... Around 4pm, I attempted to go to the lounge car to get some juice or coffee. Unfortunately the line was so long that it would probably have taken 20 minutes to get anything. I decided I could live with the water I had brought with me from L.A.
The train was very full--probably close to being sold out. Around 4:30 the dining car steward started coming through the train to take reservations for dinner. Unfortunately he started in the front of the train, and by the time he got to the last car the only reservations he had were for after 9pm. We were due to get off at Oakland at 9:30, and even though the train was running a little bit late we reasoned that we probably wouldn't have time to finish dinner before our stop. So we decided to just keep on snacking all day and not worry about actual meals.
... (In late afternoon) we went over a big mountain pass that afforded a dramatic view of the 101 freeway below. Beyond the pass we reached the town of Santa Margarita, which was the first place in California we saw homes with what I would call actual yards around them.
We stopped in the town of Paso Robles (pronounced in correct Spanish PAH-sow ROW-blace) at 5:05pm, 14 minutes late. It was near here that my father was stationed before he shipped out for the Pacific in World War II. My brother Paul has the diary my dad kept before going overseas, and he mentions going into Paso Robles on several occasions. It seemed like a reasonably pleasant place, and the countryside around here is really quite pretty.
I was getting rather bored at this point (both Margaret and I agreed this was by far the dullest of the train trips), so I decided I would go and wait in line in the lounge. I got in line at 5:25pm, and at 5:40 I was finally served. It's a good thing I got in line when I did, too. The snack bar attendant announced that he would be closing so he could "straighten things up". I ended up being the very last person he served before he closed.
We went through what seemed like endless farm country. Around 6:30 we got to King City. We crawled along and then stopped dead for 10 minutes waiting for a freight train to pass. We stopped briefly about 5 minutes later and then parked yet again around 7pm on a siding by the state prison at Soledad. Soledad is an amusing name for a town with a prison. The Spanish word (which they pronounce correctly soul-aid-ODD) means "solitude", and it made me wonder whether they have a solitary confinement wing there.
It was while we were parked at Soledad that they finally turned off the country music that had been accompanying us for the first nine hours of our journey. It was right in the middle of Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors". I distinctly remember hearing "... just to find the others laughing and making-----" We never did hear the end of that line, or any more of the music, thank goodness.
We got moving again about 7:15. The ride was very jerky, which caused people to jostle around the coach if they got up and moved. There was one senior citizen in our coach who got up to go to the lounge car. I was amused when we hit a bump and the train tossed him around the aisle. This little old man exclaimed "Whoa, man!" in a voice that sounded like a surfer dude. That's just not quite what you expect to hear from an elderly person, but then we were in California.
We reached John Steinbeck's home of Salinas at 7:40pm. There was certainly nothing in the Steinbeck novels and short stories I had read that would make me recognize Salinas. What we saw was mostly warehouses and minimalls. Salinas was another smoking stop, but a quick one, and we were on our way again at 7:47, exactly one hour late.
The cars on the highway had their lights on now as we headed past feedlots and on into a marshy area. We then went past a series of towns, all of which claim to be the "________ Capital of the World". You can fill in the blank with just about any strange agricultural product you want. Each town has its annual "__________ Festival" and crowns a "__________ Queen". We read that Marilyn Monroe had been crowned the Artichoke Queen in Watsonville and the Garlic Queen in Gilroy, all in the same summer. I'm sure those honors carry precisely the same lack of prestige as "Beef Queen" or "Pork Queen" does around here, although at least the vegetable titles sound better. While I've known some lovely girls who have been beef queens, every time I hear that term I can't help but picture a very large, unattractive woman with the figure of a linebacker.
Around 8:30 we crossed the San Andreas Fault in the middle of a tree-filled canyon. Then at 8:30 we reached Gilroy, which is the border between farm country (they still hold a Garlic Festival) and the San Francisco Bay metropolitan area. While it's nearly a hundred miles from San Francisco, we saw two dead giveaways that Gilroy is more a suburb than a farm town. First we passed the Caltrain yard, with commuter trains parked waiting to make the journey into San Francisco on Monday morning. Then we passed the local Motel 6, where a sign proclaimed "Cheapest Rooms in the Bay Area: $65.99 Single". What's sad is that the sign didn't lie. By comparison with San Francisco, the hotels in Boston were cheap.
The sun set just north of Gilroy, and we passed a combination of fields and housing tracts from there to San Jose. I do know the way to San Jose; you can get there by the Coast Starlight.
It was night when we actually got to the Bay Area's largest city, and I must say that San Jose was the darkest and deadest city I have ever seen. It was between roughly 9:00 and 9:45 that we were actually in the city, but it seemed as it were 2am. The streets were all deserted, and very few lights seemed to be on anywhere. All the factories were closed, and even the parking lots at bars were empty. San Jose is the center of Silicon Valley, and I would have thought it would have been a more "happening" place. I have no idea what the locals do on Saturday nights, but from the looks of things Algona is a more swinging town.
