recorded 122 crows, with subsequent counts in the 700 to 900 range. So what’s behind the increase? People who watch the birds point to an equation with two major parts. “One argument, which may be true, is that crows are smart birds, and crows have historically inhabited the countryside,” said Bob Lewis, a Berkeley birder and one of the organizers for the Oakland Christmas Bird Count. “But in the country, crows get shot . . . and crows have perhaps discovered in the cities and towns that it’s a much safer place to be.”

207

But unfriendly humans are just one major factor that has led to more crows joining us in our cities and suburbs. The other? “I think it’s kind of simple myself,” said University of Washington wildlife biologist John Marzluff, who has studied crows and other corvids for decades. “Basically, we’ve provided more food for them. Now, the reasons for that may be more complex because it includes things like garbage, like fast-food restaurant waste, like roadkill. So there are a lot of ways we provide them food. But that’s the bottom line. That’s why they’re more abundant.” There’s a sort of commonsense objection to that idea: City dwellers have always been pretty messy. Look at the giant open garbage dumps that used to be on the edge of every big city. If garbage is attracting crows, where were they before? Marzluff said it actually works better for crows to spread out their food sources. “You don’t have to have a dump,” he said. “I think actually in terms of territoriality and increasing the breeding population, it’s better to have food more uniformly distributed.” Adrian Cotter, a web developer for the Sierra Club, as well as a citizen scientist and corvid enthusiast, points out that some of the very things we do to make cities more livable for us are also attractive to crows. “We plant trees they like to nest in. We plant trees that other birds nest in, and that becomes a source of food,” Cotter said. “So we’re presenting this sort of lovely banquet for them.”

Are Crows Replacing or Killing Off Other Species of Birds?

Crows have long had a bad reputation for reducing the population of songbirds, but Kaeli Swift, another University of Washington biologist who has spent years studying crows and their ways, said research has found that this reputation is largely undeserved. “Most people that contact me feeling like crows wiped away all of the birds in their neighborhood just have this perception that if

208

you see a flock of crows, it means none of your songbirds are going to reproduce, that everything is doomed,” Swift said. “The science just does not back that up.” The research she’s pointing to is a 2014 compilation of fortytwo studies that looked at the impact of corvids on dozens of songbirds that were their potential prey. In four out of five cases, the analysis found, corvids had no negative impact on either the reproduction or the abundance of other birds. “It can be easy for us to think, ‘If this predator was gone, then all of the babies they would have eaten will survive,’” Swift said. “That’s really not how it generally works. . . . The other predators in the system will just come in and take their place.” Hawks. Owls. Jays. Snakes. Foxes. Raccoons. Cats. And, Swift notes, some animals we might not think of as menaces. “A lot of people don’t realize squirrels and chipmunks are huge nest predators, much more impactful than crows,” Swift said.

Learning to Love Crows

Scientists like Kaeli Swift and John Marzluff argue that the best way to deal with crows is to try to understand who they are and what they’re doing here. “[There are] a lot of qualities that I don’t think you can help but find really attractive in crows—like their ability to learn our faces and be pretty excited to see us when you’ve built up a positive relationship with them,” Swift said. “They play, so you can watch them play games, particularly the young birds. And they’re just kind of charismatic and goofy in the way that a dog with a really strong personality is. For me, crows have the same sort of quality where, if you watch them, you just see them do all these things that are so interesting that you just kind of can’t help falling in love with them if you just open yourself up to that.” Dan Brekke

209

REDWOODS: Why Do These Ancient Giants Only Thrive in Northern California? When it comes to seeing redwoods, Northern California isn’t just the best place—it’s almost the only place. Why is that? Were these huge, ancient trees once more widespread? Where did the rest go? And why is California the main place to find them?

The Three Types of Redwoods

First, let’s clarify. The term redwood can refer to three species. There are the two iconic California trees—the Sierra redwood and the coast redwood—and one other called the dawn redwood, which only appears naturally in central China (though it is grown elsewhere in parks and as a street tree). A “living fossil,” the dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) was once thought to be extinct and is dwarfed by the two California redwoods. It grows to only around 150 feet tall. Sierra redwoods appear in just a few dozen groves in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, while coast redwoods grow closer to the Pacific, ranging from around Big Sur northward along the California coast and into the southwestern corner of Oregon. Sierra redwoods depend on water from snowmelt, while coast redwoods rely on fog drip. Both trees also go by a variety of other names: Sierra redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are also called giant redwoods or giant sequoias—or sometimes just sequoias. Or even, as legendary California protoinfluencer John Muir would have it, big trees. Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) sometimes go by California redwood or just plain ol’ redwood. Of the two, coast redwoods tend to be the taller, while Sierra redwoods the more massive,

211

with scalier leaves and thicker bark. Both get ridiculously old and brain-breakingly big. At about 380 feet high, a coast redwood in Humboldt County bearing the awesome name “Hyperion” is considered the record holder for the tallest living tree. For scale, it’s just a bit taller than a football field is long. Sierra redwoods don’t get quite that tall, but they have been known to reach more than 300 feet. While both species are also tremendously long-lived, neither holds the record for age. That distinction falls to the Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva). At more than 4,850 years old, one in California called “Methuselah,” located in the White Mountains near the Nevada border, is believed to be the oldest living tree. Still, some Sierra redwoods have survived for more than three millennia. They were already ancient when Rome fell. And coast redwoods hold up well, too, often dating back more than a thousand years—some more than double that. Through wildfires and yearslong droughts, these trees have shown they can withstand quite a bit.

Why Are They Such a Distinctly California Thing?

There are fossil records of redwoods dating back to the time of the dinosaurs, seventy million years ago or more, according to Joe McBride, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley with expertise in forest ecology, as well as urban forestry. These trees once thrived as far away as Greenland and Europe. So what changed? In a word, climate. Over millions of years, a procession of climatic fluctuations— perhaps alongside competition with other species better adapted for the local conditions of the moment—have cramped redwoods’ once expansive range. For instance, during the last ice age, which ended about twelve thousand years ago, McBride said, glaciation in the mountains of inland California may have scoured much of the Sierra redwood habitat there.

212

“It’s possible that the movement of the ice sheet down wiped out entire populations, so there was no seed supply left after the ice sheet melted,” McBride said. Climate shifts also account for the diminished range of coast redwoods, which as recently as the ice age could have been found much farther south, near present-day Los Angeles. “As the climate became drier and warmer, they lost most all of that distribution,” McBride said. Starting in the nineteenth century, redwoods were harvested for timber, wrote historian Jared Farmer in his book Trees in Paradise: A California History. “In the two decades straddling 1900, loggers felled roughly one-quarter of all mature sequoias in California—that is, the world,” Farmer wrote, before explaining that by the 1950s most remaining Sierra redwood groves were legally protected. Coast redwoods made for superior timber: “It was easy to work with, hard to wreck. No other lumber matched its combination of lightness, evenness, and durability,” Farmer wrote. He noted that while many of the oldest, tallest coast redwoods that remain are now protected, from the gold rush to 2000, some 95 percent of the old growth was cut down. The range of California’s redwoods will likely shift further as climate change adds more volatility to the state’s long-term forecast. Models show the fog belt shrinking, which is bad news for thirsty coast redwoods in Monterey County, McBride said. “There is a concern that, as a result, the distribution of the tree will be reduced.” McBride happens to have spent a good deal of time working in California’s coastal redwood forests. “I was involved in a number of research projects dealing with redwoods that took me out into the forest. And particularly when I was there alone, without reference to any particular date, I felt a real sense of peace—a sort of sense that all my worries had melted away,” he said. Indeed, there is something about being among the redwoods that can unstick the mind from time. Daniel Potter

213

YOU CAN CALL IT FRISCO: The History of the City’s Contentious Nickname Frisco. Just try dropping that word into conversation these days and see what kind of response you get. Chances are good the nickname will be met with a healthy dose of side-eye, a grimace, or even a slap on the wrist. Frisco is the nickname people love to hate. If you ask around, people say it’s disrespectful, truncated, ugly sounding, or icky. Basically, they don’t think the name does the city justice. But where do these arguments originally come from?

