by Gary Kamiya
At a party to celebrate the arrival of some wayward members of the expedition, Arballo sang a few racy, teasing improvised songs called glosas. Some of her verbal barbs evidently struck the expedition’s geographer and diarist, a Franciscan father named Pedro Font, in his soft posterior. Font was an excellent diarist, but he was also an insufferably self-righteous prig. After Arballo had, in Font’s words, “brazenly sang some glosas that were not so nice,” her male companion, apparently jealous of the applause, began beating her. When Anza came out of his tent and scolded the man, Font protested, “Let it be, sir, he is doing the right thing.” But Anza replied, “No, Father, I must not allow these excesses in my presence.” Font whined, “He was strict about this and not strict about the excesses of the party!—which went on until quite late.”
A wild party, an outraged reactionary, a free-spirited woman and an enlightened leader—all the essential elements of the future San Francisco were there. But Maria Arballo deserves an honored place in California history just for irritating Font.
It was a long and difficult journey. As the party crossed the snowy mountains into California, the women cried “Ay!”—a plaintive wail of regret for the homeland they had left. In San Jose, the children cried because there was not enough to eat, which led the nearby hills to be named Lomas de las Lágrimas (Hills of Tears). But Anza, who could ride 50 or 60 miles a day fueled by only a cup of morning chocolate, guided them unerringly through the wilderness. When he said goodbye to the colonists in Monterey, they wept. He then gathered a smaller party, which he led to San Francisco. On his first night he camped at Mountain Lake because of its freshwater.
Mountain Lake is one of the stranger historical sites in San Francisco. It is hidden away at the end of a swanky dead-end street in the bland, pleasantly upscale Richmond District, two blocks away from bustling Clement Street. It’s about the last place in the city you’d expect to find a 1,700-year-old freshwater lake. A beautiful little park fronts the lake, but its western side is profaned by Park Presidio Boulevard, the intrusive freeway that connects the western part of the city with the Golden Gate Bridge. The eight-foot-deep lake is polluted and only a couple of hundred yards wide. It used to be bigger and deeper before the freeway was built and eucalyptus trees encroached on it and shrank it. The lake drains out of a pipe on the west side and runs through culverts into the Lobos Valley, a short, wild stretch of sand and tangled brush hiding the only remaining significant free-flowing stream in the city, Lobos Creek, which empties into the Pacific at Baker Beach.
After leaving Mountain Lake and exploring the beaches to the west, Anza rode north, to the great gap in the Coastal Range. Font stood on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate and marveled at what he saw: “The port of San Francisco … is a marvel of nature, and might well be called the harbor of harbors … And I think if it could be well settled like Europe there would not be anything more beautiful in all the world.” Anza selected a site for a military base nearby, then headed south. A map drawn by Font suggests that Anza may have ridden to the top of Russian and Nob Hills on his way, Font’s cryptic dotted line, like the markings on a pirate’s treasure map, giving the downtown hills a tantalizing hypothetical cameo in the city’s founding odyssey. In a warmer, more protected site a few miles away, Anza’s party found “a handsome year-round stream of extremely fine water” surrounded by chamomiles and violets. Because it was the Friday of Sorrows, they named the stream the Arroyo de los Dolores and chose it as the site of the original mission.
That same day, Anza left the narrow peninsula that ended at the Golden Gate, never to return. He had brought Northern California its first colonists and prepared the way for the city to come. On June 27, just eight days before other colonists on the far side of the continent declared their independence from England, Anza’s lieutenant, José Moraga, arrived in San Francisco with a small party of soldiers, settlers, and servants from Monterey. On September 17—the anniversary of the stigmata of St. Francis—Father Palou said Mass and blessed the presidio. Then Moraga took formal possession in the name of the king, accompanied by a blast of muskets and cannon fire from the San Carlos.
Two hundred and thirty-four years after Cabrillo sailed past the Golden Gate, the world had finally found San Francisco.
