8th Wonder of the World

It is Halloween. It is raining. It's the San Francisco Giant's Champion Homecoming Parade today and Dia de los Muertos tomorrow. The Mission has been tagged over again, my neighbor's house completely demolished, and a closing sign went up on another business (The Empress, too?).

I intended for this to be a resignation letter of sorts. My initial intention was chucked months ago, becoming (subconsciously) a redundant articulation of my everyday angst. I don't like complaining. I don't like watching my beautiful city evolve faster than I can emotionally keep up. I don't like having to tell everyone to shut up and quit bitching. And yet, there's something still so therapeutic about this. Perhaps writing has become my own coping mechanism, a method to preserve some positivity in this sea of change, a tiny buoy of hope.

Besides all that, I quit at quitting. I've never been any good at it. I tried quitting piano when I was twenty-seven and I dream about it almost nightly. I quit painting at 25, snapping my brushes in true, artistic agony, only to develop horrific internal leg itches until I resumed. I quit writing that same year, burning everything, including thirty-seven diaries, because I had decided that all words were lies.

Don't even get me started on romantic relationships.

But, like all things, creative production/intention evolves, bringing us back to places we thought we'd left forever.

Having Monday afternoon cocktails with one of my best friends, we fell into our favorite debate: When do we fully accept change? When do we finally let the past die? How do we let ourselves mourn, purge and then move forward. "Sweetie, you are a dinosaur, you more than anyone I know. You live with the ghosts of everything past. You have to let it burn. You have to murder it with your bare hands. You have to set it free in order to free yourself."

Perhaps he's right. Perhaps he's always been right, like when he walked away from the rigid structure of Berklee College of Music to beat his drums in Oakland, when he switched to electronic instruments. Or perhaps not.

In that fascinating article I mentioned a post or two back, called "A History of San Francisco in 26 Stories: On 140 New Montgomery, the PacBell Building", by Alexis C. Madrigal, she took what had been San Francisco's first skyscraper as the physical structure to outline our changing city and life. 

The building, having first been created for telecommunications in 1927, loomed over the city, unchallenged until 1964. It was the place where Winston Churchill placed one of the first transcontinental, transatlantic phone calls (one month before the stock market crashed). It stood as the city's storm warning station, using a highly sophisticated flag system. The outside base was made from quarried stone from the Sierra Nevada mountain range, while the rest of the facade was made of terra-cotta (a fact I found most intriguing), and was possibly inspired by Yosemite's Devil's Postpile. It was built by the architect Timothy Pflueger, a Mission resident (when the Mission was still a marshland). Diego Rivera painted it in his Pan-American Unity Mural. And now, the building is occupied by Yelp and Facebook, with the average age of its inhabitants being 25.

According to Cathy Simon, the architect in charge of restoring it, "The building subliminally has a great message that is very nuanced. It's an old building that's repurposed with intelligence."

I bring this building up to simply illustrate that what once stood as a monolith to telecommunication and capitalism, a bastion of a booming marketplace, has evolved all on its own. 

Madrigal used the evolution as a further argument for the shift in capitalism as a whole. Where power and wealth moved higher up in the sky, creating a greater physical distance from the working class, the internet has managed to level the playing field (physically only). Until now, we've operated on the ancient Roman grid system in our urban planning, and since the turn of the 20th century, we've moved up. 

"Who knows how precisely the streets we walk shape the way we walk them, but they do."

Humans have always dominated our landscapes. We build around water sources, we build in grids to maximize space, efficiency, control. The internet has no need for these things. 

"...a flatness prevails. There is no sense of decay, of time passing.... At any point in the physical world, there is infinity in all directions, a grid that is not just spatial but temporal."

With the Giant's victory, the Mission was covered in tags all over again. 

In a recent issue of Cabinet magazine (my favorite, btw), there was an article "From A 'Wondrous' Place" about graffiti during the 18th century Romantic period.  According to the author James Trainor, Kaaterskill Falls in New York's Catskill's Mountains, is covered in antiquated graffiti.

A little bit of back story: when I was in school, studying the horrifically boring American Art History, we spent an entire term of the Catskill's Mountains. Thomas Cole, the leading figure in the Hudson River School started his career by painting his sublime depictions of these mountains, a statement which reiterated his allegiance to God and the United States. This, then, became the thing to do.

