Postcards from the Rogue Valley

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City.” Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it.

Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me. – John Steinbeck, 
Travels with Charley

In September 1960, the famed Steinbeck and his 10-year-old French poodle, Charley, set off on a one-man, one-dog journey that would take them about 10,000 miles through 38 states in six weeks, ending in San Francisco. 

At age 58, in declining health and with more than 20 books published at that point in his career, Steinbeck’s aim was simple: After years of living in New York City, the native Californian wanted to see for himself how the country  had changed.

He writes about his first glimpse of “the City” after many years:

San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold—rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of busting excitement. She leaves a mark.

From Coit Tower to Fort Funston

I know what Steinbeck meant. I’ve been to the “gold and white acropolis” more times than I can count.

My first visit, though, didn’t go so well. When I was eight, on one of my family’s cross country trips from Princeton, New Jersey to my father’s summer job at RAND in Santa Monica, we traveled up the California coast to San Francisco. I remember my excitement giving way to terror as my adventure-seeking mother, behind the wheel of our 1955 manual transmission Plymouth station wagon, threaded her way down the narrow and curved Lombard Street, then headed up Filbert (with a grade of 31.5%) to Coit Tower, and finally tried her hand parking on the next steepest street she could find. By then, I was hugging the floorboard.

When I was thirteen, my mother divorced my Princeton mathematician father, married a mathematician at UCLA, and we moved to Los Angeles. I came to appreciate LA — or I should say the “westside” of LA with its beaches, canyons, relaxed vibes, and manicured streets — but I felt a kinship with those who put San Francisco first, a view many Angelinos saw as snobbish.

Our family made regular pilgrimages to the City. Our SF itinerary included a swing down Lombard Street, a trip up Coit Tower, a dinner at Alioto’s in Fisherman’s Wharf, a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, and a foray into Chinatown. 

When I headed East for college and an adult life in the Northeast, my trips home to Los Angeles often included a San Francisco “fix,” with new entries on the itinerary: the luscious, Victorian Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park; the ancient redwoods in Muir Woods; the skyhigh bar at the Top of the Mark; the Italian restaurants filling North Beach; the Marin Headlands with their breathtaking views of Golden Gate and San Francisco.

Later, when Tony and I introduced our sons, Carl and Dan, to the wonders of San Francisco, the list grew longer still: the Exploratorium with its hands-on science exhibits; the hang gliders soaring over the Pacific at Fort Funston; a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge; a visit to Haight-Ashbury; a ride on the Powell-Hyde cable car from Union Square to Fishermen’s Wharf.

Powerful learning with public purpose

Work, too, beckoned me to San Francisco. 

In the mid-1990s, trips to oversee the progress of the $50 million grant the city had received through the Annenberg Challenge, which I coordinated at Brown University, threw me into a Bay Area version of progressive education, where schools seeking to change teaching and learning turned to each other for ideas and support. I documented the efforts of a handful of Bay Area organizations, and the youth activists they supported, as they fought for a youth voice on the school board, the city council, and various commissions

I documented, too, the demands of students fighting back at an Oakland high school that had been picked by The Gates Foundation to be a test case for its campaign to break large high schools into a collection of separate “small schools,” to which students would be assigned rather than chose. At a school-wide assembly, I watched students pound the adults on stage with questions.

What’s your evidence that this idea will work? Are we guinea pigs? Just because Bill Gates is a billionaire, what gives him the right to come into our school and break it up, splitting friendships and relationships built over time? Why didn’t anyone consult us? Do you realize that without student support, this will fail?

In 2014, I took a different turn. I recruited a group of youth at the “Tenderloin Clubhouse,” part of the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, to create a photo essay about their lives in a neighborhood that scares tourists and San Franciscans alike, just blocks from the city’s wealthy financial district. Known for its large population of homeless and drug dealers and its long history of ill-repute, the Tenderloin had also become a bustling home to immigrant families drawn to its low rents, including my teen-aged collaborators who knew the residents and streets well and valued both. 

The resulting book, In Our Village: San Francisco’s Tenderloin Through the Eyes of Its Youth,  joined nine other publications my nonprofit What Kids Can Do had created with youth around the world, documenting daily life in their “village.”

San Francisco redux

Newly arrived in Ashland in 2018, after 50 years in the urban Northeast (an uprooting that still surprises me), I figured San Francisco would top the list of places Tony and I would visit soon after arriving.

We didn’t make it to the City, however, until the COVID pandemic was subsiding. We found no “gold and white acropolis,” but an empty downtown with a drug-user passed out, maybe dead, in the Union Square plaza across from our hotel. This was not the San Francisco I remembered.

Last week, we finally returned, drawn by a performance by my favorite violist, Hilary Hahn, with the San Francisco Symphony. (Many nights, I spend my evenings watching classical music concerts on YouTube.) When I reserved tickets two months ago, Hahn’s appearance was almost sold out.

I found a new hotel right off Union Square whose prices seemed unbeatable. I sketched our arrival, entering San Franciso via Golden Gate Bridge, including taking in the view of the bridge and the city from the Marin Headlands, and then proceeding to Coit Tower, a family heirloom.

Finding Citzen M, the stripped-down boutique hotel I’d reserved through Expedia, turned out to be the sort of thing that can end a marriage. We missed it on our first pass and spent the next 45 minutes trying to find our way back. Tony is a follow-all-the rules (signs) guy and I’m the opposite. In desperation, I channeled my mother (who never met a rule she liked) and ordered Tony to make turns where they weren’t permitted and drive in the transit lanes. Eventually we reached our destination. 