A Mysterious Birth

Let’s start with some history. The origin of the word Frisco is pretty murky, said Charles Fracchia, founder of the San Francisco Historical Society. Nobody knows exactly where or when the word was first used, but he theorizes Frisco got its start in the late 1800s— potentially from a drunkard making a contraction out of San Francisco. “How about a fella who’s been drinking who says, ‘Ah, good to be back in S—fr—isco.’ You know, it’s kind of a contraction.” The earliest written use of the word that Fracchia could find was on a piece of sheet music from 1897, for the song “A Frisco Girl.” Here are the lyrics for the first verse: A San Francisco girl am I And only plain at that; I’ve been to Monte Carlo, And have played the Baccarat, In Paris, London, and Berlin, And far away Moscow— I must admit they’re very fine, But give me dear ’Frisco.

216

Regardless of when it first appeared, Frisco’s use was probably in its heyday when the ports were strong here, around the time of World War II in the 1940s. “It was kind of a working man’s period of time,” Fracchia said. “The port was thriving, you had lots of small manufactories here. Frisco is kind of a working man’s word.”

A Trashy Name for a Classy City?

Not long after people started using Frisco, other people started hating it. And the man who led the charge was Herb Caen, the revered columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. When he wrote about the city, people listened. “Herb Caen made San Francisco into almost a village,” Charles Fracchia said. “By the fact that his columns were very popular. There was kind of a lingua franca about them.” Caen came along after the city had grown from a dinky West Coast outpost into a gold rush boomtown with saloons and debauchery—and later into a city that looked more like the East Coast and European cities it wanted to imitate. Caen wanted San Francisco to be classier, more chic. His book Don’t Call It Frisco came out in 1953. The opening paragraph reads as follows: Don’t call it Frisco—it’s San Francisco, because it was named after St. Francis of Assisi. And because “Frisco” is a nickname that reminds the city uncomfortably of the early, brawling, boisterous days of the Barbary Coast and the cribs and sailors who were shanghaied. And because Frisco shows disrespect for a city that is now big and proper and respectable. And because only tourists call it Frisco anyway, and you don’t want to be taken for a tourist, do you?

Fracchia said Caen’s book ruined the nickname for a lot of people who wanted to seem proper and cultured. They joined Caen in shunning it.

217

Frisco Is Loved Too

These days many people associate the word with an earlier generation. Take Joey Wilson, co-owner of a tattoo shop in the Mission called Frisco Tattoo. He remembers Frisco as a part of his childhood. “My parents always called it that,” Wilson said. “They were blue-collar workers. It was just something that was instilled in me. When I was a little kid, I think I was twelve or thirteen, there was a bike shop called Frisco Choppers. I’d race down there on the bus, down Valencia Street, just to buy a T-shirt that said ‘Frisco’ in big, bold letters because that was the coolest.” Today, Wilson is in the Hells Angels—the Frisco chapter. His wife, Lilah Wilson, said they have lots of friends who love Frisco as much as they do. “A lot of our friends are kind of small business owners in the city, and really are owners of the name Frisco,” she said. “We had Frisco Boxing, we have 415 Clothing, we had Frisco Choppers years back.” She said this group embraced the name, printing it proudly on T-shirts and getting it tattooed on their bodies. Joey Wilson wants to know why Caen’s opinion should matter more than his. After all, Caen was born in Sacramento. “So that’s the question—why does it upset you to call it Frisco?” Wilson asked. “Give us a reason. And who are you to tell us what we can and can’t do? I’m from here. I’m born and raised here, so I think I got rights to call it whatever I want.”

A Cultural Divide

Local Lyft driver Lorenzo Beasley believes that whether you use Frisco or not is a sign of what neighborhood you’re from. “I grew up on the bottom of the city, a small neighborhood called Visitacion Valley,” Beasley said. “I think more of the urban community grew up using that word. . . . You hear it in Hunters Point, Lakeview, the Fillmore, Potrero Hill, and especially the Mission.” When it comes to people who don’t like Frisco, Beasley said it’s a class distinction. “People who stay in Nob Hill and stuff. They look

218

at it like slang, so they’re not really with it. It’s definitely a bit of a snob thing.” Teresa Pratt, assistant professor of linguistics in San Francisco State University’s English department, echoes that. She said that when you’re talking about language and word choice, like nicknames, you’re virtually always talking about money and power. “Institutions or people who have power have an interest in maintaining that the way they speak is the right way to speak,” Pratt said. “Because it helps them. Because it’s coupled with this ideology that’s really widespread, that there’s a right way to speak, that there’s a way to speak that gets you ahead.” According to Pratt, word choice is like a signal. “Language as cultural capital, right? It’s something like knowing exactly where to put your forks at the end of a meal.” Nicknames are even more like that. Knowing which one to use and which one not to use tells people where you belong. In a way similar to oppressed groups who have reclaimed slurs once used against them, people whose connection to the Bay Area goes back generations can use the nickname Frisco to assert that history of belonging.

Go Ahead and Call It Frisco If You Want

Herb Caen eventually flip-flopped on Frisco a couple of times, even backtracking on his claim that it was a word for tourists. In 1995 he wrote, “The toughest guys on the old SF waterfront, neither rubes nor tourists, called it Frisco.” There were some admirable efforts to bring it back into widespread usage in the mid-2000s too. SFGate predicted that the young and hip would revive it. Joe Eskenazi wrote for SF Weekly that it is mostly old white people who don’t like it. And Buzzfeed launched a “Call It Frisco” campaign in 2016. For us at Bay Curious, Frisco is A-OK in our book. It speaks to the city’s history and its diverse communities. If you want to use it, we certainly won’t object. Vinnee Tong

219

GHOST FLEET: The Buried Ships of San Francisco In the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, you can grab a drink at the Old Ship Saloon. The bar first opened in 1851 inside the hull of a ship called the Arkansas. “People who wanted to go to the bar would have to get up this plank and in through the side of the ship,” said former owner Bill Duffy. The Arkansas now lies in the dirt below the bar and is one of dozens of ships buried around San Francisco. Some have been found as far as half a mile from the modern-day waterfront. A few of these old ships are marked with aboveground plaques, but many are completely unacknowledged—a ghost fleet beneath our feet. How did they get buried so far from the water?

A Boom That Starts on The Water

“San Francisco in 1848 was a small town of a few hundred. But the discovery of gold that year had a pretty big impact. The small town became a city,” said James Delgado, a maritime archaeologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and author of Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront. Ships pregnant with people and goods poured into the Bay Area. They dropped anchor in the deeper waters offshore, below where the Bay Bridge is today. Once moored, many of the ships never set sail again. Vessels often arrived in a decrepit state, the owners planning the voyage to San Francisco Bay to be their last. Other ships stuck around because sailors caught “gold fever” and chose to abandon their sailing careers in favor of heading to the mines. “There were large numbers of desertions, in some cases even officers,” said Delgado.

220

The harbor was soon clogged with nearly one thousand ships—a nuisance to anyone trying to navigate the bay waters. Contemporary observers often referred to the sight as a “forest of masts.”

When Water Became Land

Because the ships were stationed offshore in deep water, goods had to be slogged across half a mile of shallow, muddy tidal flats to get to San Francisco. Merchants would pay workers handsomely to forget about their gold fever and accept the job of a porter.