This is important because "Anthropologists of graffiti - who usually focus on the classical period or study contemporary urban examples - rightly talk about the tension between 'self-fashioning' and the formation of 'group identity'. Visitors to Kaaterskill Falls came to have an encounter with some epiphonic experience of the Sublime that was shaped both individually and culturally, and then chisel their way into it for good."

Though "Die Foodie Scum" as was spray painted on Radish's windows does not speak to the same sentiment, it still acts as an example of continuing practice, of the past still influencing our future.

Trainor goes on, "New York suddenly 'discovered' its own backyard, and developed, thanks to its wandering artists, literati, and intellectuals, a social contract for appreciating and interpreting, for traveling and visiting. Unwittingly or not, the urban 'creative class' became the gentrifiers of the wilderness, the avatars of a runaway cult of nature veneration, and of tourism and outdoor recreation, of which they were both symptom and cause."

Driving my friend's BMW down Mission Street after the World Series, I couldn't help but laugh out loud at my own hypocrisy. As I mentioned, I've been wanting to offer a positive spin. I've been preaching to the choir of the local artists and musicians, demanding we band together, fight harder, produce more, all in celebration of this stunning city. And yet here I was, secretly excited to see (not participate in) the destruction brought on by the overzealous and the out-of-town assholes. 

I went home to research SF's crime rates vs other urban areas in the country, and sadly found that information lacking. What I did discover were a few interesting points: in general, crime in the United States has decreased to such an extent as to match the 1960s. And though in 2010, our homicide rate was one of the highest in the world, it paled compared to the horrific stats of Russia, El Salvador and Honduras. 

Could I not find the information I was seeking simply because San Francisco, proper, is quite small? It hasn't been on the top-ten most populated cities list since 1900. Hell, San Jose made the list in 2010, for the first time ever, at 950,000.

In reading an NPR article about declining crime rates in American cities, Aboubacar Ndiaye wrote, "It's likelier that the end of the burning cities of the 1960s and '70s, the violent crime epidemic of the '80s and early '90s provoked younger generations to move to newly safe central areas. A Brookings Institute study from 2005 showed that the revitalization of downtown areas coincided almost exactly with the end of the crime spikes of the Reagan-Bush era."

Going further, Ndiaye cited Phillip Clay's 4-step gentrification analysis, starting with the number one culprit: the "starving artists", the "marginals", the "urban pioneers", who, as we know and have done, move into low-income areas, making them approachable for the wealthier, seeking a 'hip' experience.

Article after article agrees: there is one simple solution to the majority of San Francisco problems, and that is more housing. But again, with our type of rent control, apparently it's simply easier to tear down our old Victorians and replace them with those hideous box buildings. 

Then there's nature. I'm still looking for a good source for the average financial loss due to fires in the city, which I suspect is quite high. And obviously there's the looming threat of the Big One coming, too.

Speaking of earthquakes, we all have Loma Prieta to thank for ruining the Embarcadero Freeway, thus liberating our beautiful Ferry Building, a building cited for destruction or repurposing directly before 1989, since there were simply no more ferries. According to the Urban Planning Company, SPUR, that earthquake was "one of the greatest urban planning success stories of the past twenty years."

It is our human condition to dominate nature, and yet it is our sentimentality to fear change. The internet has freed us from obsessing on concepts of "authorship", "artistic integrity", and maybe we are just too new to this stage of evolution to fully grasp it. But I guarantee, I'm not the only dinosaur in the room. I think we all find ourselves sometimes digging in a little too deep, hugging our favorite bar before the sledge-hammer smashes it, writing our names onto bathroom walls, seeking the facades of historical buildings for guidance and direction, while never knowing what exactly is coming next. 

I think it is ironic that the building intended for PacBells telecommunication now houses social media, that the Ferry building, having no Ferries to serve, lasted longer than the freeway that ran in front of it. 

This is what I love about San Francisco. We are surrounded by water, by change, nothing is fixed. Jokingly, I wanted to call it the 8th Wonder of the World, until I researched it. Though the Golden Gate Bridge did make it to the top ten list of the Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers, San Francisco is not on any big, magical, global list. On the United State's Seven Wonders of the World, however, the Internet is number 5. Where do we go with that? 

PS: I've started reading The Sun Also Rises, and on the opening page is a fantastic quote:

"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever... The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose... The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits... All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." -Ecclesiastes