It took a beer to get us talking to each other again and another hour to learn our way around this new creature of a hotel, an import from Netherlands known for its minimalist accomodations: a king size bed with little additional furniture, a bathroom sink the size of a small bird bath, no color in the room but white. An iPad on the wall controlled everything from lighting — there were no switches — to window shades. The lounge, we quickly learned, was where people went for a comfortable seat and snacks. 

We were the only guests over 35.

Tourist- and car-free

One of the advantages of reaching the mid-70s and finding oneself waking up at 5:00 a.m. is that the streets — wherever you are — will be empty, whether it be New York or San Francisco.

At 6:30 the next morning, Tony and I were the first to board the Powell-Hyde Street cable car two blocks from our hotel. Fisherman’s Wharf, our destination, was equally deserted.

We walked the waterfront in the early morning sun, studied the tied-up boats poised to take deepsea fishing enthusiasts out for the day (for $200), and ended up at the dock where a colony of California sea lions — mostly male — have been homesteading since 1990. Though modest in numbers this day — one day in 2024, drawn by an explosion of anchovies, they numbered 2,000 — their cacophonous barks and gyrating bodies (some weighing 800 pounds) still filled the air.

Back at Union Square, we walked to the Museum of Contemporary Art, arriving when it opened its doors to a half dozen school groups heading to a special exhibit. We turned left when they turned right and found ourselves alone in the permanent galleries.

GPS told us that it was a 30 minute walk to the Louise Davies Symphony Hall, where we had a 1:30 date with Hilary Hahn. We set off again. 

The hall was packed when we arrived. A quick glance around suggested that Tony and I were among the youngest concert goers (the reverse of CitizenM), but we’ve gotten used to this. Hahn’s performance of Beethoven’s violin sonata was impeccable and after several standing ovations, she offered an encore. I was elated. It was a sad day, though, for Finnish conductor Esa Pekka-Salonen, who had recently resigned from his post directing the San Francisco Symphony when the board slashed his budget for the upcoming season, saying declining revenues required retrenchment.

Rather than walk the mile back to our hotel, we ordered a “Waymo,” the driverless taxis that can currently be secured through a phone app in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. We were clueless how the car would find us or vice versa; I had failed to read the fine print. I flagged down a young man near us and asked if he could help us. “I have no idea how it works, but I’ll give it a try,” he said. Someone suggested that we start by keeping an eye out for our initials on the rotating bulb on the car’s roof. 

The hardest part, it turned out, was figuring out how to open the doors on Waymo’s sleek Jaguar SUV when it arrived. (You use your phone to unlock the doors, it turns out.) We grabbed a seat just seconds before our driverless car would have left without us. We followed along on two screens and saw what Waymo saw; the sensors on the front, back, sides and top of the car were constantly whirring. (It’s a machine, after all.) Our non-human driver let us off several blocks from our hotel; we weren’t quite sure where we were. 

We spied the long line snaking into the Nintendo store that had taken up residence in a corner of the now defunct three-story Nordstrom near our hotel, and we got our bearings. Union Square, once home to one of the largest collections of department stores, upscale boutiques, gift shops, art galleries, and beauty salons in the United States, was now filled with “for lease” signs.. The just opened Nintendo store boasted: “Nintendo San Francisco opens its doors, bringing the gaming world to Union Square.”

Starlite 

Eversince Tony (channeling his Italian mother) took over our household cooking 45 years ago, we’ve been a family of foodies. When Tony cooked something fancy, our boys would rate the meal; they’ve become discriminating chefs themselves.

Before our trip, I’d drawn up a list of restaurants near Union Square that we might try. I’d also singled out an historic rooftop bar called Starlite, once frequented by Allen Ginsburg, whose cocktails reportedly rivaled its views. We’re mostly wine and beer drinkers, but we decided to stop at Starlite before heading to the Thai restaurant where we had a reservation. 

We were immediately smitten, adding a large bowl of “Furikake French Fries with citrus crème fraiche” to our margaritas to prolong our stay.

For our second and last day in the City, I had booked us a three-hour food walking tour through Chinatown. (Ordinarily, touring with a group is not our style, but the promise of sampling dim sum and Peking duck in restaurants with locals was a strong bait.) The food, it turned out, was mezzza mez, but the guide’s stories about Chinatown’s history had the savory the pot stickers lacked. Seeing a woman painstakingly insert fortunes into fresh hot wafers, then turning the corner to see women gambling at Mah Jong were my favorite scenes.

Later that afternoon, Tony and I returned to my list of dinner places to try. Asian fusion? Mediterranean? Sushi? An old-fashioned grill? Pushing foodie-ism aside, we headed back to the Starlite and replaced the previous night’s whisky and margarita with bolder choices.

Tony picked “A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day” featuring Roe & Co Irish Whiskey washed with brown Irish butter, Tempus Fugit Banana Liqeur, Sanchez Romate Gloroso Sherry, Fred Gerbis 16 Amaro, Il Mallo Nocino, salt, Guiness foam. I chose the “Porn Star Martini” with Grey Goose Vodka, passion fruit, lime, vanilla, cacao, champagne, luster.

We ordered the Furikake French Fries again, added a smashburger, and toasted the City that had lured us for years, however changed.

Yes, San Francisco, she still leaves a mark.

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