Eventually, politicians devised a solution to lessen these hefty expenses: bring the shoreline closer to deep water. The city began selling water lots on the condition that buyers fill them in with land. “In order to secure the title, you would put real property on it,” said Delgado. “You could drive pilings and build a fence around it. But the easiest, cheapest way was to do that with a ship.” Land in gold rush–era San Francisco was incredibly valuable, and people tried to secure these water lots any way they could. “If you scuttled your ship, you could claim the land under it as part of your salvage,” said Richard Everett, curator of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. Some men used this technicality to lay claim to other people’s lots. They were known as the “hulk undertakers.” In the dead of night they would sail ships over valuable lots, unplug holes drilled into the ship’s keel, and conveniently lose the vessel on the spot. “There were actual open wars,” said Delgado. “One day the captain of the hulk undertakers was in the midst of giving a command when a wharf employee fired a shot at him. His mouth was open, he was yelling, and the bullet passed through one cheek and out the other, missing his tongue and his teeth. To the end of his days he wore a beard to cover those two scars on either side of his mouth.”

Putting Old Ships to New Use

San Francisco needed buildings, as well as land. Lumber was expensive, and many of the city’s early structures were essentially canvas tents. One visitor described San Francisco as a magic lantern city at night after seeing the tents covering the hillsides glow from within. While this may have been picturesque, the residents wanted more permanent buildings and began to eye the ships in the harbor. Junker ships were taken to “Rotten Row,” where they were recycled into building materials. About two hundred of the nicer ships became permanent structures—used as warehouses, hotels, offices, bars, banks, or churches. Even the city jail moved onto a ship once the old one became overcrowded and worn down.

222

As water lots were filled in with dirt and the city’s borders expanded into the bay, many of the floating buildings were soon surrounded by land, sitting along city streets.

The Fires and What Was Left Behind

A series of seven fires ripped through the city between 1849 and 1851. The biggest blaze took out about twenty city blocks, destroying more than a thousand buildings in May 1851. “That was the giant fire that took out most of the waterfront,” said Richard Everett. “Many of the ships burned down to their water lines.” The tops of the landlocked ships burned, too, though their buried hulls often survived. When the city rebuilt, the remains of the ships were forgotten, built over one by one in the Financial District. Nowadays, we barely think about the hulks lying just under our feet. That is, until we have to lay a new foundation or dig a fresh tunnel. In 1994 San Francisco Muni was digging a light-rail tunnel beneath Embarcadero Plaza when workers hit a three-masted vessel known as Rome. The ship was so huge they literally had to tunnel through. Now thousands of riders on J, K, L, M, N, and T trains ride through its hull every day—literally traveling through history. Jessica Placzek

223

VAULT LIGHTS: What Are Those Grids of Glass in the Sidewalk, and Why Are They Purple? If you walk around downtown Oakland or San Francisco long enough, you’re bound to find grids of clear or purple glass embedded in a patch of sidewalk. Beneath your feet, dozens, if not hundreds, of little glass tiles glow when lit from beneath. Most often round or square, these surprisingly beautiful sidewalk designs are called vault lights, and they have a pretty neat purpose and history.

Where Were Vault Lights First Used?

“It’s long been the traditional way of lighting the interior of ships,” said Diane Cooper, a museum technician at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. “While kerosene lamps were sometimes used, the smoke could make interior spaces uncomfortable. And candles could become a fire hazard on wooden ships.” The prism shapes of the vault lights had a dual purpose aboard a ship. They not only lit rooms below deck but also projected light upward if a fire broke out there, offering a glowing warning for the sailors above. “If you had coal in your hold, you’d need to be able to see that there’s light down there,” said Cooper.

Lighting Underground

On land it was also difficult to use a flame to light subterranean spaces. The smoke and fire hazard were one thing, but it was also expensive. In 1845 inventor Thaddeus Hyatt developed a cast-iron vault cover featuring panels of glass lenses. The glass was flat on the top, but often formed into a prism on the bottom. As light passed through the glass, it would get bent by the prism, illuminating the farthest corners of underground rooms. The covers were also modular so they could be used over large areas.

224

Vault covers were installed all over the country, and Hyatt’s innovation in subterranean lighting made him rich. He spent much of the rest of his time and newly acquired wealth fighting for the abolition of slavery.

Vault Lights across the Country

Vault lights have been used to illuminate a variety of iconic projects, like some of New York City’s first subway stations. In the original Pennsylvania Station, natural light would pour through the building’s arched glass canopy and spill down into the lower levels of the station through hundreds of vault lights. Vault lights are also common in Sacramento, where in 1862 massive flooding left the city underwater for months. Many buildings were raised by as much as 14 feet to protect against a future disaster. In some places, instead of lifting a building up, owners simply built over the first floor, leaving an underground network of abandoned storefronts. These days many of those spaces are used for storage and lit from above by vault lights. In San Francisco and Oakland vault lights are mostly used to illuminate basements that extend under the sidewalk.

Why Is the Glass Often Purple?

Most glass is made by heating sand until it turns into a liquid. When that liquid cools, it hardens into glass. If the sand were 100 percent pure silica, it would produce a colorless glass. But most sand contains other elements, like lime or iron, that give the glass a colored tint when it cools. In the mid-nineteenth century glass manufacturers discovered that they could add manganese dioxide to the mix and create a glass that was virtually colorless. Problem is, when manganese is exposed to UV rays for long periods of time, it photooxidizes and turns purple or pinkish. This process can take decades, so when you see vault lights made of purple glass, it’s usually a sign they’re quite old. The next time you pass over a panel of vault lights, take a moment to admire their beauty—and appreciate that these little prisms of glass have been lighting our underworld for centuries. Jessica Placzek

225

BRICK CIRCLES IN CITY STREETS: The Underground Firefighting Tanks below San Francisco Intersections All around San Francisco, something stands out against the right angles and parallel lines that make up most of the city’s streets. At many intersections, you’ll find bricks arranged in 20-foot circles embedded in the asphalt. Once you notice one, you can’t help seeing them everywhere. And it’s no wonder—there are more than 170 of these circles around the city! They’re a charming design feature from above—a little something to break up the monotony of the gray pavement—but it’s what’s below these brick circles that really fascinates. Dating back to the mid-1800s, they mark huge underground tanks, or cisterns, that hold water for fighting fires.

History of the Cisterns

“I’m not a historian,” said Scott Kildall, an artist who’s lived in San Francisco for years, “but I’ve become a historian about cisterns.” Kildall designed a map with the locations of each cistern, a process that turned him into quite a cistern expert. Kildall said the story starts in 1848, when San Francisco was little more than a cluster of tents housing less than a thousand people. When gold was discovered in 1849, thousands rushed into the city. In just one year the city grew about twenty-five times in size, to at least twenty thousand residents. Demand for housing skyrocketed, and a building frenzy followed. Most homes were built out of wood, which unfortunately made for perfect kindling if a fire started. In the 1850s San Francisco saw six big fires that wiped out huge swaths of the city.

227

They came to be known as the Great Fires, and this onslaught of devastation spurred the city to act. “People are like, ‘Oh no, what are we going to do? We got to do something about this,’” Kildall said. City leaders built sixteen underground cisterns around San Francisco to store water for firefighting. The very first was a 12,000-gallon cistern in what is now Portsmouth Square. They also bought fire engines pulled by horses and set up a paid position for a fire chief. There was even an ordinance passed that required each family to have six buckets of water in their house—just in case. As the city grew, more cisterns were installed, but the city also started to install water pipes and hydrants. By the end of the 1800s residents had full faith in their new water system, and the cisterns stopped being maintained. Then came the massive 1906 earthquake.

