Which Is To Stay
It is a poor novelist who can be in a place five days and dare believe he can begin to understand it; it is a worse essayist who feels that he cannot. Having failed in both ambitions, I can only say that I have begun to feel something of an understanding of San Francisco, or at least the beginning of what will prove a very good misconception.
San Francisco is not the swirling hurricane of innovation its own residents try to tell us it is. Maybe it is, further down the bay, but in San Francisco proper there is a spirit as old as earth, and it is called progress. This is why those billing themselves as old souls will always triumph over those who ride on continual revolutions like waves; everything once new either dies or becomes something venerable.
Anchoring the downtown (as much as anything can anchor a city once built on piles) is the Palace, San Francisco's grand old lady. Each great city has one: Hong Kong has the Peninsula, London has the Savoy. The Palace is perhaps not the oldest area building to welcome guests from abroad, but it is by far the "most modern and full of today's conveniences" — according to its early 20th-century advertisements. Today it is full of that gorgeous old must which no amount of renovation, save complete demolition, can remove, a thousand hot summer suns baking paint and mortar and carpet and liquor and perfume into each other, until they become a novel. But San Francisco is not content with one grand old thing, and I need not even allude to the red guardians at the Bay's mouth.
I write this over a Sazerac from the Top of the Mark, which besides explaining any typographical errors, should elicit nods from Bullitt fans as our hero Steve McQueen once strode the stones below. The penthouse bar does a rare thing; in a glorious, un-air-conditioned atmosphere in which one can smell the clothes, drinks and sweat of the dozens around you, it allows you to see all of the area. There is no private chamber reserved for Gulf princes or coastal parvenus. The broad windows are single-paned and almost intimate, how they could be in your house, except they are massive and three hundred feet from the ground.
It is a democratization of aristocracy, a thing which only makes sense in America (or makes very little sense elsewhere); all are free to bask in the sun and gaze at the bay and mottled houses and apartments, and listen to a pianist skip from Chopin's Nocturnes to Piano Man. This moment seems incongruent to an area which gave the world agents of entropy like Twitter and AirBnB, but there it is.
The trolleys are in working order, and used not only by Asian and Midwestern tourists but by businessmen too who hang off the side like it were a zeppelin; vintage buses glide up and down the streets besides the boxier moderns. More recent additions to the museum still thrive in Russian Hill: aged flower children still libertine and a bit high. Art deco, an architecture once considered more daring than Twitter, blossoms all about, having survived a housing crisis that would have flattened it — that did flatten it — in Columbus, Ohio.
I have misunderstood San Francisco all my life, I think. This place births newness, but it prizes oldness; it adds old gems to its immense pocket year by year, decade by decade.
