Storming the Gates of Paradise (49 page)

If you imagine the city as a body, plazas are not, like streets, mere arteries of activity; rather, a plaza is the heart, the central place from which the lifeblood of a community issues. This means, of course, that many American cities have had fatal coronaries, or equally fatal coronary bypasses, and that we face a crisis of heartless cities. In 1966, that great historian of the American landscape J. B. Jackson wrote that the federal government “is everywhere destroying public gathering places near or around Federal buildings. Small-town post offices, formerly congenial gathering places, have been landscaped and isolated; and the very term ‘public building’ has become a contradiction: no one in his right mind goes into a public building except on business. One thing can be said: there must be many more such places, large and small, scattered throughout our communities.”

When San Francisco was Yerba Buena, a dusty hamlet on the northeastern edge of the San Francisco peninsula, the place had a center: Portsmouth Square. During the Gold Rush era, it was lined with gambling houses. The Indian trader James Savage came to town in 1850, camped out there, and reputedly started an Indian war when he bet his weight in gold on the turn of a card, since that gold belonged to his entourage of Native Californians. Portsmouth Square was eviscerated by a parking garage and a concrete bridge to the Holiday Inn across Kearny
Street, though it’s still a nice park for Chinatown. And San Francisco? Any place so big really has multiple centers. There’s the Market and Powell cable car turnaround, where emergency marches have long met, most notably the evening the Gulf War broke out in 1991, and where tourists and street performers meet. There’s Dolores Park, the green space for the Mission. There are key spots for each neighborhood—small parks, shopping streets, other plazas. But U.N. Plaza is different. It’s not just a symbolic center of the city, but of the world. Not the center—there are infinite such places—but a center, a local center of the globe, a place where you know where you stand in the world in the most practical and metaphysical senses. The longitude and latitude written in the concrete are just a beginning.

The United Nations, of course, was founded in San Francisco in 1945, inside the War Memorial Building over on McAllister and Van Ness. For the U.N.’s fiftieth anniversary, the city redesigned the plaza to reflect this history. As you walk from Bolívar to Market Street, you pass some of the principal statements from the founding document, inscribed in huge metal letters inset into the ground. “We the people of the United Nations determined to save the world from the scourge of war . . . to reaffirm faith in basic human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.” On either side of this processional space are cement pillars on which are inscribed the years various nations joined up: you can see the fall of the Soviet empire part way down, with nations like Kazakhstan liberated to become members. Most days, homeless people sit around the fountain, on the low cement walls of the flanking grassy beds, and on the base of the Bolívar statue. In some parts of the world, housing is considered a basic human right.

One afternoon not long ago, a shy boy in a knit cap took one of the neat takeout cartons of hot food and a donated carton of Juicy Juice and called me ma’am when he thanked me, in an accent so sweet I had to ask where he was from. Kentucky, he said. Then the bowed-down old woman across the plaza, hearing that I was handing out food from a Buddhist organization, told me that she had been stationed in Tibet during World War II. “Really?” I said, and she unzipped her plastic carryall and showed me the ivory Buddha she said she’d been carrying ever since. A dark-skinned man cheerfully greeted me in a British accent: “Is that
dinner, tea, or supper you’re offering?” Which would you prefer, I asked, and he said, “Supper, please,” and I handed over the goods.

A recent letter to the editor referred to these people “as the multitude of winos, junkies, and crack heads who have infected our city streets and transformed San Francisco into an open sewer.” One of the nice things about handing out food is that I’ve been approaching the crackheads and finding that even they have a graciousness less evident in many more affluent people. Undoubtedly there are criminals among them, as there are among CEOs and Catholic priests these days, and it’s clearer that many of them are suffering deeply. Occasionally I see one of them shooting up (not nearly the threat to me that, say, seeing a Range Rover running a light is, remember, please), but even these characters tend to be well-mannered. But seeing them here in the heart of the city reminds me of the medieval Christian and still-pervasive Asian belief that giving alms is a spiritual duty and that beggars provide us with our opportunity to fulfill it, to make a society that is by definition interdependent.