The train emptied out at San Jose. We left the station at 9:40, and by 9:50 we made it to Santa Clara, a suburb whose lights were much brighter than San Jose's. Past there we crossed the mud flats at the southern end of San Francisco Bay and then made our way past another long stretch of factories to Oakland.
Oakland was by far the most active place we saw tonight. The streets were full of traffic, parking lots were full, and many of the factories were open for the night shift. The lights were also on at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium as we passed by around 10:15. (Technically that's not the name of the stadium these days. It's one of those places that's basically become "Your Name Here Stadium", with naming honors going to the highest bidder. Out of curiosity I just checked the Oakland A's website and found that they play at "Network Associates Corporation Field"--how's that for a name that just rolls off the tongue?)
We pulled into Jack London Square station in Oakland about an hour behind schedule, right at 10:30pm. The station set-up in Oakland is very weird. The train tracks run right down the middle of the street (the Embarcadero), and the actual platform is beyond the curb of that street, extending for about two blocks northwest from the station.
Oakland's modern glass Amtrak station is part of the Jack London Square urban renewal project. Our hotel was advertised as being "2 blocks from Jack London Square" and "a short walk from the Amtrak Station". They didn't lie, but what they didn't say was that "Jack London Square" is really the name of a neighborhood, rather than a specific place. Pretty much anything along the Embarcadero in the downtown area is considered to be in Jack London Square. The train station is clear at the southeast end of the area, over half a mile from Broadway, which is where our hotel was located. Not knowing this we set out wheeling our luggage over the quaint brick sidewalks for block after block after block.
It didn't help when I chose to take a "short-cut" and ended up on a poorly lit street. The block ahead was blocked off to car traffic with pylons, but a police car came through there. We saw a group of young black men on the block ahead who just seemed to be standing around doing nothing. While I could wish it otherwise, I'm sure there was a touch of racism involved in our decision to turn back and walk along the much better lit Embarcadero, rather than proceeding past those guys on the next block. I found out later that the street we had been walking along houses a wholesale produce market. All night long shipments come in from the farm country, and during the day they are disbursed around the city. Very likely the men we saw worked there and were just waiting for a shipment to unload. Not knowing that at the time, though, I decided prudence was in order when walking through an unfamiliar city at night.
On the Embarcadero we mostly passed restaurants and nightclubs. There were quite a few people out walking, mostly well-dressed young black women who seemed to be going from club to club. I felt like an idiot wheeling luggage past them, but we made our way along without incident.
When we made it to 2nd and Broadway, the block where our motel was located, I was dismayed to see that right next door to the place where we had reservations was a XXX movie theatre called Xanadu. There were a bunch of men in front of the place. Some seemed to be adult movie customers, while others looked more like homeless people. At least one was standing on the corner drinking from a paper bag. I wondered just what kind of a place we were going to be staying. We were paying more for this place than we had at the Roosevelt, but it was still the cheapest place I could book that was reasonably close to San Francisco. Now I seemed to sense why it was so cheap.
Rather than walk past the crowd by Xanadu, we opted to walk up the other side of the street-which was deserted, except for a police car parked along it. We made our way to 3rd Street, crossed Broadway, and walked back to the Best Western Inn at the Square, our home for the next few nights.
The rather indifferent desk clerk (an enormous woman I can only describe as "white trash") assigned us to Room 141. We had requested a non-smoking room with two double beds. When we unlocked the door we could see there were two beds, but the whole room reeked of smoke. I may not be opposed to people smoking, but I'd rather not smell it all night. Moreover both the deadbolt lock and the security chain on the door were broken, and what we had seen so far in this neighborhood I wanted as much security as we could get. I went back to the desk and told the clerk the room was unacceptable. The clerk seemed annoyed, and she struggled for more than ten minutes with her computer trying to make a change in our room assignment. Eventually she was able to put us into Room 246. I thanked her, and we went up to what was a perfectly acceptable room.
In the end the motel turned out to be reasonably nice. Even having the adult theater next door became more of an amusement than a problem. The hotel itself had an interesting design. It was three stories, but the first story was basically a parking ramp. On the roof of the parking they had built a lovely courtyard with a pool in the middle. The guest rooms encircled the courtyard, with their windows facing it rather than the street. You had to go up a flight of stairs (or use a strange little elevator) to get to the "first" floor, which was level with the courtyard, and the "second" floor was on the third level of the building. The hotel was very quiet, making you forget what might be going on out on the street.
The motel was old, but it had been kept up reasonably well. The room was a generic motel room with all the same furnishings you'd find in a Super 8 or a Travelodge. We had a tiny bathroom with a shower instead of a tub (like you'd have at an old Motel 6), and the bathroom door just barely missed hitting the edge of the shower when you opened it. There was nothing wrong with this place, but there was also no way it was worth $110 a night. ... Still, it was less of a rip-off than every other hotel in the area, and it was not an unpleasant place to stay for four nights.
