No this isn’t a guest blog! It is an old fashion book report (some of you will remember those). I found this book by Kamiya in the thrift store attached to the Okotoks Landfill and had to share some of its contents with you.

FYI: If you are ever in Okotoks the Landfill thrift store south of the city is a “must visit.” It has a great selection of used books, $1 for hard covers $.50 for paperbacks.

I was wrong…

I bought the book thinking it was 49 different people’s view of the city, but NO it’s 49 stories about San Francisco by Kamiya. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down.

Kamiya has amazing insights into the City’s past and how it shapes the city today. It is full of fun facts, stories and personal observations of San Francisco’s unique sense of place, which I found very perceptive.

In fact, it is the book I’d like to write about Calgary, but I don’t possess the depth of knowledge or the perceptive eyes and mind Kamiya has for his city.

Kamiya loves to walk his city (kinda like Calgary’s David Peyto, whose quest is to walk every street in Calgary), he seems to have an encyclopedia (remember those?) knowledge of his city’s history (like Calgary’s Harry Sanders or Alan Zarkin) and he writes with the witty comedic sensibility of Calgary’s Will Ferguson (author of How to Be a Canadian, and Aritha van Herk’s, “Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta,” in the book.

The book is full of perceptive zingers like:

“It made Las Vegas look like a convent,”
“SF’s lack of civilized amenities reflected its obsession with money.”
“Cities always violate nature.”
“Intensity of living does not always translate into artistic achievement.”

The Stories…

“Cool Gray City of Love,” (published in 2013) is the book’s actual title, but the subtext “49 VIEWS of San Francisco” really tell you what the book is about. Kamiya has wandered the city for over 4 decades, accumulating an appreciation for how the city’s geography, geology and urban genetics has shaped the city.

Each of the 49 short stories/chapters has an intriguing title – The Balcony, The Sandcastle, Hill of Hate, Adventure of the Skin Trade – accompanied by a nice pencil sketch. There are no photos of the places he visits, which would have been helpful.

In “Stairway to Heaven” he shares with the reader some of SF’s steps, staircases, shortcuts and obscure passages. I love his observation, “These walkways constitute a kind of alternative and secret grid, a human-size way of moving through the city. There is something playful and gratuitous about steps. Walking on them makes a journey less purposeful and more like a game of hide and seek. They turn grown-ups into kids, and the city into a giant backyard.”

In “Maximum City” he examines if SF has lost its soul, its authenticity as a city. He shares an observation from a New Yorker, that SF is “an urban boutique, an overgrown version of Carmel or Santa Fe, a private playground for dot-com moguls, and overpaid techies and investment bankers and businesspeople for Hong Kong. The cops, teachers, artists, barbers and clerks who gave it its sinews and muscle have been priced out, and what is left is a toy city, as impractical and overpriced as its cable cars.”

Kamiya agrees, noting “money has a homogenizing effect. SF feels less eccentric, and a lot less blue-collar, than it used to, but disagrees with the “toy city” label. He agrees with Jane Jacobs observations in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” that cities are kept alive by heterogeneity – the juxtaposition of radically different things in a small space.

He acknowledges that while SF’s list of urban offenses is too long to count (as they are in every city including Paris’ bulldozing of Les Halles or New York clean-up of Times Square) the city still jams together the rich and poor, the sublime and ridiculous, the ethereal and the raunchy. It’s where the city’s tectonic plates meet.

In “Outside Sands” we learn that SF doesn’t have the conventional beach culture of Miami, LA, Rio or Sydney, even though it has several beautiful beaches including Baker Beach perhaps the most unappreciated beach in the world.

Baker Beach is a dramatic two-mile gentle curve, between two towering cliffs to the west and the Golden Gate bridge to the east giving it a sense of place that is “both detached from the city, while being nestled into its heart.”

We also learn Baker Beach is where Larry Harvey and a friend on the summer solstice in 1986 built a wooden figure and set fire to it in front of 20 people. That fire grew to become Burning Man, the largest and most astonishing countercultural event in the world. Kamiya thinks “The Satyricon-like orgy on the adjoining sands may be over, but Baker Beach will always be associated with crazy revelry and hedonistic ritual.”

