Storming the Gates of Paradise (52 page)

Already in the mid-1970s, when I was a student at Columbia, my windows gave out onto the plaza of the School of International Affairs, where on winter nights troops of feral dogs would arrive to bed down on the heating grates. Since then the city had lapsed even further. On Canal Street stood a five-story building empty of human tenants that had been taken over from top to bottom by pigeons. If you walked east on Houston Street from the Bowery on a summer night, the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square. At that time much of Manhattan felt depopulated even in daylight. . . . In 1978 I got used to seeing large fires in that direction every night, usually set by arsonists hired by landlords of empty buildings who found it an easy choice to make, between paying property taxes and collecting insurance. By 1980 Avenue C was a lunar landscape of vacant blocks and hollow tenement shells.

What happened in New York was more dramatic and more visible (though it since seems to have been forgotten), but it paralleled the slow, violent death of the modern city and the industrial age across the United States, a death that was itself part of the larger passing of the utopian (and often socialist) belief in a rationalist, technological future that those cities once embodied. The old blue-collar cities of manufacturing and shipping were dying, to be replaced in some cases by sleek new cities dealing in information, of which San Francisco and Manhattan are among the most prominent. New York’s ports moved to New Jersey; San Francisco’s ports moved to Oakland and Long Beach; railyards closed, as did countless small urban manufacturing sites; jobs went overseas. A sort of forest succession stage took place: the abandoned sweatshops and manufactories became artists’ lofts in San Francisco’s South of Market and New York’s Soho, and then lawyers and others more powerful than artists priced them out. Artists represented a sort of lull between two economies, as did the ruins, and perhaps both represented a moment of openness in the meaning and imagination of the city, a pause in urban busyness to wonder and reflect. Artists in these circumstances often became their communities’ historians, servants of memory and thus of ruin.

The ruins: they were part of the San Francisco I came to inhabit in 1980. They no longer exist. They were a significant part of the cityscape of my youth, a cityscape of vacant lots and empty factories, of low-pressure zones in which housing was not so hard to come by and economic choices were not so anxiety-ridden. The ruins signified much to us in the 1980s, as under Ronald Reagan’s nuclear brinksmanship we anticipated the end-of-the-world war. The apocalypse seemed close at hand, and the post-apocalyptic landscape was imagined as a landscape of ruins, the landscape of road warriors and terminators. But the ruins lay in the present, not in the future: we were not living before ruin but after it, after the ruin of the old cities that had been written about by people like Joseph Mitchell in his decades of
New Yorker
reportage, the blue-collar cities with room for everyone, the muscular, industrial cities that looked like the future in the first decades of the twentieth century and became the abandoned past by the last two or three.

The ruins were the backdrop—often literally—of punk rock and performance art; San Francisco’s Survival Research Labs performed their rites of mechanical
failure, their avant-garde demolition derbies between handcrafted machines, in parking lots, in vacant lots, and, at least once, at the site of an abandoned brewery that has been replaced by a Costco. (The movement from local beer production to the consumption of transnational products is one way to trace the trajectory of cities over the past several decades.) And the ruins were our psychic landscape: like Luc Sante, we who were young gloried in the liberatory spaces of abandonment and destruction, found in the ruins a mirror for our own wildness, our own desire to locate an outside to the strictures of society. I think back to that moment when the Portals of the Past framed not a mansion, not a garden, but a whole smoldering terrain, more tragic but also more wide open than before or after, a long pause between two phases, as ruins often are.

