A city-state frame of mind - San Francisco

National Review, Feb 19, 1990 by William A. Rusher

Yet here I was, being told by my Los Angeles friend that "none of this is real"!

Believe it or not, I can see what he means. The filet of San Francisco is a pie-shaped wedge of land with City Hall as its apex, Market and Van Ness as its sides, and the curving bayfront as its crust. Within that wedge lie Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, the financial district, the Civic Center, Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf, the Tenderloin, North Beach, Union Square, the Embarcadero: most, in short, of what San Francisco is famous for. This choice segment of San Francisco and the Bay area isn't so much a city as a state of mind: a set of images, sounds, odors, sentiments, and experiences. To some extent these are "real," in that they survive and have their functions today. But to a very large extent they exist (if at all, outside the realm of recollection and imagination) only by virtue of successive heroic acts of municipal sentimentality.

Take the famous cable-cars. They were positively made for me. They will take me from my door to almost any destination in the heart of town where I might want to go--and do it, moreover for just 15 cents, so fond is San Francisco of us geezers over 65. (For you, buster, the charge is two bucks.)

And yet there is really no excuse for the cable-cars whatever. Frequent municipal buses carry many more passengers faster and farther (and even retain the 15-cent fare for "senior citizens"). No San Franciscan under 65 in his righ mind will pay two dollars to ride a cable-car if there is any reasonable alternative; they are obviously priced to exclude everyone but the elderly and the invaluable free-spending tourists.

And yet, when the citizens of San Francisco faced the choice, a few years ago, of scrapping the cable-cars or repairing them at huge expense, they didn't bat an eyelash. The cable-cars were rehabilitated without the slightest visible change, and are now ready to rattle and ring up and down the hills of San Francisco for another hundred years.

They are, you see, San Francisco's gondolas: a ridiculously outmoded form of transportation, but one with a unique charm and an unbreakable link to the history and meaning of the city.

And it is to Venice, I think, that we must look for the true analogy to this relatively small but very select portion of San Francisco and the Bay area. Venice, to be sure, is much further along their common road, but the similarities are plain. Both once counted for more in the great parade. Both chose to yield their place in it to others, in return for something they valued even more. Both, moreover, forsook it for the same ideal--one that Los Angeles has never even heard of. It is the only ideal that has ever seemed more seductive to men than power: a dream of charm, and grace, and almost implausible loveliness.