Twice a week, the interdependence of the city and the country is clear. Farm booths and tables form two long lines in front of the columns of United Nations members, and the plaza becomes a kind of United California conference. Some farmers markets are upscale, but this market is down home. It serves the Tenderloin’s Asian communities, who, like inner-city dwellers across the nation, have to get by without a nearby supermarket, and it also sells to downtown workers and to people catching the bus back to the Richmond, who leave laden with plastic bags sagging with the bounty. There are Southeast Asian families who set up tables piled high with cilantro, basil, mint, and other herbs less familiar to me; the Grandpa’s Sweetness honey people from Turlock with their jars of gold; the Safest Dates on Earth stand with organic and fresh dates from the Mojave; the organic farmers from Davenport, near Santa Cruz, in season; the Latino flower growers who show up some of the time; and the big stand that always anchors the northeast end, staffed by an older woman and her Latino assistants from Half Moon Bay, selling everything from onions to roses. I love it. Where else can you meet the people who grow your food? Where else can you get the feeling that the food might come out of a real place, where people make a living wage, rather than
the unsavory mysteries of agribusiness? Where else can you find out that the pomegranate season will be short because of early rain in the San Joaquin Valley or learn why dry-farmed tomatoes are so tasty?

And where else does good food coexist with free speech in such a resonant way? The huge peace march on February 16, 2003, the one with two hundred thousand people, a Korean youth drum group, a Chinese New Year’s dragon, stilt-walkers, Palestinian women, a lot of baby carriages and white-haired people—mostly turned off at McAllister Street to fill up Civic Center Plaza, a pleasant dead zone that comes alive only at such times. I broke through the ranks of watchers on the curb to go to the farmers market that Sunday and saw that a few booths were still open, and demonstrators were lining up to buy samosas from the Indian food stand and kettle corn from the popcorn booth. The homeless, the farmers, and the peace marchers were all in it together.

Cities are where people are citizens, where they coexist in public, generating that public life so vital to a democracy, which depends on our sense of connection and trust in strangers, who become less strange when we move among them every day. Too many American cities are just vast suburbs, with people segregated by race, income, and avocation, and by their dependence on private automobiles to get around. Even in true cities, democracy, citizenship, public life can be just words. But in U.N. Plaza, you can stand and look east at TRUTH or west past Bolívar to imagine the curve of the earth over the blue horizon toward Asia; or you can just look your fellow human beings in the eye and know that you’re a citizen, of a city, of a state, of the world.

Panoramic photographs taken after the 1906 earthquake show that the old San Francisco was gone, replaced by jagged, smoldering spires and piles of ruins. Photographs made a century later demonstrate that the ruins are likewise gone, erased more definitively than the earthquake erased the nineteenth-century city. Ruins represent the physical decay of what preceded them, but their removal erases meaning and memory. Ruins are monuments, but while intentional monuments articulate desire for permanence, even immortality, ruins memorialize the fleeting nature of all things and the limited powers of humankind. “Decay can be halted, but only briefly, and then it resumes. It is the negative image of history,” wrote landscape historian J. B. Jackson. It is the negative image of history and a necessary aspect of it. To erase decay or consciousness of decay, decline, entropy, and ruin is to erase the understanding of the unfolding relation between all things, of darkness to light, of age to youth, of fall to rise. Rise and fall go together; they presume each other.

In another sense, everything is the ruin of what came before. A table is the ruin of a tree, as is the paper you hold in your hands; a carved figure is the ruin of the block from which it emerged, a block whose removal scarred the mountainside from which it was hacked; and anything made of metal requires earth upheaval and ore extraction on a scale of extraordinary disproportion to the resultant product. To imagine the metamorphoses that are life on earth at its grandest scale is to
imagine both creation and destruction, and to imagine them together is to see their kinship in the common ground of change, abrupt and gradual, beautiful and disastrous, to see the generative richness of ruins and the ruinous nature of all change. “The child is father to the man,” declared Wordsworth, but the man is also the ruin of the child, as much as the butterfly is the ruin of the caterpillar. Corpses feed flowers; flowers eat corpses. San Francisco has been ruined again and again, only most spectacularly in 1906, and those ruins too have been erased and forgotten and repeated and erased again.