And then the ruins were gone—not all at once, but incrementally, throughout the nineties, first in slow stages, then, in San Francisco, in a sudden rush of money as dramatic as any disaster. At the turn of the century, at the height of the dot-com boom, twenty million dollars of venture capital was being pumped into the Bay Area each day, and it swept away not just empty and abandoned spaces but also the poor, the eclectic, the alternative, small businesses, and nonprofits; drowned countless continuities, the small stores and elderly residents and longtime denizens who constituted the place’s memory and links to the past. After decades of neglect, vacant lots everywhere filled up, as though the long, sighing exhale of loss had become a quick, choking inhale of cash. You walked down the street and saw a new hair salon or a Starbucks and tried to remember what it had replaced—a fried-chicken shop? an upholstery store? a storefront gospel church?—and then one day you walked down the street and didn’t remember how new all this new San Francisco was. Photographers ran around like ethnographic photographers a century before, trying to preserve some sense of the disintegrating communities. Sometimes, as if it had been a neutron bomb, this onslaught of wealth just destroyed the contents of buildings, their fragile residents forced out with their souvenirs and memories; sometimes it tore down less valuable buildings to replace them with ones that would yield more profit and accommodate other populations.

Tens of thousands of newcomers arrived to live not in the San Francisco they found but the San Francisco built out of their paychecks and stock options, a place
full of brand-new bars and restaurants and boutiques, a place where condominiums—particularly pseudo-industrial lofts—were springing up by the thousands, where nonprofits and small businesses, the economically marginal, and seniors and families were being evicted at a rate several times that of a few years earlier. I am never sure whether these newcomers were the barbarians sacking our Rome or whether they were the Romans—after all, they represented order and homogeneity and a consolidated future—sacking our Barbary Coast. But they came and they ravaged the city. Then, early in 2001, their technology bubble burst, leases went into default, rental prices that had increased astronomically sagged slightly, restaurants folded, and the boom became a bad memory or a bad case of amnesia. It was as though that futurist technological utopianism that had died out with modernism had lurched back to life, but not for long, not with a credible foundation.

The 1989 earthquake is not what I count as the tenth destruction of San Francisco. For me, that destruction was, like the ninth, economic: the sack of the city by wealth during the heyday of the dot-com boom, circa 1998–2001. Wealth did to us what poverty did to New York—or perhaps both could be identified as the same force, as greed (for it was not the poor but the landlords’ profiteering that caused those Bronx and Lower East Side fires). Like all the previous destructions, this one did not destroy the city, but it destroyed
a
city, a slightly rougher, more diverse, more creative city that is gone forever (though the current city too is temporary, and not all of us were uprooted).

The first nine destructions created ruins; the tenth erased them in a frenzy of development, demolition, eviction, and replacement.

Where ought one to situate another invisible age of ruin, the generation of the armies of the homeless, who camp out as though the city was ruined, bombed, as though they are not the species for whom it was built, a crisis that has in two decades become the ordinary state of things, these people who are themselves a ruin of sorts, not of their own lives but of the civility that we used to believe aligned with citizenry and cities? Perhaps they are refugees from the cities that no longer exist, the industrial cities with uncomplicated jobs, unions, job security, blue-collar housing, New Deal and Great Society social programs, and stable networks. The structure of the Hibernia Bank at McAllister and Market Streets survived
the 1906 earthquake. I believe it was still a bank at some point in my tenure in San Francisco, and then it was a police substation. But for many years it has been empty, and homeless people have sat on its steps, as though the city had never been rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake, as though generations had come of age in the ruins. And then, the other day, I passed it and a set of mobile barricades had been erected around the broad, inviting corner steps so that it was truly abandoned, inside and out.

W. G. Sebald wrote of the erasure of Germany’s wartime damage: “From the outset, the now legendary and in some respects genuinely admirable reconstruction of the country after the devastation wrought by Germany’s wartime enemies, a reconstruction tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nation’s own past history, prohibited any look backward. It did so through the sheer amount of labor required and the creation of a new, faceless reality, pointing the population exclusively towards the future and enjoining on it silence about the past.” This is the silence more devastating than ruin.

