Herb Caen: Those endearing old charms

Photo: RUSSELL YIP


Herb Caen in the Crown Room atop the Fairmont Hotel in 1996.




Excerpted from a Herb Caen column — June 27, 1971

I KEEP READING in learned journals that nostalgia is the hottest movement in the land these days, but I’m not buying. It all seems phony to me, just another exercise in merchandising, a high-pressure plot to put our ladies back in wedgies and ankle-strap shoes, not to mention those awful suits with padded shoulders and nipped-in waists (I’ll take the beautiful hippie girls who let it all hang out). Not a tear came to my eyes as I read Life’s “Nostalgia” issue, and as for the vaunted revival of “No, No, Nanette” on Broadway, that’s a bore, too. Can you really get choked up in 1971 over a song with such lyrics as “Day will break and you’ll awake and start to bake a sugar cake for me to take for all the boys to see”? What’s a sugar cake? Why does she have to get up at dawn to bake it? And I’d rather not think about the kind of “boys” who’d want to see it.

THE MAIN REASON I think the Big Nostalgia Kick is synthetic is that we don’t see any signs of it in San Francisco. If it were really happening it would have happened here first. We’ve led the way in so many wonderful things — rock music, Love Children, cirrhosis, bridge-jumpers, bare boobs, junk art, junk clothes, turning on at the Opera House — that it’s ridiculous to think we couldn’t have kicked off a nostalgia boom if we’d really wanted to. After all, San Francisco practically invented nostalgia. It’s just that we played “Remember when?” for so many years — while the rest of the country was going crazy with progress — that we’ve tired of the game.

WELL, NOBODY can accuse San Francisco of living in the past any longer. In fact, where we seem to be is in a mad rush to destroy every vestige of The City That Was, The City That Knows How, Poor Pitiful Pearl of the Pacific. We can’t tear down old buildings fast enough to make room for new ones that are every bit as distinctive as Pittsburgh’s or Atlanta’s. As the man said when he first entered the restaurant atop Bank of America’s World Headquarters: “Instant Cleveland!” And now the rusty steel bones of the Transamerica pyramid are beginning to rise, its lower extremities already girdled in white Plastic Inevitable that puts you in mind of hotel bathrooms. When the pyramid was first announced, Mayor Alioto, drawing on his rich Florentine background, enthused: “It will be our Giotto Tower!” Well, he may have meant Irving Giotto.

WHILE NOSTALGIA is said to be sweeping the country, it’s a dirty word in San Francisco ’71 (watch out, here comes M. Justin Herman again with his swinging steel ball!). Redevelopment is the name of the game, and if you just had your old house shot out from under you, it’s for your own good, old-timer. “You have to be realistic,” as this big building said to me just the other day over lunch at Jack’s, an old restaurant that survives, miraculously. “Realistic.” I didn’t know how to answer him. Realism to him apparently means congestion, confusion, sterility. One antiseptic building, bustling by day, stone cold dead by night — replacing dozens of little buildings where mama and papa ran a grocery, Joe had a bar, Sam did the laundry, George owned a bookstore and hundreds of people lived, laughed, loved and rejoiced in a “neighborhood.” Gone, all of them, to where?

MAYBE NOSTALGIA is out here because it’s too painful to contemplate the dream and consider the reality. Once there were giants who built well — for the ages, they thought — but their landmarks, the solid evidence of their achievements, could disappear overnight, and they did. Now, it’s only when the fog steals in to blot out their ersatz replacements that you dare think of the past — alone, in a bittersweet reverie.

The Vertical Earthquake essay by Herb Caen

THE VERTICAL EARTHQUAKE

Henry Park has invented a parlor game - fun for young and old alike - called City Planning. The equipment is simple, and any number can play. All you need is a grid map of San Francisco, crayons and a dice box.

The player who wins the toss rolls the dice, finds the corresponding coordinates on the map and "destroys" or "improves" that square with his crayon. If he colors a landmark, he gets 10 points. A theater is worth 9 points. If the numbers he rolls fail to intersect, he may draw a freeway - 15 points - between the two spots and pick up any number of points in between, depending on the buildings in his path (a pre-1906 house is worth five points).

The players may give themselves various titles - state highway engineer, city architect, Eastern capitalist and so on - and the one who destroys City Hall for a parking lot is declared the winner. To add a final note of verisimilitude, all players are blindfolded.

Well, City Planning, like Monopoly, is just a game - a dangerous game that San Francisco is playing every day with great recklessness. It contains an added hazard: The players are not only blindfolded, they are also masked, and the masks aren't necessarily black or white. It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, and even the players themselves aren't sure. If you want to build a 33-story skyscraper on a slope of Nob Hill, are you a hero or a villain? Not too long ago the answer would have been simple.

A few days ago, we were delighted or chagrined, according to our various tastes, to read that another 20-story apartment house will rise on Russian Hill - in a so-called "sacred enclave." For years, the general feeling in that area has been that nobody would dare desecrate it with a towering slab of concrete. Good taste would prevail.


Well, we learned something - again too late. Nothing is sacred in San Francisco any longer. The Russian Hillers who opposed that 20-story building expressed a great love for San Francisco and made vain appeals to ethics and morality. The lady who is going to build that skyscraper probably loves San Francisco, too, in her own fashion, and would like to make a buck besides. That is also a sacred tradition.

Which brings us to the Nub Hill of the problem: The lady who owns the Russian Hill property isn't breaking laws by building her monster.

If what's left of the physical character of San Francisco is to be preserved, the laws have to change. (Frank Lloyd Wrightonce said, "San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful." Then he snickered, "What San Francisco really needs is another earthquake," which overlooked the fact that we are having a quake - a vertical one.)

Changing the law to provide for zones that are indeed sacred - for reasons of history, beauty and just plain breathing space - is not going to be easy. There are people in City Hall who would tear down City Hall without a qualm in the name of that magic slogan: "Get it on the tax rolls!"

A high Chamber of Commerce official said: "We WANT big buildings here. We want this to remain the business capital of the West." So does everybody - as long as the buildings add to, rather than detract from the city.

"We don't want people to say San Francisco is dying," another said.

When is a city dying? Howard Moody answers that question this way:

"A city is dying when it has an eye for real estate values but no heart for personal values, when it has an understanding of traffic flow but no concern about the flow of human beings, when we have competence in building but little time for ethical codes, when human values are absent at the heart of the decision-making and planning and governing of a city - it is dead and all that is left is decay."