City of High Spirits

By KURT ANDERSEN

The delegates, too, may leave their hearts in San Francisco

Many Americans say they hate New York City, and New Yorkers love to loathe Los Angeles. Most people could find something unflattering to say about Boston, Washington or Chicago. But San Francisco is charmed. Just mention the city, and ordinary folks turn weak-kneed, as if recalling some perfect spring or long-lost romance.

San Francisco is beautiful, vivacious. San Francisco is physically dramatic. San Francisco is funky but clean, elegant but spunky. San Francisco is tolerant of crazes (beatniks, hippies, microchip venture capitalists), yet preserves the old (cable cars, Victorian follies). If an out-of-town churl dares suggest that the city may be too cute for its own good, he is politely ignored. But disparagement by outsiders is uncommon: ever since the Democrats announced last year that they would hold their convention in San Francisco, politicians and journalists have savored the prospect. The city's high spirits are contagious and self-justifying.

It has always been so. San Francisco was gay when that meant merry and blithe, back when its 49ers were gold prospectors, not football players. The city began as a boom town and never quite lost the founding giddiness. "San Francisco was zero in 1848, a Mexican village," says Kevin Starr, author of Americans and the California Dream. "And in 1870 it was the tenth-largest city in the United States." Ne'er-do-wells found themselves making fortunes on minerals or dry goods or prostitution. Young Yankees rode into town by the thousands, looking for adventure and gold. "It was never your average American city," Starr says. "San Francisco, right from the start, was a second chance, a new beginning."

Like America itself, in other words, but more urban, more hopped up, less buttoned down. San Francisco's mild but flighty climate must nurture eccentrics. In 1849, the city's commissioner of deeds resigned to become a singer-songwriter. Some years later, a circus geek called Oofty Goofty became a sidewalk S-M entrepreneur: he let passers-by cane him for a quarter or hit him with a baseball bat for four bits. When another local loon, the self-appointed Norton I, Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, died in 1880, 30,000 people (out of a population of 234,000) went to the funeral. A century later, a punk rocker named Jello Biafra ran for mayor and finished fourth among ten candidates. Rudyard Kipling wrote that San Francisco was "a mad city--inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty." He liked it. Other American cities had their rambunctious phases, but San Francisco (pop. 706,000) never left its adolescence entirely behind.

The city, of course, was no land's end colony of sybarites and free spirits. Wharves, canneries and dynamite factories were built. Immigrants arrived from China, Italy and Ireland, hoping to better their lot through hard work. After the 1906 earthquake, there was plenty of work to do. The city's two glorious bridges and half the buildings standing today were built during the 35 years between the quake and World War II. The names of immigrants who rebuilt San Francisco turn up everywhere in the city. There is a Molinari Delicatessen and a John Molinari who sits on the eleven-member board of supervisors. There is the Fisherman's Wharf fish market called F. Alioto Fish Co., and Lawyer Joseph Alioto, the former mayor. Alfred Nelder was once police chief; Wendy Nelder is now president of the board of supervisors. These fourth-generation families give San Francisco a solid core of culturally conservative citizens.

San Francisco has been ambivalent about its shifting myths, and seems to cringe each decade as the national press discovers the newest social kink cum movement. In 1957, Poet Allen Ginsberg and other shooting stars of his generation ("starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn," he wrote in Howl) were said to compose a San Francisco renaissance. The city was besieged by sophomores with a taste for espresso and random-access verse. When 1967 sparked and sputtered through town, the beatniks had given way to Haight-Ashbury hippies. They were less high-strung and, like, not into the whole verbal trip, O.K.? There was an influx of homosexuals during and after World War II, but it was nothing like the flamboyant wave that arrived in the 1970s. By 1977, when Gay Activist Harvey Milk won a seat on the board of supervisors, his Castro Street district was populated in great measure by similarly trim, tan men, and after Milk was assassinated in 1978, thousands of them rioted.

Other places have large homosexual populations, but nowhere are gays more conspicuous than in San Francisco, where they are said to make up 20% of the adult population. In the 1960s the police department went out of its way to raid gay bars, and recently a homosexual chorus was forbidden to sing in a Roman Catholic church. But the ill will has diminished a lot in the past few years. "We have fights going on in this town," says Supervisor Harry Britt, Milk's successor, "but we don't have fights between gays and straights."

The San Francisco homosexual community is more self-aware, more of a community, than any other on earth. Gays have their own savings and loan association, car-insurance agency and funeral parlor. There are gay newspapers, gay hotels and gay travel agencies. There is also, sad to say, a gay health crisis. About one in every thousand San Franciscans has AIDS. According to a sketchy study released last week, at least half the city's homosexuals may have been exposed to the disease.

Gay or straight, San Franciscans pursue the good life with vigor. Boutiques are endemic. Fine fresh food and exquisite wines are a local industry. A daily jog provides a runner's high. Cocaine was big. BMWs still are. In such a city, thick with gays and Yuppies, the similarity between those two demographic subsets is striking.