Chapter 9
The Borrowed City
Filbert and Kearny Streets
Observations about San Francisco’s weather tend to be variations on Mark Twain’s supposed quip, “The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco.” (Twain never actually said this, although he did write a funny piece about a freezing early-morning trip to the Cliff House.) The wind also comes in for its share of abuse, while those of a poetic bent throw in a few references to the fog. The general sense is that San Francisco’s weather is a subset of “California weather,” a kind of inferior, cooler version of Los Angeles’s.
Such complaints have a long historical pedigree. In 1539, the Spanish explorer Francisco Ulloa irritably called the prevailing northwest wind “the king of all that coast.” In 1850, novelist Eliza Farnham declaimed, “San Francisco, I believe, has the most disagreeable climate and locality of any city on the globe.” Farnham’s distaste for the city’s weather was so great that it led her to predict an early, comma-laden doom for anyone forced to endure it. “What sort of end the unfortunates, who spend their lives there, can expect under such circumstances, one does not easily foresee.” Even so ardent a lover of San Francisco as the bohemian poet Charles Warren Stoddard described its weather as “invigorating as it is unscrupulous, having a peculiar charm which is seldom discovered until one is beyond its spell.”
It cannot be denied that San Francisco’s summers are a pale imitation of the real thing, or that the city was cursed by Aeolus. The cold gusts that swirled through Candlestick Park, the soon-to-be-demolished former home of the San Francisco Giants and 49ers, were the stuff of legend. Despised Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey recalled, “I remember walking back to the tunnel after a one-run loss, and something whizzed by me. It was a gin bottle. I picked it up and saw it was half full. Right then, you knew you were at Candlestick. In New York they would have kept it full for more impact. At Candlestick, they had to drink half of it to keep warm.”
San Francisco’s climate will never please those who require a real summer, or need weather that falls into clearly defined categories. But the clichés about the city’s weather completely miss the larger point. The truth is that San Francisco has the most interesting weather of any city I know. No other place that I’ve ever been has weather so complex, subtle, varied, and ephemeral—or so beautiful.
It may seem perverse to claim that San Francisco has uniquely varied weather. It’s well known that this city, with its Mediterranean climate, does not have seasons in the normal sense of the word. It almost never snows, the last time the temperature hit zero was the last ice age, and it rarely gets above 80 for more than a few days at a time. It has only two observable seasons, wet and dry, and even the rainy season is hardly a monsoon. How is this monotonous round of eternal 50- to-70-degree days varied?
It’s simple. San Francisco’s weather features extreme variations within a relatively small range. The best analogy may be to good wine: All good wines are much more like each other than they are like rotgut jug red from Modesto, but the fine differences between them are precisely what connoisseurs appreciate. In the same way, a connoisseur of San Francisco’s weather learns to enjoy every day’s unique bouquet—for they are never exactly the same. San Francisco has sophisticated weather.
Not only is the weather here rarely the same two days in a row, but on any given day you can also experience a dozen different weathers, depending on what part of town you’re in. This is because San Francisco is one of a handful of world cities—Halifax and Santiago are two of the others—that has microclimates. The city supposedly has seven microclimates, but the number is more or less arbitrary. The western parts of the city are foggier, windier, a
nd cooler, and the eastern ones are warmer and clearer. The main barrier is Twin Peaks, which divides the city’s weather as much as it does its inhabitants: “West of Twin Peaks” is political shorthand for conservative homeowners—and fog. East of Twin Peaks means liberal renters—and sun.
The difference between these microclimates can be dramatic. Every San Franciscan knows that if you live in the Mission and are going to a picnic at Ocean Beach or Golden Gate Park, you should be ready for a five-degree drop in temperature, plus the wind chill factor. But what is less widely known is that the weather here changes so quickly, and is so localized, that you can literally outrun it. Living in San Francisco gives a whole new meaning to the old saw “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.”