“The Country in the City” looks at how SF natural landscape trumps its man-made one. Kamiya thinks SF is made up of a discrete neighbourhood, each with their own aura, more than any other city he knows. He points to Bernal Heights until recently the most village-like place in the city. Its quasi-rural atmosphere comes from the big (433 ft) round hill that it occupies (SF had 50+ major hills within the city limits). The streets with their small old homes have a 19th century village quality to them as they wind around the hill. However gradually the homes are being updated and the neighbourhood gentrified.

The Dead City

“Many of my happiest moment have been spent in the weirdest most obscure, often ugliest parts of San Francisco. Every explorer, even a two-bit one like me whose realm is only a seven-by-seven mile square, lives for the moment of discovery.”

Kamiya goes on to say this is why he love to explore SF “wastelands” i.e., vacant lots, abandoned buildings and old industrial, warehouse areas. He postulates “a city without wastelands is a city without soul.” He laments that “in the post-industrial age, the sterilizing power of ownership and money spreads further and further, a seamless façade, impossible to penetrate. Old cities had guts – factories, docks, train yards and produce markets. And like all guts, they produced organic waste, urban shit. The new financial info-city, controlled by disembodied capital, every square inch leveraged for maximum profit, its workers pushing keys on computers or serving lattes, is gutless and shitless.”

He then goes on to share his walks in SF’s old industrial areas, shipyards and butchertown. In the process he shares how between 1940 to 1943; 94,000 people migrated to SF, most of them black, and most of them working at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyards. This migration was the beginning of changing the complexation of city from almost exclusively white to more multi-cultural.

The Park

This story begins with, “Parks are infallible signs of civilization, and the Golden Gate Park is no exception…20 years after its chaotic birth, SF had finally outgrown its wild youth and was ready to settle down.” The author then notes that between December 1849 and May 1851, the city experienced major fires six times, the most destructive series of fires to befall an American city. This resulted in the citizens having to face the fact it couldn’t continue its “every-man-for-himself ethos.”

By 1855, citizens began to realize the city had no public park (“the true lungs of a large city”) or garden, or broad avenue, ornamental street or buildings. “SF’s lack of civilized amenities reflected its obsession with money.” In 1870, city official chose a 3 mile by half-mile rectangle at Ocean Beach (1,017 acres, 20% larger than New York’s Central Park) and Fredrick Law Olmstead to design Golden Gate Park an urban green space designed to feel as natural as possible.

Kamiya shares “In one crucial respect, Golden Gate Park is inferior to other great city parks – New York’s Central Park, London’s St. James Park and Paris’ Luxemburg Gardens which all offer a sublime contrast between the city and nature.”

He adds, “great urban parks are framed by the buildings the surround them be it the Dakota Apartments and other buildings on the edge of Central Park or Buckingham Palace next to St. James Park. The buildings act like a painting’s frame to accentuate the look of the park.”

Golden Gate Park is surrounded by low-rise residential district, there is no dramatic sense of it being an urban oasis, rather it feels wild. This would be the case for Calgary’s two great parks – Fish Creek Park and Nose Hill Park – that are both wild and suburban.

Golden Gate Park’s “wildness is actually man-made as the land was originally great sand dunes, a natural marvel misguidedly seen by early pioneers as a barren desert is tragic. But cities always violate nature.”

In “Hill of Hate” Kamiya looks at the city’s most private club the Pacific Union, and the city’s Big Four millionaires – John Mackay, James Fair, William O’Brien and James Flood - the Silver Kings, who made a fortune in silver mining. As well as the Big Four Railway Kings – Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins – whose staggering profits from their railway monopoly led to a “mansion-building frenzy” on Nob Hill. (The Calgary equivalent would be the Ranchman’s Club on 13th Ave SW and all the mansions in Mount Royal and along 13th Ave e.g., Lougheed House).