It was going on 8:00 by the time we got up this morning. We each showered, which was just a bit of a challenge. I have no idea where the motel's water heater was located, but it was obviously nowhere close to our room. I had to let the water fun a full five minutes before there was any warmth at all. Once the hot water arrived, I found it was difficult to adjust the temperature. There was only one adjustment on the shower faucet. If I turned up the pressure, the water was scalding hot; but if I tried to lower the temperature, the pressure dropped to a trickle. Eventually I did get showered, though, and so did Margaret, and then we set out for the day.
The one "bonus" we got for our over-priced room at the Best Western were coupons worth $2 at the adjacent Buttercup Kitchen Cafe. The Buttercup Kitchen is an old diner that appears to have recently been redecorated. The $2 coupons would have bought us coffee, but not even toast to go with it. Pretty much everything on their menu--breakfast, lunch, and dinner--cost $8. I had ham and eggs for breakfast, and Margaret had an omelette. Our waitress was a middle-aged white woman who looked like she had been working at the Buttercup since the '60s. ... She was very apologetic to us because the service was a little bit slow; and she even gave us free blueberry muffins to fill the time while we waited.
After breakfast we walked away from the bay (which I think is northeast) to the downtown Oakland subway station. We would repeat this walk several times during this trip, passing the same fascinating variety of things each time. Let me take just a moment to describe Oakland's Broadway, between 3rd and 11th Streets.
Directly across 3rd Street from our hotel was a lavender stucco building that housed a sushi restaurant. They had a poster in the window illustrating all the available food, and it looked truly disgusting. Beyond there was a storefront restaurant called "Nation's Famous Burgers" that black people always seemed to be going in and out of. Their window had a poster of pies and tarts that looked delicious. Beyond Nation's was a little coffee shop where a cop car was always parked. Across the street was the start of Chinatown. This was a lot like L.A.'s Koreatown. The buildings just looked like the downtown of Smalltown U.S.A., but many of the signs were in Chinese.
The block between 4th and 5th Street housed the Alameda County Department of Social Services, a squat green metal and glass building that covered an entire city block. ... Social Services was noteworthy, because it appeared to be the sleeping place of choice for Oakland's homeless population. They had a big porch in front of the building, and each night as many as five different street people were sleeping on different parts of it. During the day I noticed a pillow hidden in the bushes in front of the building.
6th Street doesn't exist in downtown Oakland. Between 5th and 7th is the infamous Nimitz Freeway. ... You no doubt saw dramatic pictures of this freeway after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. This was the double-decker one that pancaked onto itself, killing around 50 people. ... It wasn't actually this section that collapsed, but rather a part a little ways west of here. Since the earthquake, they've completely re-designed the freeway. It's still elevated, but it no longer has two levels. It's supposedly perfectly safe now, but I can't say I was fully comfortable walking beneath the overpass.
The space under the freeway is the local police department's parking lot. Nearly a whole block is full of black-and-whites. There was also a shopping cart full of cleaning supplies that seemed to have been permanently abandoned on the sidewalk under the freeway. I don't know if it belonged to a homeless person or if it was for police janitorial work.
Across 7th street were two bail bond brokers. Their location was ... right next to the Alameda County Jail. The Oakland Police Department followed, with a drugstore and an Asian grocer across the street.
The next block had an eclectic combination of businesses, all with apartments above. The most interesting place was called "Sacred Tattoos". The whole time we were there, we saw only one person go in there, but their well-inked help often lingered on the sidewalk.
Most of the block between 9th and 10th was taken up by a store called Smart & Final. They're a wholesale grocer, dealing primarily in large sizes and lots. Looking in their window, the place looked like a Sam's Club, except that there was no parking anywhere remotely nearby. .....
The last point of interest was the Alameda County Convention Center, which was dominated by a high-rise $250/night Marriott hotel. The convention center basically marked the limit of today's downtown, as opposed to what was downtown in the Victorian era when most of the city was built. There are several new mini-skyscrapers in downtown Oakland, most of which house "dot-com" companies I'd never heard of. The most noteworthy new buildings are twin towers that form the East Bay Federal Building that look like tiny replicas of the Citicorp Centre in Chicago. There's also one very prominent building from the turn of the last century. The Oakland Tribune has a stately tan brick headquarters, topped by a beautiful clock tower.
11th Street marks the entrance to the Oakland City Center subway station. (The station is actually called "12th Street, but the three exits lead to 11th, 13th, and 14th.) The station is served by BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. I can remember when BART was installed in the '70s; I think we read about it in Weekly Reader or Junior Scholastic at school. It was billed as the "train of the future", truly a triumph of modern technology. Like the L.A. green line, it was supposed to be driverless. I can't imagine trusting the safety of a trainload of people to 1970s computers, and in the end BART thought better of the idea too. The trains have drivers, but pretty much everything else about BART is automated.