The Quake Changes Everything

It struck on the morning of April 18 and shook the city for about a minute. Windows were smashed and chimneys caved in. Even a train was thrown off its tracks. The damage was incredible. Three-quarters of the city was gone, three thousand people died, and about two hundred thousand were left homeless. Most of the damage wasn’t from the earthquake itself, but from the three days of fires that followed. Since the quake broke a lot of the city’s water pipes, most fire hydrants quickly ran out of water or stopped working entirely. But those old cisterns remained intact, and firefighters used them to save several San Francisco neighborhoods. San Franciscans then realized the cisterns’ value, and they built and repaired more than a hundred throughout the next several years.

228

“You can see that people didn’t think they’re actually useful until they were useful, and they said, ‘Oh, that’s a really good idea,’” Kildall said.

Cisterns Today

Even today, the cisterns are still a valuable resource. They can hold as much water as two backyard swimming pools, said Katie Miller, the city’s water division manager. The city finished building thirty new cisterns in 2017, many of them in places where there weren’t any or where they could be key in stopping fires from spreading. Each cistern costs about one million dollars. “So if you think about it, that’s about the cost of a really nice new home,” said Miller. “It’s about the size of a new home too. It can be a nice bunker for somebody.” Not all of the city’s cisterns can be spotted by looking for a big brick circle in the street. Some have no marking at all. Deputy Fire Chief Tony Rivera took a guess as to why: “The roads have been repaved so many times, there probably is an original brick circle somewhere deep under there.” Rivera is a fan of the red brick circle, although he said the cisterns come in two other designs: a double circle and a square. The designs once helped firefighters find the cisterns, but now, he said, they use GPS. These days the circles just serve as decoration. As for the cisterns underneath those designs, they haven’t been used since the 1906 earthquake, more than a century ago. But they are down there, just in case, ready to save the city when the next earthquake strikes. Sarah Craig

229

THE BUTTERFLY BRIDGE: The Beautiful Bay Bridge Frank Lloyd Wright Never Got to Build The great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright loved the San Francisco Bay Area. But you wouldn’t know it by looking because there just aren’t many of his buildings around here. Even so, his grand, if unfulfilled, designs for the Bay Area still exist, including his plan for a bridge across the Bay.

Frank Lloyd Wright Loved the Bay

Very few of the buildings Wright designed for the Bay Area actually came to exist. “Seven or eight, depending on how you count them, including the houses,” said Paul Turner, a professor emeritus in architectural history at Stanford. He’s the author of Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco, a book that’s as much about the projects that didn’t get built as the ones that did. “Frank Lloyd Wright actually designed close to thirty projects for the Bay Area, and they include some of his most unusual and really amazing buildings,” Turner said. Most of the time Wright was just dreaming too big (read: expensive) for the client, and his proposals failed to get the go-ahead. “For example, his first skyscraper was designed for Market Street in San Francisco,” Turner said. “If there was some project that he found interesting, he would do the design and just hope that it would get built.” Wright never got the commission for that San Francisco skyscraper. Just as he never got the commission to design another passion project of his: a second Bay Bridge crossing.

230

The Butterfly Bridge

There was talk of a second span almost as soon as the Bay Bridge was completed in the 1930s. Traffic was that bad, even in the bridge’s early days. In the late 1940s Wright was competing for projects all across the country. Jaroslav Joseph Polívka, a San Francisco Bay Area engineer and fan of Wright’s, suggested he throw his hat in the ring for the proposed second Bay Bridge. That was in 1949, and Wright would spend the last decade of his life trying to win over decision makers in California. Essentially, he fell in love with his own proposal, which he called the “Butterfly Bridge.”

“The structure had the form of a thorax and wings of a butterfly in reinforced concrete. It’s a beautiful sculptural form when you look at the drawings that he did of it,” Paul Turner said. The Butterfly Bridge would have started at the terminus of Army Street, now Cesar Chavez, in San Francisco. Long, curved, concrete arms would stretch across the water toward Oakland, carrying six lanes of traffic and two pedestrian walkways. The literal centerpiece of the bridge: a hanging garden. “People driving across the bridge could pull off into this landscape park and enjoy the views from high above over the bay. It’s kind of a crazy idea that traffic going across the bay could stop and there would be enough room for parking and everything, but that was the idea,” Turner said.

Plans HELD Up by Committee

The proposal for the Butterfly Bridge was received enthusiastically by the San Francisco press. But the California State Assembly Committee rejected the plan, influenced by consulting engineers dubious about the details. “The engineers in Sacramento were able to say, ‘Well, it’s just not worked out in enough detail. We don’t think it’s going to work. It’s too radical,’” Paul Turner said. To be fair to the pencil pushers in the state capital, Turner adds we have to imagine how things looked back in the mid-twentieth century. “The idea was so unusual, was so radical, it was unlike any earlier bridge that had been designed,” he said. “And because Wright had not gotten a commission to do it, wasn’t being paid anything, they weren’t able to design the bridge in the kind of detail that would really be required, with all of the structural analysis and everything. That would have to come later.” Ultimately, officials decided a second bridge wasn’t necessary, because by the 1950s people had started talking about

232

running a BART rail line under the bay, and that became the solution to the traffic problem. Wright called that idea “suicidal,” which turned out to be an overstatement, as the Transbay Tube is still going strong after more than forty years. When Wright died in 1959, so too did all serious thoughts of doing something with his plans, especially after the new, expanded San Mateo Bridge opened in 1967. There is still talk, however, of building another bridge to span the bay. In December 2017 Senator Diane Feinstein and East Bay congressman Mark DeSaulnier called for another bay bridge, a “Southern Crossing” south of the Bay Bridge. “Every now and then, people talk about an extra possible bridge, and there’ll be stories in the newspapers [about the Butterfly Bridge],” Turner said. “It still captivates the imagination of the public because it is so beautiful.” Rachael Myrow

233

BART’S TRANSBAY TUBE The creation of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), with its promise of whisking commuters between the East Bay and San Francisco, was one of the reasons planners put the kibosh on a second Bay Bridge. The underwater tube that makes the crossing possible is an engineering marvel. The first detailed proposal for a tube to link San Francisco and the East Bay appeared in the 1920s, the work of General George Washington Goethals, who had supervised construction of the Panama Canal. But it wasn’t until the late 1950s that everything necessary for such a project—what would be the world’s longest and deepest vehicular tunnel—came together. The engineering consortium that designed BART began seismic studies in 1959, chose a route for the tube very close to the one Goethals had laid out, and devised a system for building the 3.6-mile structure. Work began in 1966 with the dredging of a 60-foot-wide trench to serve as a bed for the tube. The tube was built in sections at the old Bethlehem Steel shipyard at Pier 70 in San Francisco. Workers fabricated fifty-seven separate segments, each about 330 feet long and weighing 800 tons. Starting in early 1967, the twinbore sections were towed into the bay, then handed off

to a specially built craft that would guide them to their precise location. The sections, sealed at each end, were lowered slowly to the bay floor. Once the sections were aligned, divers working four-hour shifts welded each new section into place as much as 135 feet below the bay’s surface. The final segment went into place in April 1969, but the tube was far from complete. Years of finishing work lay ahead. Even so, it became quite the attraction. In November 1969 BART opened the tube for a one-day, once-in-a-lifetime chance for people to hike into the tube. They could enter from either side of the bay. A reported fifteen thousand people lined up for blocks near the Ferry Building waiting to enter, a walk that began and ended by navigating 174 steps that led from the surface into the tube. Workers spent several years adding electrical and ventilation systems and, of course, rails. BART sent its first test train through the tube in August 1973 and launched passenger service between the East Bay and San Francisco in September 1974. Today, tens of thousands of people pass through the tube every day.

TUNNELS UNDER SAN FRANCISCO? Inside the Dark, Dangerous World of the Sewers The idea of an underground tunnel network hidden under our feet is an endlessly alluring one. There are, after all, very real labyrinths under major world cities—like the infamous Catacombs of Paris, lined with the bones of the city’s dead.