One summer day I was visiting a friend who lives at Broderick and Eddy, on the western edge of the Western Addition. At 4 P.M. the fog rolled in over the Anza Vista hill and through the Geary Street gap and swallowed up his apartment. So I jumped on my bike and rode over to my house on Nob Hill, which was in bright sun. Two hours later, the fog had conquered Lafayette Park, routed resistance in Polk Gulch, and sent its advance scouts blowing in great gray streaks down Jackson Street. So I got back on my bike and zipped over to my office on Telegraph Hill, which was golden and toasty. An hour after that, Coit Tower, too, had fallen to the onrushing gray maelstrom. I drove over to have dinner with another pal who lives on Potrero Hill, two miles south and west. Her house was still in the sun.
And San Francisco’s weather doesn’t just change block to block; it changes foot to foot. Even the microclimates have microclimates. Mostly that’s because of the wind. Any obstruction—a building, a hill, even a big tree—that blocks the wind has a dramatic impact. Since the wind almost invariably blows from the west, all you have to do to stay warm here (assuming the sun is shining) is to find the leeward side of a western wall and sit down. Five feet one way or the other can spell the difference between being able to sunbathe with your shirt off on any day of the year and wearing a sweater.
In his little book Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region, Harold Gilliam, whose writings on the natural world of San Francisco are unsurpassed, notes, “Probably no comparable area on earth displays as many varieties of weather simultaneously as the region around San Francisco Bay.” As Gilliam eloquently describes, San Francisco’s remarkable weather is caused by the ceaseless encounter between the sea and the land. This encounter is made possible—and uniquely dramatic—by the presence of the Golden Gate, the only breach in the Coast Range for its entire 600-mile length. “Through the funnel of the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay, the immense aerial forces of sea and land wage a continuous war, and the tide of battle often flows back and forth with regularity,” Gilliam writes. “The line between the two types of air masses, particularly in summer, may zigzag through the streets of San Francisco and extend in similar fashion across the entire region.”
This swerving, ever-changing weather has a psychological and emotional impact on daily life here that is rarely mentioned but is incalculable. Cool and fresh, constantly cleansed by the sea, it is walking weather, thinking weather, alert weather. (I admit that the fact I have mostly lived in the warmer, eastern neighborhoods predisposes me to see the weather here as stimulating rather than frigid, and frisky rather than Gothic. While living at my father’s house in Miraloma Park, near Glen Canyon, the first time I walked under a big line of eucalyptus trees, I got soaked to the skin, even though it wasn’t raining. It took me a minute to realize that the leaves were dripping with condensation from the fog that had gathered on them overnight.)
The changeability of the weather, and the fact that several different kinds of weather often coexist at the same time, has a subtle effect on one’s moods. Blue skies trigger a Pavlovian happiness response in us; gray skies are deeply associated with gloom. But when the sky is simultaneously sunny and overcast, as it so often is here, these instinctive associations short-circuit. This gives rise to new, nameless moods. It also encourages living in the moment. The knowledge that that gray sky at 2 P.M. may grow brighter and brighter until the fog burns off and the day ends up sunny, or dimmer and dimmer until darkness falls, is like having a Zen master standing behind you with a stick, ready to whack you if you don’t pay attention to that glowing gray sky right now.
Above all, San Francisco’s weather is a feast for the eyes. This is a city of famously clear light, but it is also one of a thousand exquisite shadings, of every possible combination of sun and clouds and warmth and coolness, mist and fog and wind and brightness and darkness. The San Francisco sky is a vast canvas, painted by the ever-changing sea. Those of us who live here take stupendous sights for granted because they happen so often: mighty banks of fog breaking like slow-motion waves over Twin Peaks, skies of cool translucent pearl clouded by evanescent washes of silvery mist, sunbeams landing on random spots in the city like the Annunciation in a medieval painting, winter mornings of such crystalline clarity that the whole city looks like an icicle-covered branch, the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge rising up above a billowing sea of thick white clouds.
But my favorite San Francisco weather moments are when two opposite types occupy the same space at the same time, leaving you in a strange physical and psychological never-never land. One example will have to stand for a thousand.