BART is a weird transit system. It's sort of like a combination between a subway and a medium-distance commuter train (like Chicago's Metra or the Caltrain line on the other side of the bay). The core of the system is a single subway line in San Francisco that extends into the so-called "Transbay Tube", an eight-mile tunnel deep under San Francisco Bay. When the Bay Bridge collapsed in that same earthquake in 1989, BART's tube was left as the only connection between the two sides of the bay. BART runs beneath Market Street in downtown San Francisco, with stops just a few blocks apart. In then turns southward, and the stops extend to about a mile apart. Across the bay in Oakland BART splits into five different lines. They provide fairly comprehensive service to Oakland and Berkeley, and then ... extend like tentacles into the distant suburbs. Beyond Oakland the stops are widely spaced, as much as 10 miles apart at one point. They are extending BART in two directions. By early 2003 an extension will be open to the San Francisco International Airport (it already goes to Oakland Airport), and in 2004 they'll extend it down the east side of the bay to San Jose.
The fares on BART are based on distance, and they're never cheap. Even a 3-block run down Market Street is over a dollar, and it cost us $2.20 for each ten-minute ride under the bay. If we had chosen to stay in the distant suburbs, any savings on motels would have been rapidly eaten up by paying over $5 for the one-way trip into the city. They have no passes, except for the handicapped and elderly, so pretty much everyone pays full fare.
All the announcements on BART are computerized. While the lines are color-coded on the system map, they are always referred to by their last two destinations. An LCD readout shows a schedule of upcoming trains, interspersed with safety messages (they seem obsessed with safety on BART), and synthesized voices with no inflection whatsoever make announcements about when trains are coming ("ten-car-san-fran-cis-co-da-ly-ci-ty-train-in-two-min-utes"). The platforms are numbered (and in Oakland the tracks are stacked on top of each other, instead of side by side), and the same computer voice tells you which platform to go to ("nine-car-pitts-burg-bay-point-train-now-board-ing-plat-form-two"). The trains automatically stop in exactly the same places every time; they even have marks on the platform to indicate where the doors of the cars will be.
The BART trains were state-of-the-art back in the days when people thought almond was a futuristic color. The older trains still, in fact, have bodies of almond plastic. They're gradually being replaced by stainless steel. Inside the cars are huge--much wider than traditional subway cars--and really quite luxurious. The seats are thickly padded and upholstered, and all the surfaces are carpeted. The trains go very fast (10 minutes from downtown Oakland to downtown San Francisco, including a stop in the middle), but if you're on a branch line they don't run very frequently. On Sunday service was every 20 minutes, and even at rush hour it's no more frequent than about 12 minutes. It seemed like we waited for BART about as much as for the L.A. buses, and I got really sick of that annoying computer voice.
It was clear from the moment we walked into the BART station that today would not be just any day in San Francisco. When we planned the dates for this trip months ago, we had no idea that we would be visiting the Bay Area on the day of their single biggest event: Gay Pride Day. San Francisco revels in its reputation as a "queer" city, and today they were celebrating in a big way. Over a million people were going downtown today for "QUEERIFIC--A Celebration of Pride for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Questioning Persons" . While that ultra-inclusive list seemed to systematically exclude both Margaret and me, unless we chose to just hang around the motel in Oakland all day we couldn't help but be part of the festivities.
I'm sure most of the festival-goers would consider me quite a prude, because I really don't think gay pride is an appropriate subject for a parade and street fair. Don't get me wrong--I strongly support gay rights. I think everybody should have the same rights as everyone else, and I don't think gay people (or anyone else) should be picked on in school or beat up on the street or murdered by drunk college kids. I can't think of a single job--at least not a legal one--where sexual preference would make any difference at all, and I certainly don't agree with the fundamentalists who would damn all homosexuals to hell. ... That said, I think there's a flip side to the issue, too. I really don't care about anyone's sexual preference--gay, straight, or whatever--and I don't want people sharing the details of their sex lives with me. I don't think it's appropriate for anyone to flaunt their sexuality in public. Sex should be a private thing between partners. (Sorry if I offended anyone. If I were a politician, I'd be losing votes from both right and left with that speech, but it is how I feel.)
Regardless of my feelings one way or the other, though, the gay pride festival would certainly be a part of our day. It started on BART, where probably two-thirds of the passengers were decked out in rainbow-colored Mardi Gras beads, ready for the festivities downtown. After we had taken several train rides with mostly gay fellow passengers, Margaret made a comment that was overly general, but basically true. She noted that most of the gay men seemed quite "normal"; they looked like muscular college boys--though most were older than that--and if it weren't for a string or two of rainbow beads or a pink triangle T-shirt, they wouldn't stand out at all in a crowd. We saw a few cross-dressers or otherwise truly "queer" men, but really not that many (certainly fewer than in the Rocky Horror group in L.A.). In contrast to the men, the lesbians were strange. It was as if they had gone out of their way to fit everybody's stereotypes of what a lesbian should look and act like. They were, almost without exception, large women with closely cropped hair and an attitude. Many of the women dressed for the occasion in pink and purple spandex, black leather, and rainbow-dyed faux fur and feathers. From a man's perspective, these women looked dreadful in those outfits, but I suppose they must seem attractive to each other.