Fun Fact: In 1873, the city had 115 cigar-making plants employing 3,480 workers, almost all Chinese.

In “Happy Trails” Kamiya shares his adventures on “dirt trails” not in parks but running right through the middle of swanky residential districts, staid middle-class tracts, run-down slums and just about everywhere else. He postulated this is unique to SF and loves that not everything in the city is covered in concrete and asphalt. He thinks of the dirt trails as “SF’s secret circulatory system, a network of divinely dusty capillaries.”

Front Door

SF’s original “front door” was the Ferry Building with its massive arches leading to Ferry Plaza, as the only way to reach the city was by water or the peninsula, until the Bay Bridge opened I 1936.

In 1913, 60,000 commuters crossed the bay by water twice each workday. “What greeted them was controlled chaos – and a city planner’s dream. Street cars, horses, babel cars railways – there was more transportation running around than in a Richard Scarry book.

He then goes on to trace the decline of the ferries as more bridges and cars doomed them and container shipping was more suited to Oakland’s port. The last ferry sailed in 1958, not to be resumed until 1964, and then only a shadow of what it once was. The entire city was undergoing a massive change from heavy industry to “secretaries and clerks, skyscrapers for the new financial district were replacing the docks.”

In the early 60s, only four miles of the 276-mile circumference of the SF delta were open to the public. A plan by the City of Berkeley to fill in 2,000 acres for the bay’s delta, led to creation of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) in 1965 - the first coastal zone management agency in the world. It was the beginning of the city’s green movement.

City Beautiful

Kamiya looks at how downtowns have been destroyed “by the mindless construction of soulless high-rise buildings starting in the 50s,” in the “City Beautiful” chapter.

He like many others thinks the greatest era of city building in American History was the early 20th century. A time when elegant buildings were the norm in downtowns and subliminally made downtowns attractive. The Beaux-Arts architecture aspired to capture the classical virtues of order and harmony in a grand but flexible style. He notes, SF’s Grant Avenue was once called the greatest architectural street in the world by a California architectural journal. While the area around Union Square was not invaded by these overgrown Legos, the urban ecology is delicate, and the towering mediocrities to the east and south of downtown cast a long shadow, literal and figurative. Indeed, downtowns across North America have lost their urban elegance.

The author postulates “The City Beautiful (debuted in 1893 at Chicago World’s Fair) movement was a creature of its time – idealistic, in hindsight naïve in its belief in the ameliorative power of beauty, but well meaning.”

Other Kamiya Observations

“Chinatown is a living demonstration that crowded and squalid conditions cannot defeat determined and hardworking people. In that sense, its 16 blocks contain nothing less that the entire American immigration experience, played out anew with each generation.”
“The glory and the curse of the Beats was that they insisted on an art of utter spontaneity, of unmediated expression, of naked self-expression – an art as raw and dangerous as life itself. At their best, the Beats were able to touch primal wellsprings. But their insistence on collapsing the distinction between art and life held two opposite dangers. On one hand, it threatened to tip them into madness, drugs or death. And on the other, it could lead to formal sloppiness. Intensity of living does not always translate into artistic achievement.”
If America could defeat the Nazis and the Japanese, why couldn’t it solve inner-city blight by simply destroying the inner cities and building new ones? There may be an unconscious connection between the “strategic bombing” that left Berlin a heap of rubble and the urban renewal that eviscerated American inner cities.”

Last Word

Kamiya thinks, “Great cities invite you to love them in extreme close-up, to love every inch of them. And the more eccentric, convoluted, broken and uneven they are, the more there is to love.” After reading this book, I think great cities are not about the architecture and urban design, but about the people. They are places that invite diversity, eccentricity and tolerance and are havens for the rich, the poor and the creatives.

It also made me wonder why some cities are incubators for artistic and innovation talent and others aren’t – think San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, New York, London and Dublin.

If you like this blog, you will like these links:

Calgary History: Why we live, work, play where we do!

Calgary’s quintessential experience?

Calgary: Mount Royal: City Beautiful

Thrift Find: 49 Views of San Francisco by Gary Kamiya