An unexpected notion occurs: Yuppies are, in a sense, heterosexual gays. Among middle-class people, after all, gays formed the original two-income households and were the original gentrifiers, the original body cultists and dapper health-club devotees, the trendy homemakers, the refined, childless world travelers. Yuppies merely appended the term "life-style" and put a conventional sexual spin on things. Together, the two groups have made the birth rate in San Francisco (12.1 per 1,000) lowest among the 20 largest U.S. cities. San Francisco Yuppies, if they do not commute to a Silicon Valley computer company, tend to work downtown.

Downtown has a newish, rising skyline, with the 48-story Transamerica Pyramid building as the exotic centerpiece. Since 1982, a new skyscraper has been topped off every five weeks. San Francisco's aggregate office space has doubled since the Haight's Summer of Love in 1967, and now, with 55 million sq. ft., there is enough to give every man, woman and child in San Francisco an office. Yuppie businesspeople, lawyers and engineers have prospered in this white-collar boom.

But many are now worried that the triangular district below California Street is becoming too dense and vertical--"Manhattanized." William Hambrecht, 48, co-founder of one of the city's most successful investment banks, has regrets. "When we opened in 1964, Montgomery Street was like a small town," he says of his office's neighborhood. "It had a sense of intimacy and a lot of small bars. Now it's more sterile and more like New York. I enjoy it less than I did." Like New York, San Francisco has welcomed foreign capitalists to invest in the city. Says Samuel Armacost, president of Bank of America: "I could throw a baseball from this window and hit 30 or 40 foreign banks."

Especially Asian ones, such as the Fuji Bank International on California Street and the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp. on Sansome Street. San Francisco now has fifth-generation Chinese Americans. The Census Bureau puts the city's Asian population at 22%, just about equal to that of blacks and Hispanics combined, and the true figure is probably higher. San Francisco has eight Chinese-language daily newspapers and four pages of Wongs in its telephone book. At Father Armand Oliveri's St. Peter and St. Paul Church on Washington Square, the altar boys are Chinese. If the last century's Asian immigrants (and the serpentine fogs) helped give San Francisco its Dashiell Hammett aura, the recent arrivals from the Philippines, South Korea and Hong Kong are giving it an enterprising no-nonsense edge.

San Francisco's compact size (30,000 acres, one-tenth the size of Los Angeles) gives it an advantage over sprawling metropolises. The supply of land is so small and the demand so great that commercial and residential real estate is at a premium (the average house costs $150,900, more than in any other city). Many people and businesses are priced out of the city. The auto assembly plants, the significant port facilities and the sprawling ghettos are across the bay in Oakland; the tract houses are south, out side the city limits. With its affluent tax base and light load of urban ills, San Francisco has been able to build a cushy municipal budget surplus ($130 million).

San Francisco is exceedingly pleased with its eclectic self. But worldliness, when it is crammed into the tip of a cramped peninsula, can take on a parochial cast.

Home-town pride produces a civic-mindedness that borders on the obsessive. In the Potrero Hill neighborhood, a builder wants to put up some stores on a pizza shop's back lot. A petition drive and local media brouhaha have deterred him. Why?

Because two goats live in the lot; because it is San Franscisco. "There are so many community watchdogs," says Robert Pritikin, an advertising executive and inn owner, "so many officious little rich ladies, so many intensely worried lawyers, that if some city official dares steal a postage stamp, it will be on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. " It is also true that beneath its mellow exterior, San Francisco has an edgy streak, an undercurrent of jitters. Perhaps it is because of the minor temblors that occasionally rattle the city, raising fears of a 1906 redux. Perhaps it is because many people come to San Francisco to flee their pasts. Whatever the reason, a great many San Franciscans are unable to go with the flow. "There's an inordinate number of people with serious mental-health problems," says Social Services Director Edwin Sarsfield. The Zodiac killer, who claims in letters that he murdered 37 people in the '60s and '70s, was never caught. Sara Jane Moore tried to shoot Gerald Ford in San Francisco. The Symbionese Liberation Army was nurtured there. Dan White, the baked-potato vendor and former city supervisor, shot and killed Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in city hall. Every couple of weeks or so, someone leaps off the Golden Gate Bridge into the deep blue sea. The city suicide rate is half again as high as the nation's.

But for every leaper, there are scores of San Franciscans who believe they have found the heavenly city. The reasons are unusually plain. There is the rich, Hopperesque sunlight. There is the cooling fog. And the sea breezes skittering up and down the hills. And the abounding good will. If San Francisco insists on delighting in itself, and even showing off -- with the All-Star Game this week, the Democrats next and the Super Bowl come winter -- 1984 is the year it deserves to be indulged.

With reporting by Michael Moritz, Dick Thompson