We got off BART at Powell and Market in downtown San Francisco, right as the parade was starting. The crowd lining the sidewalks on Market Street was at least ten deep, so we could see absolutely nothing. We certainly could hear the parade, though. Leading off was a contingent of lesbian motorcycle aficionados. They gunned the engines on their Harleys all the way down the street. The roar was so loud, I think we could have heard it in Oakland.
The crowd was mostly made up of gay and lesbian people, but there were a lot of others too. There were many people I'd guess were just there for the big party. They were interested in the event, but probably not gay. I think every homeless person in San Francisco (and there are certainly a lot of them) had also gathered along Market Street for the occasion. There was even one group of young men protesting by carrying placards with messages like "Jesus Saves". The whole thing was a carnival atmosphere, and it was certainly something to see.
The crowd was mostly on Market Street, which was fine with us. That meant that the bulk of the city was uncrowded and ready for us to explore. We started wading through the crowd to Hallidie Plaza (named after the man who invented the cable car), where the city visitors' center is located. We picked up assorted literature, of course, but our main purpose in being here was to pick up MUNI passes. MUNI is short for the San Francisco Municipal Railroad. It is completely separate from BART (which is headquartered in Oakland) and provides the bulk of the public transit within the San Francisco proper. .....
We spent much of the day following the Barbary Coast Trail. This is an idea San Francisco rather obviously stole directly from Boston's Freedom Trail. It's about a sixty-block self-guided walking tour, marked with bronze logos in the sidewalks. By following it we managed to see most of the "must see" sights downtown. The fact is, though, that by comparison with Boston, San Francisco is really has very few sights that are all that important. It's a much newer city, made newer still by major earthquakes at the beginning and end of the 20th Century. They don't have 300-year-old churches, and not much of historical significance ever happened here. Still, it made for an interesting walk.
We made our way past Union Square to Maiden Lane. They feature every part of local history on the Barbary Coast Trail, including the fact that Maiden Lane was so named because it was the red light district in gold rush days (apparently 25¢ was the going rate to "step inside"). Just down the street is Old St. Mary's Cathedral, the oldest cathedral west of the Rockies (1854). Its clock tower was purposely built with a stern message to those frequenting the brothels: "Son, observe the time and fly from evil."
Much of the trail focuses on Chinatown. When you say "Chinatown" to almost anyone, they'll think of San Francisco. It really does look like all the pictures, full of pagodas and painted balconies. It was lively, but not crowded--a real pleasure to walk through. We saw the tourist strip--full of restaurants, gift shops, and herbalists. Then we went to the area where the Chinese locals shop (with stores from Walgreens and Safeway to the meat markets and greengrocers with the most bizarre goods you could ever imagine). We saw residential streets and back alleys, including one with the world's first fortune cookie factory (they were baking today's batch as we walked by). There were also a number of clinics featuring traditional Chinese medicine.
The most interesting sight in Chinatown was a funeral procession. I would love to have photographed it, but it didn't seem respectful to do so. The procession ran up one street and down another, all over Chinatown. Leading the way was a small brass band that played Protestant funeral hymns ("Amazing Grace", "Nearer My God to Thee", "How Firm a Foundation", etc.) as they marched. Behind the band was the hearse, draped in flowers. After that some girls marched along, tossing little strips of white paper to the curbs. They were measured about 1 inch by 3 or 4 inches, and they seemed to have almost been embossed with a random pattern of bumps and cuts. I have no idea what the symbolism of those strips of paper was, but they were obviously an important part of the ceremony. After the paper the mourners proceeded in their cars. We saw the group a couple of times and heard them all over Chinatown.
We stopped for a snack at a convenience store in Chinatown. In the back they had an ice cream parlor that served a different variety of exotic flavors than the Arabic place in Hollywood. My cone was filled with honeydew sorbet ... and was most tasty. Each of us also picked up a box of a product called "Pocky". This is a snack made in China that features long, straight pretzels (the size and shape of a fireplace match), dipped two-thirds of the way down in chocolate. You hold the un-coated part in your hands while you eat the chocolate-covered part, giving you the taste of Christmas pretzels without the mess.
Ice cream really wasn't the most appropriate snack today. Mark Twain once wrote "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco". I can certainly relate to that wise crack. Janet had told us it would probably be pleasant here in summer. I think Margaret may have found it pleasant (she frequently complained about the heat in Los Angeles, which I didn't find that bad), but I thought it was cold. I wore a jacket every day we were in the Bay Area, and long pants instead of shorts. Even so, I found things a bit on the chilly side. Temperatures in the city were in the 50s and 60s, with a brisk breeze blowing in from the ocean that made me wonder what the wind chill factor was. It was also overcast much of the time. I think my mental image of California was formed by that old song that speaks of it as a place "where bowers of flowers bloom in the sun" and "a sun-kissed miss said 'don't be late'." Even though that song must have been vaguely referring to the Bay Area ("Open up your Golden Gate--California, here I come!"), it would apply much more to L.A. than San Francisco. This was definitely not the land of eternal sunshine.