Discovering the Tunnels

If you search the internet for information on San Francisco’s underground, there’s a person who comes up again and again—an urban explorer named Sierra Hartman. A photographer and writer, Hartman produced haunting photographs of shadowy spaces under San Francisco that are for many people their first clue that a world of tunnels really does exist under the city. When Hartman was living in San Francisco, he would explore the city’s streets at night with his camera. It was a chance encounter with a manhole left open that led him beneath San Francisco for the first time—and sparked a passion for urban exploration. “I think it’s just ingrained in human nature, you know?” said Hartman. “You wonder what’s down there.” Hartman started using a mixture of publicly available records, maps, and whispers from fellow urban explorers to find entrances to tunnels that stretched for miles into the blackness. But don’t ask him to tell you where they are. Urban explorers are notoriously secretive about their finds. At least some of that is due to the risks of their enterprise. Bodily dangers aside, urban exploration represents “at best a gray area of legality in some places, and outright trespassing in other places,” as Hartman put it.

236

Now this underground network that Hartman risked bodily harm to venture into—it’s no mysterious labyrinth built by shadowy figures. It’s San Francisco’s huge sewer network.

A Complex World You Don’t See

“I crawl through a lot of sewer pipes. That’s basically my job,” said Megan Abadie, an assistant engineer for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission wastewater enterprise. She makes sure this giant, intricate system filled with your waste keeps working the way it’s meant to. There are a lot of misconceptions about the sewers, said Abadie. For one, what we surface dwellers call a “tunnel” isn’t truly a tunnel—a term that specifically means a long run of pipe, bored out of the earth with only a few manholes attached. When we talk of the “tunnels under San Francisco,” we’re usually talking about sewer mains. San Francisco is 49 square miles but contains over 1,000 miles of sewer mains, running under every block. What makes our system unique in California is that it’s a combined system. Instead of stormwater and sewage water being separated into different pipes, as they are elsewhere in the state, in San Francisco they flow into the same set of pipes. This is a legacy of the city’s relative age. The foundations of our modern-day sewers were laid during the gold rush in what Abadie described as “a very ad hoc system. . . . People would build pipes to just connect to the nearest creek.” There are still some pipes under your feet that date from the 1840s, she said. Just like in New York—another old, dense city—it was too hard to rip up San Francisco’s sewer network to replace the old system with secondary pipes. So we’ve repaired and adapted our old system, which is why this city still has those big, wide sewer mains . . . that people can’t seem to stay out of.

237

A Lethal Labyrinth

“There are a lot of things that can happen in the sewer that can actually kill you pretty easily,” Megan Abadie said. For one thing, there’s the risk of drowning down there. Because of San Francisco’s steep topography, Abadie and her colleagues never enter the sewers if there’s so much as a drizzle of rain anywhere in the city. “If you’re in a large pipe at the bottom of a hill, it doesn’t take much for a big slug of water to hit you, even if it’s not raining very much where you are,” she said. Then, there’s the danger of toxic gas: namely hydrogen sulfide, produced when organic material starts to decompose. At low levels it has a distinctive smell of rotten eggs. At higher levels it affects a person’s sense of smell entirely. It can knock you out—and kill you—within minutes. On top of that, there’s the threat of simply getting lost or injured in the sewers. Abadie and her fellow inspectors are equipped with accurate maps and supported by a large chain of people below and above ground—like weather spotters and medics. “When I go into the sewer system I know exactly where I am. . . . You go into a pipe that you see sticking out somewhere? Open up a manhole? You’re not going to know where you are,” Abadie said. So what can people do if, after hearing the truth about the darkness and danger down there, they still can’t resist the lure of subterranean exploration? “We have a lot of people retiring here. You can come work for us!” Abadie said. “We will get you into sewers. It’ll be awesome. Your passion can actually get you paid to explore sewers.” Carly Severn

238

SAN FRANCISCO PAGODAS: The Unexpected History behind San Francisco Chinatown’s Striking Architecture Layered pagodas. Hanging lanterns. Bright reds and brighter greens. Fanciful buildings that harken to another place, another time, perhaps one that is based more in fantasy than reality. Modern-day Chinatown’s architecture can fascinate the Western eye—in fact, that’s the point. The story of how San Francisco Chinatown earned its signature look isn’t just a tale about wood and nails. It’s about people, who out of the ashes of the city’s darkest hour, in the face of blistering hate, built a place that would draw wonder. All in hopes of protecting their community from one of the most pernicious of San Francisco evils: displacement.

Function Tops Form in Early Chinatown

In its earliest incarnation, pre-1906 Chinatown bore little resemblance to the curved eaves of the flashy pagodas topping neighborhood buildings today. Homes, shops, and other constructs of the 1800s were more modest and functional, largely because of who lived there. San Francisco’s early Chinese immigrants were merchants, herbalists, skilled and unskilled laborers. There were home builders, carpenters, and masons, but one major labor group was missing— there were no architects. That’s according to the late historian and architect Philip Choy. He wrote in his book, The Architecture of San Francisco Chinatown, “Subsistence conditions in China and then in California gave little

239

room for the expenditure of money and energy on reestablishing a distinctively Chinese architecture in the new country.” Some early Chinatown structures were prefabricated frame houses imported from China. At least seventy-five were built around the 1850s. While they were considered superior to American-built prefabs of the time, they do not resemble the pagoda-topped Chinatown buildings of today. There were a few features that reflected the area’s cultural heritage, like bamboo lanterns suspended from balcony overhangs and wooden plaques carved with Chinese characters. Still, Choy wrote that one essayist from 1890 perhaps put it best: Chinatown in his eyes was “neither picturesque nor Oriental. . . . The majority of the buildings are of brick . . . two or three stories high.” That century-gone essayist concluded, “The architecture is thoroughly American.”

Chinatown No More?

The stage for Chinatown’s transformation was set by a job shortage. Unions and their workers in San Francisco demonized Chinese Americans, pinning their employment woes on burgeoning immigration from China—a common racist refrain seen today in the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was born from that hatred and tried to halt Chinese immigration entirely. US congressman Julius Kahn represented San Francisco in the House of Representatives from 1899 to 1903. When the Chinese Exclusion Act was about to sunset, he introduced a bill to make it permanent. “It is my deliberate opinion that the Chinese are morally the most debased people on the face of the earth,” Kahn said in remarks to Congress. “Forms of vice which in other countries are barely named are in China so common they excite no comment among the natives . . . depths of depravity so shocking and horrible that their character cannot even be hinted.” The San Francisco Board of Supervisors was only too happy to fan those flames of resentment. They drew up plans to quarantine

240

the city’s Chinese community in Hunters Point, replete with their own services wholly separate from the rest of San Francisco. “San Francisco May Be Freed from the Standing Menace of Chinatown,” read a headline from the Merchants’ Association Review newspaper in February 1905.

The plans weren’t given time to come to fruition though. In 1906 the quake would arrive.

When Chinatown Was Destroyed

The 1906 earthquake resulted in fires that scoured the city. Initially, Chinatown went untouched, Chinese Historical Society of America director Pam Wong said. But that changed when local firefighters tried to create a firebreak at the foot of Chinatown’s hills using dynamite. “That was a big mistake,” Wong said. The dynamite supplied to the fire department by the army troops stationed in the Presidio was the “incorrect type of explosive,” according to the Bancroft Library’s 1906 Earthquake and Fire exhibit. Instead of guncotton or stick dynamite, they sent highly flammable black gunpowder. It was meant to clear a firebreak, but instead the explosives helped the fire spread. Buildings were demolished that otherwise would have blocked the inferno’s tide. The flames leveled Chinatown. The Board of Supervisors saw opportunity in the devastation. With much of the city’s population already living in tents, a chance arose to displace its Chinese population amid the mass relocation. That move would’ve ghettoized Chinatown and cut its population off even more from the city’s wealth. “The southeastern part of the city is still very much a poorer side of the city. And [fewer] resources [were] going into that neighborhood,” Wong said. Chinatown’s leaders had to move fast. So from the ashes of destruction, they stepped up to rebuild. Ng Poon Chew, the editor of the Chinese-language newspaper Chung Sai Yat Po, galvanized the Chinese community, according to the Chinese Historical Society of America. Chew pushed for the neighborhood to hire lawyers to protect “Chinese interests,” to rebuild “immediately” without waiting for city officials, and to sign new leases with their largely white landlords.