Construction in San Francisco is always a reminder that this place was once little more than dunes: under nearly every building is sand. Around noon on September 10, 2001, I went to see the great oaken rib cage of a 409-ton merchant ship that had been excavated from the sand of a construction site at Battery and Clay, in the heart of the financial district. The dark curved beams were huge, speaking both of forests ancient at the time of their cutting more than a century and a half ago and of the skill and brute exertion that shaped forests into ships. Office workers on their lunch break peered through the Cyclone fence at the site, somehow drawn out of themselves in this place where ordinarily even eye contact is an expenditure few will make; they seemed to feel part of something, and the place was somehow enlarged—not only in its sense of time, as the ship’s hull made visible the ruined city of 1851, but also in its sense of community. It was an enchanted moment.

During the Gold Rush, hundreds of ships were abandoned in San Francisco’s harbor because so many sailors deserted to head for the mines. Some vessels rotted in the water, but several were hauled ashore and used as warehouses and homes. As the city filled in downtown’s shallow cove to create more prime real estate, strangers “were astonished to see the hull of a large ship located in the very heart of the city, surrounded on all sides with large blocks of substantial stone and brick edifices.” It was a wild, provisional city, built not only on sand and landfill but on greed, the greed of those hoping to make a killing in the gold mines or in the frenzy of real estate speculation and retailing from which most of the real fortunes came. Only disaster drew people out of themselves, notably the fires that plagued the
early city: San Francisco’s first fraternal societies were companies of volunteer firemen.

The ship we stood around and looked at on September 10, the
General Harrison
, had burned to the ground in one of those fires. That fire, the fifth great fire of San Francisco, was thought to have been started by an arsonist near midnight on May 3, 1851. Violent winds turned it into a general conflagration, and when it was over, about ten million dollars’ worth of goods and property and two thousand buildings—all downtown—had burned. Citizens by the hundreds or thousands rushed to the scene to fight the fire. Hoping to protect themselves and their goods from the frequent blazes, some had built masonry and iron structures, but those who took refuge in them mostly died, and died horribly: masonry collapsed, temperatures in intact structures became unbearable, and the iron doors swelled in the heat and could not be opened. The hulls of the old ships below ground survived, to be buried beneath the new city that arose on top of them, the city that would burn down again in 1906.

Late on the morning of September 11, 2001, unable to concentrate on anything else and frustrated by the uninformative repetition on the radio—I don’t have a television—I went to the gym at the college up the street from me. The TVs that usually play rock videos were tuned to CNN, and the dozen or so of us there wavered between working out and gathering around the screen when something new or dramatic occurred. The towers collapsed over and over. The footage taken by a camera held backward by a fleeing cameraman played again and again, and we watched his shadow jolt after him down a New York street full of figures chased by boiling white dust. In the gym, a muscle-bound young man went around and told everyone in a voice tense with emotion where the nearest blood bank was. In the hours and days that followed, everyone agreed that the world was changed, though no one knew exactly how. It was not just the possibility of a war, but the sense of the relation between self and world that changed, at least for Americans.

To live entirely for one’s self in private is a huge luxury, a luxury countless aspects of this society encourage; but like a diet of pure foie gras, it clogs and narrows
the arteries of the heart. This is what we’re encouraged to crave in this country, but most of us crave, more deeply, something with more grit, more substance. Since my home county was faced with a disastrous drought when I was fifteen, I have been fascinated by the way people rise to the occasion of a disaster. In that drought, the wealthy citizens of that county enjoyed self-denial for the public good more than they enjoyed private abundance the rest of the time. The 1989 Loma Prieta quake shook San Francisco into the here and now: I remember how my anger at someone suddenly ceased to matter, and so did my plans. The day after the quake, I walked around town to see people I cared about, and the world was local and immediate. Not just because the Bay Bridge was damaged and there were practical reasons to stay home, but because the long-term perspective from which so much dissatisfaction and desire come was shaken too: life, meaning, value were close to home, in the present. We who had been through the quake were present and connected—connected to death, to fear, to the unknown, but in being so connected one could feel empathy, passion, and heroism as well. We could feel strongly, and that is itself something hard to find in the anesthetizing distractions of this society.