One summer afternoon I went down to Crissy Field. It was a pea soup. The fog there was so heavy that the entire bay was invisible. The diaphone foghorn on the bridge was blaring its dark two-toned warning. The sound reminded me, as it always does when the fog is especially heavy, of the haunting last scene in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, when the morphine-addicted mother descends the stairs. The foghorn that has kept the whole family up all night sounds in the distance. Lost in delusion, she is a child again, back in convent school. Then she speaks the play’s shattering final lines. “Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” The foghorn sounds as she stares unseeing into the distance.
A little later I was in North Beach, walking up Filbert Street toward Coit Tower. The fog was burning off, but it still hung on the bay and covered the bridge, an impenetrable blanket. The foghorn sounded dully again. Because of some auditory trick, it was incredibly loud—it sounded like it was coming from the next block. Suddenly the clouds parted and the sky above cleared to a dazzling blue. And even as the sun shone down, something I had never seen before took place. A wild profusion of gentle water particles came blowing, tumbling, whirling through the air from the west. It was as if some mischievous kid up in the clouds was spraying a giant nozzle set on “mist.”
I could see the particles dancing brilliantly in the sun. The foghorn blew louder than ever.
These are the kinds of things that happen when you live on a jagged peninsula at the end of the continent, under a torn-open sky, in a city that is only borrowed from the sea.
Chapter 10
The Lost River
Huffaker Park, Sixth and Channel Streets
San Francisco is famous for its natural beauty. But to call its beauty “natural” is slightly misleading. For aside from the cliffs at Lands End (which are actually covered with introduced trees), Glen Canyon, and a few other places, its beauty does not derive from nature in its pure state. The paradoxical truth is that before the city existed, its terrain was not particularly beautiful. Covered in sand dunes and with scant trees, it was a monotonous, even dreary landscape, largely devoid of color and contrast. Heretical as it is to say, much of San Francisco’s terrain became more attractive when the city was built. San Francisco is the urban equivalent of an English garden, an artful blend of wildness and cultivation.
But there is one part of the city’s primordial landscape that was breathtakingly beautiful, and whose loss was tragic: its vanished waters.
Compared with the East Bay or the Peninsula, San Francisco in, say, 1700 C.E. was fa
irly arid. It had no streams as large as Alameda Creek, which runs for 45 miles and drains 700 square miles, or 15-mile-long Butano Creek in San Mateo County. But it had plenty of live water: four or five significant free-flowing streams, numerous springs, and more than a dozen lakes, at least 14 of them in what is now Golden Gate Park. And of all its aquatic features, the most magnificent was an estuary called Mission Bay.
This vast tidal cove, clearly visible in old bird’s-eye illustrations of the city, took up much of what is now South of Market and ran deep into the Mission District. Fed by a meandering creek that wandered as far to the south and west as 20th Street and Florida, Mission Bay was surrounded by 260 gloriously squishy acres of salt marshes, mudflats, and serpentine streams. These nutrient-rich wetlands were home to an enormous bird population, including ducks, egrets, ospreys, seagulls, and herons, and supported a rich population of mussels and clams. Fish were abundant, as were small game. Not surprisingly, the native people, the Yelamu, were drawn to Mission Bay. (The 49ers had a saying that wherever there was freshwater, one would find Indian artifacts.) The Yelamu had a winter village on Mission Bay, near today’s AT&T Park, and a summer village a few miles west on Mission Creek, near Mission Dolores. They could travel by boat between these villages on Mission Creek, a route still practical when the 49ers arrived.
Nancy Olmsted recounts the saga of this lost world in Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay. During the 19th century, the cove was home to San Francisco’s shipbuilders and later the city’s little-known whaling industry. A rope plant, an ironworks, and a sugar refinery stood on the cove’s southern tip, Potrero Point, near present-day Third and 16th Streets. The thousands of Chinese immigrants that poured into the city disembarked at the Pacific Mail Steamship pier, near what is now First and Brannan.