On the plus side, at least San Francisco doesn't have the smog problem they do further south. There's just as many cars and just as many freeways and just as many grimy old factories, but those sea breezes keep the air stirred up enough that smog really isn't much of a factor. There also wasn't nearly the fog that travel books led me to expect. We saw a little bit in the early morning some days, but it was absolutely nothing compared to what we had seen in Newfoundland (and less than we saw in Redondo Beach).
You never know what you're going to see next in Chinatown. At one end of Portsmouth Square (the oldest public plaza in the city, laid out in 1776), a group of people was protesting for the right of Mainland Chinese to practice fulan gong, a meditation technique that the Communists have banned. Their "demonstration" consisted mainly of demonstrating fulan gong itself; it looks basically like slow motion aerobics. ....
Past the fulan gong people was a much stranger sight. A middle-aged Chinese man was "exercising" on the playground in the southeast corner of the square. I use the quotation marks, because this was not like any form of exercise I'd ever seen before. He was standing in front of a wooden pole. He started out by slapping the pole and his chest alternately with his hands. That was odd enough, but it was about to get much more bizarre. He started slamming his head against the pole, like a tackle head-butting a guard in football. Over and over again he bumped the pole with his noggin. I have no clue what he thought he was accomplishing with this, and I'm surprised he didn't seriously injure himself. If people were to ask me for advice on things to ban, this crazy activity would be much higher on my list than fulan gong.
Another point of interest on the Barbary Coast Trail is the "Imperial Palace" of Emperor Joshua A. Norton. Norton was a businessman who went bankrupt after the gold rush. He proclaimed himself "emperor" of San Francisco, and a surprising number of San Franciscans went along with the charade. While his imperial palace was nothing more than a room at a boarding house, he was able to print his own money and have it accepted by local merchants. People bowed at the penniless man on the street and rose when he entered the theatre. Thirty thousand people attended his funeral in 1880. Our trail guide described him Norton in great detail, finishing with the line, "Was he an ingenious pretender of a mentally impaired imposter? You decide."
Throughout our walk, there was one thing we couldn't help but notice: San Francisco, that city that everybody says is the most beautiful on earth, is covered with graffiti. Nowhere have I seen so much graffiti. It's much worse than in Chicago or New York or L.A. In those cities you mostly see graffiti in back alleys and on abandoned buildings in bad neighborhoods. Here you see graffiti everywhere. Several times I saw active businesses, the fronts of which had been obliterated so that I could barely tell what kind of business was there. Even in top-drawer neighborhoods the lampposts and mailboxes were "tagged", and numerous retaining walls seemed to be freshly painted--no doubt covering up the most recent round of illegal art.
We went slightly out of our way to see another historical monument, the site of Philo T. Farnsworth's laboratory. For those who haven't heard of Farnsworth, the Mormon physicist was the first person to register a patent for television. There is an on-going debate about who actually invented TV, with most experts leaning toward either Russian or British scientists. Even if they were first in the lab, though, they were not first to the patent office. RCA developed the first commercially successful TV system (using a group of Russian scientists who had fled their homeland), but after decades of legal battles, Farnsworth's widow received royalties on every set they sold. Farnsworth sent and received his first TV broadcast (a picture of a dollar sign, meant to impress a gathering of bankers he hoped would fund his work) on September 7, 1927 in a lab at the corner of Green and Sansome Streets in San Francisco. The building is now a graphic art studio, but a brass plaque commemorates Farnsworth's contribution to modern technology.
We saw a number of "firsts" along the Barbary Coast Trail, most of them of little significance. There was the place where they held the first Jewish Yom Kippur services, the first Pony Express office, and the site of the first public school in California (now a parking ramp). There was also a brick inlay in the sidewalk marking the location of the original shoreline of San Francisco Bay, many land-filled blocks from where the present coast is located. Definitely taking the prize for the most dubious "first" on the trail, though, is America's first strip club--still active in the city that considers itself the "adult entertainment capital of the world".
The trail winds through the North Beach area, an overpriced district of pastel stucco rowhouses that is nowhere near the beach. It is supposed to be one of the most "chi-chi" areas in town, but frankly it looks quite seedy. Books describe North Beach as San Francisco's Greenwich Village and it was the home of "beat" writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. It was also the home of Joe DiMaggio, and the twin towers of the lovely Sts. Peter and Paul Church that he attended dominate the neighborhood.
Beside North Beach is Telegraph Hill, which is topped by the famous Coit Tower, a 210-foot column whose top was built to resemble the nozzle of a fire hose (it was apparently funded by the widow of a firefighter). The trail splits in North Beach, with the main part going up Telegraph Hill and the "accessible alternative route" heading straight for Fisherman's Wharf. While we didn't really intend to, somehow we mixed up our directions and ended up on the handicapped route. That's no great loss; I've climbed to the top of enough towers at one time or another.