242

At the same time, a worry began to circulate that the Board of Supervisors’ plan to relocate Chinatown would harm trade with China, an important consideration for business interests more broadly across the Bay Area. Headlines in the Oakland Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle trumpeted the loss of trade should the Chinese community be cordoned off in Hunters Point. As workers began rebuilding Chinatown, questions remained. How would the neighborhood deal with the shifting tides of hatred? And how would they revitalize the neighborhood’s economy?

Playing Defense with Design

The singular solution for those questions came from Look Tin Eli, the manager of Chinatown’s Sing Chong Bazaar, alongside other Chinese merchants. Their idea? Capture people’s imaginations by building a new “Oriental” city of “veritable fairy palaces,” Philip Choy wrote. “Chinatown was seen as a ghetto, as a slum, as a dangerous place,” Pam Wong said. “So to clean up its image . . . they created what looked like Chinese architecture and allowed for color schemes to match what [tourists] would think China’s houses and buildings would look like. They created Grant Avenue for the tourists to come.” The result, Wong said, was the “fanciful” and “theme park–esque” design seen in Chinatown today. In the beginning, Chinatown’s signature look was partially thanks to the architect and engineer team Ross & Burgren, who took inspiration from the Chinese pagoda. In China the pagoda is “used only in religious structures,” marking a burial site of a Buddhist relic or tomb, Choy wrote. They are actual structural forms. Yet in Chinatown, pagodas became ornamental elements to excite newcomers. Bold yellows, reds, and greens were employed. Eaves were curved and tapered. Some real architectural features, like the tou-kung structural system, which features overlapping weight-bearing brackets atop a column, were turned into purely decorative forms across many local buildings.

243

Some architects of fame would make their own stamp on the look of Chinatown, like Julia Morgan, who designed the Chinese YWCA on Clay Street. It was built in 1932, replete with a “traditional” Chinese courtyard, said Choy. Morgan, who famously designed Hearst Castle, was also the architect behind the Methodist Chinese Mission School built in 1913. The neighborhood’s new design, Choy wrote, is “neither East nor West. Rather, it is decidedly San Francisco.” In the decade following the new design, newspaper articles and magazines nationwide lauded the neighborhood for its otherworldly, so-called “Oriental” design—one that we know now has little basis in reality. Still, tourists flocked to Chinatown, a trend that has continued for a century. The plan had worked: Chinatown was here to stay.

Building a New Future

The neighborhood’s survival wasn’t ever guaranteed, a fact Pam Wong knows too well. She was raised in San Francisco, a Lowell High School alum, and said the rebuild of Chinatown is a testament to her community’s strength. “The architecture of San Francisco Chinatown is a symbol of the resilience of the Chinese community fighting racism, fighting for their survival in San Francisco,” Wong said. That fight is far from over. Wong recounted racist slurs she faced even as a grade-schooler. She particularly worries about a record number of hateful words and assaults toward Asian Americans across California, including in San Francisco, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But Wong believes her community will rise above. After all, Chinatown faced racism codified into law, and even a raging historic inferno, and prevailed. To remember that, all you have to do is look at a Chinatown pagoda. Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

244

Did San Francisco Put the Bay in Bay Windows? There are so many bay windows in San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities around the Bay Area, it would be easy to assume they were invented here. And hey, there’s even that name: bay window. Surely that’s a reference to our glorious San Francisco Bay, right? Sorry, nope. “It’s a reference to the physical shape of the bay window because it looks like a bay in [the] plan,” said Christopher VerPlanck, an architectural historian in San Francisco. The bay window has its roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when an architectural feature called an oriel began to appear on the homes of British elite. “Basically a three-sided or four-sided appendage to a building that cantilevers out over the ground beneath,” said VerPlanck. Wealthy residents would often put a chapel or throne in

them—but the feature would soon make its way into dense, urban housing. “If you have limited space to put the windows in the front of the house, if you’ve got a three-sided bay window, it lets a lot more light into the interior of the house,” said VerPlanck. When Europeans immigrated to the United States, they brought the bay window with them, first to cities like Boston and New York, and ultimately to San Francisco. When the city was being built, housing lots were narrow, averaging 25 feet wide, and “in many cases the sidewalls butt up against each other,” said VerPlanck. A few people built bay windows onto their homes, and before long, everybody had them. While San Franciscans may have had nothing to do with inventing the bay window, our city has certainly become known for them. And that, in and of itself, is pretty cool. Christopher Beale

STAIRWAY TO PARADISE: The Garden Oasis of the Filbert Steps There are more than 900 sets of steps across San Francisco, which isn’t altogether surprising in a city with so many hills. Most of them are about function—connecting high to low, here to there, this to that. But a handful of these staircases have become lovely public spaces. The Lincoln Steps near Sea Cliff are covered in vibrant tiles that create a larger-than-life design. The Esmeralda Stairs on Bernal Hill feature a 40-foot slide for kids (or adults) to enjoy. The Inner Sunset’s 16th Avenue Steps are inlaid with an intricate seato-stars mosaic design that draws photographers from all around. But perhaps the most famous stairs in the city ascend iconic Telegraph Hill: the Filbert Steps. From the bottom, they don’t look like much, but trust us, they’re worth the climb. It’s like stepping back into the nineteenth century; the sounds of the city fade away in favor of the breeze riffling leaves and the squawking of birds overhead.

Hiking Up the Steps And Back in Time

A trip up the steps begins near where Filbert Street intersects with Sansome Street. The lower steps are made of concrete and rise steeply up against a rocky cliff. It’s a heart-pounding trek to get to where the beauty begins, but keep climbing. It’s worth it. When the steps turn from concrete to wood, it’s as if you’ve been transported not only to another place, but to another time. A lush garden bursting with flowers runs along the left side of the stairway, and old wooden cottages emerge on the right. Many are situated around a boardwalk that intersects with the staircase, Napier Lane, and they’re some of the oldest homes in San Francisco.

246

In the 1850s, longshoremen lived in these cottages. They’d look up at the semaphore—basically an old school signaling device— on the top of Telegraph Hill to see which ships were coming into San Francisco’s harbor and what cargo they carried. Then they’d rush down the steps to help unload. Decades later, these homes survived the 1906 earthquake and fire that devastated much of San Francisco. As the story goes, there were many Italian families living here at the time, and they made their own wine. When the fires ignited south of Market Street and began to head their way, the residents dipped burlap sacks in the wine and covered their roofs, preventing floating embers from catching the wooden shingles on fire. The people who live in these homes today have to get used to a few quirks that come along with their unique accommodations. There’s no back alley to park a car, and there’s no road access—so it’s up and down the steps for everything. “It’s not your normal city environment. You walk down a wooden stairway, you walk along a wooden boardwalk, and then you’re home. I mean, it’s really kind of nineteenth-century living in a modern age,” said longtime resident Larry Habegger. Unloading groceries, getting to and from work, and delivering mail or pizza—all of it requires walking flights and flights of steps. “We’re really big tippers,” joked Habegger.