A city—any city, every city—is the eradication, even the ruin, of the landscape from which it rose. In its fall, that original landscape sometimes triumphs. One day, I looked up from an intersection in San Francisco’s densely urban Mission District and saw down the street to the south the undomesticated crest of Bernal Heights, with its coyote and wild blackberries, and up the street to the west the ridgeline of Twin Peaks and with a shudder perceived, still present as a phantom, the steep natural landscape that underlay the city, the skin beneath the clothes, the landscape that reappeared amid the miles of ruins of the 1906 earthquake and that someday will reassert itself again. Another day, I walked down Hayes Street west of City Hall and saw suddenly the surprising view of Bernal Hill across half the distance of the city, a vista opened up by the belated removal of the freeway overpass damaged by the 1989 earthquake. Some months before, I had watched the wrecking ball smash that overpass into chunks of rebar-threaded concrete small enough to truck away. The concrete mined from some place out of sight was being sent back over the horizon. A place like San Francisco could be imagined not as one city stretching out since 1846 but as dozens of cities laid over each other’s ruins, the way that archaeologists experience the unearthed ruins layered in strata, the several cities that lay above Homer’s Troy. Dolls, whiskey and medicine bottles, buttons, sometimes ships and skeletons reappear along with the sand whenever a new foundation is dug in central San Francisco.

To make this city, much of a windswept, fog-shrouded expanse of sand dunes and chaparral-covered hillsides was smoothed over, dunes removed, hilltops flattened, bays and marshes filled in, streams forced underground, endemic species driven into extinction. Even the view of the resultant simplified topography was
obscured by the buildings everywhere, though one of San Francisco’s charms is its still-surviving steepness: the crests and heights offer views of the distance—not only of the rest of the city, but the sea, bay, and hills beyond it. Another is the pure geometry of its grid, often criticized for being an overly two-dimensional response to a wildly three-dimensional terrain, but these straight axes also open up the distance visible at the end of the long shafts of streets. San Francisco is the least claustrophobic of cities. Both big earthquakes of the twentieth century shook the place loose of its bonds—the carpet of architecture in 1906, the ugly shackles of the Embarcadero and Central freeways in 1989.

In natural disasters, the natural landscape reasserts itself and reappears, not only as force but as the contours beneath the cityscape. Cities are always maintained, for natural processes of decay produce ruins as surely as violence and fire, flood and earthquake do; and only maintenance and replacement postpone the inevitable ruin—the entropy of the built and the return of the organic. In his
Arcades Project
notes, Walter Benjamin quotes a Victor Hugo poem:

I think I see a Gothic roof start laughing

When, from its ancient frieze,

Time removes a stone and puts in a nest.

Stone to nest may be the death of a piece of architecture, but it is also a coming to life. Cities are a constant assertion against the anarchic forces of nature, and a disaster like an earthquake is the opposite, nature’s assertion against the built world. San Francisco is the ruin of a lonely, untrammeled landscape, its buildings the ruin of forests, stony landscapes, gypsum deposits, veins of iron deep in the earth—and after 1906 all these sources were raided again, with urgency and intensity. A few trees were snapped by the earthquake, but forests were laid low for the hasty rebuilding of San Francisco.

The catastrophe of earthquakes is largely the catastrophe of built structures. Trees fall down or snap or split only in the most extreme earthquakes (as a few did here and there from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Sonoma coast in 1906); under the open sky, creatures may lose their balance, but they are not likely to be
crushed. Large earthquakes can also split open the ground and dam and redirect streams, but these are not catastrophic effects. Before the Franciscans brought adobe architecture and the Gold Rush brought more massive development, the Bay Area’s Ohlone and Miwok and other indigenous Californians likely regarded earthquakes with wonder and terror but suffered little physical damage. Any lightweight structures that fell down could easily be rebuilt, and little damage to life would result from such a collapse.