Fisherman's Wharf is one of those "must see" attractions in San Francisco, but I certainly couldn't tell you why. Margaret said she felt it was just "famous for being famous", and that has to be it. There's certainly nothing to see or do here that you can't see or do in more pleasant surroundings elsewhere. Basically it's a bunch of seedy old industrial buildings filled them with overpriced restaurants, tacky gift shops, and street artists of varying--but often rather limited--talent. There are also malls here, full of the same stores you'd find at every mall in America. We could have gone to K-Mart on Fisherman's Wharf, but it hardly seemed necessary to travel 2,000 miles for a blue-light special. (On the other hand, I wish I could have found a K-Mart in L.A. when my shaver broke.) It's basically the same stuff they've got in the French Quarter in New Orleans, with three major exceptions. New Orleans is cheaper, the architecture is much nicer there (those wrought iron balconies are lots nicer to look at than decaying canneries), and there's more space in New Orleans to handle the crowds. Fisherman's Wharf is way too crowded, and to my mind downright unpleasant.
There's not even a nice view of the ocean at Fisherman's Wharf. There are a couple of pleasant marinas, and if you look hard you can see Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge beyond the development on the piers. It's definitely not the kind of postcard view that makes you grab your camera, though.
I'm almost embarrassed to say that we did drop some money in one of the gift shops on Fisherman's Wharf. The main thing I bought was a small watercolor painting of the Golden Gate Bridge. More than a souvenir of San Francisco, the painting a reminder of my friend Sandra from graduate school. Sandra was an art teacher when I met her, but before that she was one of those artists who sold her work on the street. She lived in San Francisco for a number of years, and while there she earned a lot of money selling paintings of the Golden Gate Bridge for $10 each. Sandra actually didn't work in watercolor; instead her bridges were painted with acrylic paint, using a palate knife instead of a brush. Inflation has definitely taken hold. My painting cost $15, and I have a feeling watercolors would be cheaper than palate knife creations. One way or another, though, it's an interesting souvenir.
The parade had apparently ended by the time we got to Fisherman's Wharf. The give-away to this was that many members of the lesbian motorcycle group were now parked outside a seafood restaurant there. Others were joining them, and the noise level was rapidly getting as loud as it had been downtown.
Our last stop on Fisherman's Wharf was at Ghirardelli Square, home to the chocolate manufacturer of that name. While they make most of their chocolate elsewhere, they still maintain a small factory on this site, and they have a huge company store. I picked up another souvenir, a little wooden cable car filled with candy bars. The chocolate was good, and the cable car will continue to be a cute little memento.
We didn't expect to recognize anyone in San Francisco, ... but we did spot some familiar faces. The family we had seen on the train with the son whose hair was so unusual happened to be at Ghirardelli Square just when we were. I'd have bet they were from San Francisco (or maybe Berkeley), rather than tourists, but here they were in Tourist Central.
There was a little park near Ghirardelli Square that was like many parks in San Francisco. People like to sun themselves in the parks in San Francisco, but they do it in a most unusual way. First of all, since it's as chilly as it is, many of them are wearing jackets as they sit out catching the rays--which seems rather a contradiction to me. Odder still, though, almost everyone sits individually on the grass, with about five or six feet between them and the next person. No one seems to come to the parks as a couple or a family; it's all just singles.
Actually, there aren't a lot of traditional families in San Francisco. Shortly before coming here I had read that this was the only major city in America where the number of people under age 18 went down in the 1990s. Part of that is the large gay population, of course, but few of the other people who live here have children either. They're either "swinging singles" or married "yuppies" without children. What families there are in the Bay Area are mostly in the suburbs, but even there it's less than you'd see in other cities.
After looking through real estate ads, I can't imagine how a family--or a single person, for that matter--could afford to live in San Francisco. I thought Boston was overpriced, but it was dirt cheap compared to the Bay Area. The cheapest studio apartments were running $2,000 a month. That's more than my monthly salary for an efficiency. An apartment similar to the two-bedroom I live in here would run $3,500 a month--or $42,000 a year, just for an apartment. The cheapest rowhouses start around $750,000, and there's really no ceiling; we saw rat-traps I wouldn't give a dime for that had asking prices in the two million range.
Things are a little bit better outside of the city proper, but not much. Apartments in Oakland started around $1,000 a month and went up to $2,500. ... Old single-family homes in Oakland were around $500,000, while newly constructed condos started closer to the million mark. The whole Bay Area is equivalently overpriced. All those "dot-com" companies must be paying some fabulous salaries for anyone to afford to live around here.