How The Steps Became an Oasis

The Filbert Steps haven’t always been so charming. In fact, residents once used the hillside across from Napier Lane as an unofficial trash heap. Everything from tires to old furniture would end up on the hill. That’s how it looked when Grace Marchant moved to the neighborhood with her daughter in 1935. She was originally from South Dakota but moved to Long Beach as a young woman to work as a stunt person in the film industry. Over her years on Napier Lane, Marchant started to beautify the hillside. She found it helped with her aches and pains as she got older.

247

“She got these little baby tears [a moss-like plant with tiny detailed leaves], and she was just beautifying right outside her door,” Habegger said. “Then she started hauling the debris off the hill because she thought, ‘OK, why don’t I do the cliffside out here?’ So she turned the junkyard into a fabulous rose garden.” Marchant planted those first baby tears in 1949. Later came the pink roses, purple delphiniums, yellow banana plants, and red Japanese maples. Butterflies and hummingbirds were drawn to come feast on the sweet nectar, and a few small pathways were cut into the steep terrain. You won’t find tidy green grass or benches in this garden—it feels more wild and free, an embodiment of Marchant’s feisty spirit. Marchant lovingly maintained the garden for thirty-three years. When she passed away in 1982 at the age of ninety-six, her neighbor and longtime friend Gary Kray took over the job.

From Hidden Gem to Famous Attraction

Telegraph Hill is a tight-knit community with a lot of pride in what Marchant built. So when rumors started circulating not long after she died that a neighbor intended to expand his house into the garden, it ruffled some feathers. “A property owner here wanted to build a large house, take over a big portion of the garden, more or less turn the place into his private garden,” Habegger said. “Gary and I got the neighborhood involved.” The two men saw the garden as Marchant’s legacy, so they started a campaign to stop the development project. They thought their best shot at saving the garden was to buy the property from the owner and put an easement on the land. “We sold figurative square inches of the garden for ten dollars,” Habegger said. “And we thought we’d raise a couple of hundred bucks.” To their surprise, four thousand individual donors from all over San Francisco and beyond contributed. Their cause also

248

got press attention, both locally and nationally. In the end, they raised more than two hundred thousand dollars, enough to save the garden and name it after Marchant. But all the publicity came with a price—it made the steps famous. “That changed things a lot,” Habegger said. Before the publicized battle, only locals knew about the steps. “And after that campaign . . . it got in all the guidebooks.” Still, Habegger said the steps are pretty quiet most of the time. Tourists walk by, but for the most part they’re respectful. Neighbors love their unique lifestyle and sometimes volunteer their time and money to make the space extra special. One Christmas, a local couple strung twinkling lights all the way from the bottom of the steps up to Coit Tower—a glittering gift to the community.

Visiting Today

Today, throngs of visitors hike the four hundred or so steps each year. They wind their way up from Sansome Street, through the Grace Marchant Garden, past the homes along Napier Lane, and all the way up to Coit Tower. It’s a grueling climb, but the views at the top are some of the most expansive you’ll find in San Francisco. On a clear day, you can see downtown San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, and the cranes of Oakland’s massive port. And to the north, the Golden Gate Bridge spans the mouth of the bay. Take in the sight, and try to imagine how when the first cottages were built on Napier Lane, none of those sites had been built yet. In a city as dynamic as San Francisco, the view is always changing. Katrina Schwartz

249

THE 49 MILE DRIVE: Seeing San Francisco through Its Lucky Number If San Francisco were to have a lucky number, one could make the case it should be forty-nine. After all, it was in 1849 that so many with gold fever emigrated from far and wide, packing their dreams of wealth and prosperity along with their pickaxes and mining pans. San Francisco’s population boomed, turning it from a windy western outpost into a bona fide city. And that city? It measured 7 miles wide by 7 miles tall—a tidy 49 square miles in all. So while we could have easily made this book fifty stories, it felt only right to pay homage to the region’s history and stop ourselves at forty-nine. We’re not the first to use the number as a way to explore our region.

The 49 Mile Scenic Drive

In the late 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, San Francisco decided to throw a party. “San Francisco had just built two giant bridges. Both the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge were done, so we had something to show off,” said Kristine Poggioli, coauthor of Walking San Francisco’s 49 Mile Scenic Drive: Explore the Famous Sites, Neighborhoods, and Vistas in 17 Enchanting Walks. City officials invited the entire world to come celebrate at the 1939–40 Golden Gate International Exposition, and they built Treasure Island out in the bay for that specific purpose. “The Downtown Association thought, ‘Well, one million people are coming to town. How can we make a buck off this? How can we get people out into the city to do business? Or buy

250

homes?’” said Poggioli. The association devised a 50-mile drive to lure people off the island, get them exploring the city. Quickly, a savvy marketing mind shortened the drive by one mile, offering a nod to the city’s “forty-niner” history, and the “49 Mile Scenic Drive” was born. The route began at San Francisco city hall and wound its way around the city, hitting dozens of attractions along the way. “It takes you to Japantown, Union Square, Chinatown, North Beach, the Wharf, and out past Marina Green and into the Presidio,” said Poggioli. “Lands End. The whole beach. Lake Merced. Then we’ve got Golden Gate Park. Twin Peaks. The Mission.” Truly a hit parade of what San Francisco has to offer.

A few highlights from the route:

Chinatown: Pass through the Dragon Gate on Grant Avenue and you might feel transported across the Pacific, but take a closer look and you’ll find many of the architectural styles are actually San Franciscan through and through. After the 1906 earthquake leveled much of the city, Chinese residents used architecture to convince city residents that their neighborhood belonged to them and was worth preserving. Coit Tower: Just before Coit Tower was set to open to the public in 1933, a controversy erupted over the frescoes that cover the walls on the ground floor. Several of the twenty-five artists commissioned to paint the murals had inserted details and symbols that were interpreted as communist propaganda. The opening of the tower was canceled, and its windows were painted to keep anyone from seeing inside. Three months later the tower did open, but some of the frescoes had been painted over. Palace of Fine Arts: When it comes to local landmarks, the Palace of Fine Arts is for the romantics among us. It’s an art

251

installation left over from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition—one of the world’s fairs held in San Francisco. Architect Bernard Maybeck designed the structure to look like a decaying ruin from ancient Rome. The original structure was meant to be temporary and was largely built from plaster. It was saved from the wrecking ball at the end of the fair because it was so beloved. In the 1960s most of the structure was rebuilt using more permanent materials like concrete. Golden Gate Bridge: Is there any contest for the region’s most iconic attraction? The Golden Gate Bridge has been crowned the most photographed bridge in the world by a litany of publications. But would it be nearly as photographed if it had been . . . gray? When the bridge was designed, most bridges were gray, silver, or black, and it was assumed the Golden Gate Bridge would follow suit. Luckily, a visionary architect intervened and pushed for the international orange color we see today. Baker Beach: Not many cities around the world can lay claim to having a nude beach within city limits. Especially not one with as spectacular a view as Baker Beach. Fun fact: The beach was the original site of the world-famous Burning Man art festival. It was held there from 1986 to 1990 before moving to Black Rock Desert, Nevada. Mile Rocks Lighthouse: Little remains of the magnificent three-tiered lighthouse that once stood out in the waters of the Golden Gate strait. Lighthouse keepers would be stationed there for weeks at a time, helping ships navigate the rough waters on their way into the San Francisco Bay. During terrible storms, waves could shake the entire structure, making for a treacherous night’s sleep. In 1965 the lighthouse was fully automated, and the upper tiers were demolished. Every now and then you’ll see a helicopter land on what remains of the lighthouse when the coast guard does maintenance.