We used our MUNI passes for the first time as we left Fisherman's Wharf. MUNI runs many forms of transit. The first thing we took was their historic trolley service, which runs along San Francisco's Embarcadero between Fisherman's Wharf and Market Street. These are not cable cars, but rather World War II vintage trolley cars that get their power from overhead wires. San Francisco apparently bought up old trolley cars from cities around the world a few years back, and they're running them mostly as a tourist attraction to relieve the over-crowding on the cable cars. Our car was named "the Brooklyn Dodger" and had originally operated in New York. It was a streamlined green monstrosity that was in mint condition, except for minor alterations to make it handicap-equipped. We got on at the end of the line, and I'm thankful we did. The crowd at the next station down filled the car, and it was packed like a Mexican subway by the time we got downtown.
Normally the trolleys (officially called the F-line) turn and run up the center of Market Street. Downtown was pretty much closed down for the gay festivities, though, and today all the trolleys dead-ended in front of the Ferry Building at the foot of Market.
We walked about a block past a line of gay pride banners to the Embarcadero subway station. The Market Street subway stations all have three levels. There's a lobby level right below the street. Below that you can board "MUNI Metro", streetcars that start in the subway and branch out at ground level all over the city. The third level down is for BART trains.
MUNI Metro is supposed to use honor system ticketing, just like L.A. In the subway, though, all the entrances have turnstiles. There's a cage for an attendant who you could flash a pass to, but today there was no MUNI attendant around at the Embarcadero station. Margaret and I were among about a half dozen people who wanted to use passes of various types. No one could figure out how to get in. Eventually a couple of us went over to the BART attendant and asked him how we were supposed to enter the MUNI facilities with a pass. He looked around a bit and suggested we reach around behind the emergency exit, unlatch it, and go in through there. He said an alarm would sound, but not to worry about it. We did exactly as he told us. The alarm did indeed go off, but no one seemed to care. People paid about as much attention to that as they would to a car alarm. ... So, if you ever want to sneak into the subway in San Francisco, now you know how.
We had our passes, but we really didn't need them. Downtown is the only place in San Francisco that MUNI seems to even remotely care if you pay your fare. Unlike in L.A., no one ever checked to see if we (or anyone else) had a ticket on MUNI Metro. They check on the cable cars, but they act like they couldn't care less about tickets on the trolleys and streetcars. Even if they did catch you, the fine for non-payment is only $35, compared to $250 in Los Angeles. They probably feel it's not worth their trouble to collect such a small fine.
Like BART, MUNI has electronic announcements in its stations. MUNI's are obviously more recent; they sound less like a synthesizer and more like an actual voice. The typical announcement is a saccharin-voiced female saying "outbound 1-car-PAUSE-"J" in-PAUSE-two minutes, followed by 2-car-PAUSE-"N, N" in-PAUSE-four minutes." You can almost hear the tape clunking around as it searches for the train letters and the numbers of minutes. "J" and "K" sound very similar on train announcements, as do "M" and "N"--all of which are the designations of MUNI Metro trains (I have no idea why A, B, C, D, E, G, H, and I don't exist.) I assume it's to avoid this confusion that the voice always says "K" and "N" twice ("N, N") when making announcements. I personally found all the electronic announcements annoying. I suppose they think it's helpful when so many different trains share the same platform, but I find it just as easy in the Loop in Chicago (where the same thing happens) to look for the color coding and destination on the front of the train when it comes.
You definitely have to know where you're going to use the trains in San Francisco. "Inbound" and "outbound" are the only destinations they ever give, and except for the letters there's no differentiation in the lines at all. Away from the subway the streetcars stop every couple of blocks, but the stops can be very hard to identify. Often they just paint a yellow stripe on a light pole, and that's the stop--no shelter, no benches, no platform, nothing. Bus stops and cable car stops use those same yellow-striped poles, so you have to check to see exactly what it is that stops at the stop you're at.
I had read ahead of time that MUNI Metro tended to be very crowded. That was certainly true today. It seemed as if everyone downtown was headed home from the parade, but they hadn't scheduled any extra trains to handle the mob. We crowded aboard a "J" train and made our way southward to 24th Street.
The intersection of 24th and Church is in a neighborhood known as Noe Valley (I think the first word is pronounced "NO-way" and was the name of the city's first mayor). This is a fairly typical residential neighborhood. San Francisco is almost entirely a city of rowhouses. The pretty ones you've no doubt seen pictures of are built of wood and mostly date from just after the 1906 earthquake. They're Victorian architecture, which everyone here seems to think is something special (they should go to the main street of any small town in the Midwest). They've been nicely kept up, and they really are quite pretty. Those "painted lady" homes are mostly concentrated right near the downtown area. The farther from Market Street you go, the less picturesque things get. The bulk of the city is built of either stucco or cement blocks--all in a very boxy design, and always painted in ghastly pastel colors. It's newer, but really not much nicer than the red brick rowhouse ghettos you see in Eastern and Midwestern cities. The big difference, though, is that in San Francisco these rowhouses may look like slums, but they aren't. They carry price tags in the million dollar range and are home to a wealthy and almost exclusively white citizenry.
CONTINUED IN PART 8
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