252

Sutro Baths: Should you need a reminder how cool the city once was, look no further than the Sutro Baths. For a few cents, the general public had access to a complex of swimming pools, rimmed with slides, trapezes, and diving boards. Dutch Windmills: You’ll find two windmills in Golden Gate Park. The first one was built in 1902 and was used to pump water from deep underground to irrigate the park. It was such a success that a second larger windmill was constructed in 1908. On a windy day the two could pump a combined 1.5 million gallons of water. Eventually, motorized pumps were brought in, and the windmills were no longer needed. Today, they’re ornamental, though their sails can still turn. The US Mint: San Francisco is home to one of the six US Mint facilities. Each branch has its own role. The San Francisco Mint printed circulation money until 1974 but now prints commemorative coins and medals, and collector-quality clad and silver proof coins. If you dig through your change jar, you may be able to find some old circulation coins made in the city. They’ll be dated 1974 or earlier, and they’ll have a small s mintmark on the front. Like the city it circumnavigates, the 49 Mile Scenic Drive is a fluid, adaptable thing. In the decades since its debut, it’s been rerouted several times to loop in the shiny and new and to bypass attractions that have faded away. It was reenvisioned as a seventeen-part walking tour by Kristine Poggioli and Carolyn Eidson for their book Walking San Francisco’s 49 Mile Scenic Drive. The San Francisco Chronicle published a new route in 2019 meant to highlight more neighborhoods, parks, and small businesses. In this book’s pages, we’ve explored many fascinating slices of Bay Area history and culture. But like the 49 Mile Drive, it’s only a small sampling of all there is to know about this region. We hope this book inspires you to get out, see the Bay Area for all that it has to offer, and follow your own curiosity wherever it takes you.

253

Contributors CHRISTOPHER J. BEALE is a reporter and producer at KQED in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @realchrisjbeale.

RACHAEL MYROW is the senior editor of KQED’s Silicon Valley News Desk. Follow her on Twitter @rachaelmyrow.

DAN BREKKE reports on transportation and infrastructure at KQED in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @danbrekke.

LIAM O’DONOGHUE is the host and producer of the KPFA radio program and podcast East Bay Yesterday and cocreator of the Long Lost Oakland map. Links to his latest episodes, events, and social media can be found at eastbayyesterday.com.

JON BROOKS is an editor and reporter for KQED News and KQED Science. SARAH CRAIG is a reporter and producer for Not Past It, a weekly history show for Gimlet Media. You can view her past work at sarahcraigmedia.com. SANDHYA DIRKS is a national correspondent for NPR, focusing on race, equity, and systems of power. You can follow her on Twitter @audiosand. ADIZAH EGHAN is an executive producer at

VICE Audio. You can keep up with Adizah and her work at adizaheghan.com.

ASAL EHSANIPOUR is a podcast producer at

the Los Angeles Times. Follow her on Twitter @aehsanipour. MAGGIE GALLOWAY is a freelance jour-

nalist and graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. You can follow her on Twitter @yourgalgalloway and check out her work at maggie-galloway .com. SASHA KHOKHA is the host of The California Report Magazine, a public radio show about the people and places that make the Golden State unique. Follow her on Twitter @KQEDSashaKhokha.

KELLY O’MARA was the editor-in-chief at Triathlete Magazine. You can find her at @kellydomara on all the platforms. JESSICA PLACZEK is the supervising editor of It’s Been a Minute at NPR. You can find more of her work at jessicaplaczek.com. DANIEL POTTER is a freelance science writer and audio producer. See what he’s up to lately at hellodanpo.com. SUZIE RACHO is a correspondent-producer at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter @SRacho. JOE FITZGERALD RODRIGUEZ is a KQED reporter and producer primarily covering politics. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @FitztheReporter. KATRINA SCHWARTZ is the producer for Bay Curious, a podcast produced by KQED in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter @kschwart. JULIA SCOTT is cofounder and partner at

SeedPod Media, a podcast consulting and production company. Follow her on Twitter @juliascribe.

RYAN LEVI is a reporter and producer for the national health policy podcast Tradeoffs. Follow him on Twitter @ryan_levi.

CARLY SEVERN is an editor and reporter at KQED News. Follow her on Twitter @teacupinthebay.

MARISOL MEDINA-CADENA is the producer for KQED’s arts and culture podcast, Rightnowish. Follow her on twitter @marisolreports.

KEVIN STARK is KQED’s senior editor managing its climate and health desks. Follow him on Twitter @starkkev.

254

BIANCA TAYLOR is an audio producer and the host of KQED’s Consider This podcast. To hear her work, visit SoundsLikeBianca.com.

Acknowledgments “Team work makes the dream work,” they say, and this book is a true reflection of that. To the Bay Curious audience, who have sent in thousands of questions over the years, I am so thankful and humbled by your participation. Nothing we do would be possible without you. Stories in this book came from questions submitted by Kelsey Poole, Erin Al Gwaiz, Betsy, Rebecca Williams, Jennifer Jacobs, José Muñoz, Ventura Albor, Shirley Yuen, Kelly Hardesty, Michelle Morby, John Aird, Gary Pilgram, Craig Rubens, Brent Silver, Amanda Upchurch, Joseph Morales, Mark Isaak, Bronwyn Pidgeon, Kevin Branch, Rena Yang, Matthew Cross, Peter Cavagnaro, Sandra Julien, Scott Brenner, Britt McEachern, Duncan Keefe, Ayran Michaels, Eric Johnson, Ben Kaiser, Jess Lyons, Shridhar Ramachandran, Jessica Schimm, Terry, Héctor Pérez, Joseph Fletcher, Clara Echavarria, Stephanie Schmidt, Jason Hanson, Thomas Sorensen, Donna Pantaleoni, Jared Muirhead, Matteen Mokalla, Debbie Torrey, and Kate Groschner. To the journalists whose work appears throughout these pages—thank you. The work of a journalist is hard and thankless, but you do it with sharp eyes, compassion, and a relentless dedication to public service. Every single person who has spent time on the Bay Curious team has shaped the project, and ultimately this book. Thank you Vinnee Tong, Jessica Placzek, Katrina Schwartz, Brendan Willard, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Kyana Moghadam, and Rob Speight. Working alongside you has been among the greatest pleasures of my career.

I am forever indebted to Jennifer Brandel, whose Curious City program at WBEZ gave birth to Hearken, and the larger public-powered journalism movement that inspired Bay Curious. David Weir and Holly Kernan trusted me to lead the effort at KQED, and I am so grateful for your belief in me and support over the years. Fun fact: This is KQED’s first book! Thank you to Julie Caine, Ethan Toven-Lindsey, and Rebecca Hopkins for helping make it possible. To Juliette Capra at Chronicle Books, you are a thoughtful and meticulous editor who asked the right questions and made this book better. Thanks also to Steve Mockus and Jon Glick for your vision and creativity. Alexandra Bowman, your illustrations are beyond beautiful and capture the spirit of Bay Curious. I am in awe. Mom and Dad, thanks for filling your homes with newspapers, always playing NPR in the car, and watching the nightly news. I think it made an impact! Thanks also to my brother, Zach, extended family members, and friends for your support, love, and encouragement. Lastly, and closest to my heart, I want to thank my husband, Sam, and son, Sullivan. I started on this project while seven months pregnant and finished the first draft when Sullivan was three months old. The stories in this book will forever be entwined with our own family story, and those bleary-eyed but blissful early days together. Every new chapter of life has been a joy so far, and I can’t wait to see where our story goes next.

255

About the Author Olivia Allen-Price is the creator, host, and senior editor of KQED’s award-winning Bay Curious podcast. Before joining KQED she worked at the Baltimore Sun and the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia. She grew up in North Carolina, went to Elon University, and now lives in San Mateo, California, with her husband and son. She loves running on the roads and trails around the San Francisco Bay Area and taking weekend trips around California with her family. Follow her work at oliviaallenprice.com.

256