Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  But the waterways weren’t only used for business. They were precious lungs for a city that had almost no parks. Long Bridge, the almost mile-long bridge that spanned three-quarters of the cove, was a favorite site for picnics and Sunday outings. Hunters wearing gum boots shot snipe in the marsh at Seventh and Mission. At the edges of the marshes, resorts like Russ’s Gardens at Seventh and Harrison and the Willows at 17th and Mission, which pleasure-goers reached by going out the Mission plank road, offered outdoor dining and dancing.

  But Mission Bay was as doomed as the more famous cove to its north, where the instant city first expanded. Flat downtown land was scarce, the hills and dunes blocked easy expansion, there was big money to be made in real estate, the omnipotent railroads needed space, and Mission Bay and its wetlands were in the way. As Philip J. Dreyfus notes in Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco, “San Franciscans seemed quite consumed by the concern that their city had been graced with too much water and too little earth.” In 1852 a San Franciscan named David Hewes invented the “steam paddy,” the steam shovel/railroad combination capable of moving 2,500 tons of sand a day. The enormous dunes that blocked Market and Mission Streets, some as high as 80 feet, were cleared away and dumped in marshes and wetlands. By 1874, Mission Creek above Ninth and Brannan was no longer classified as navigable. By 1889, most of Mission Bay had been filled in. By 1910 the job was finished.

  Today, the entire majestic cove, its creek and its glorious marshes are gone. All that is left is a short stretch of Mission Creek, which opens onto the bay just south of the Giants’ stadium, passes under two historic counterweighted bridges, and runs west four blocks to Seventh and Berry, where it abruptly ends at a wastewater pump just before the Caltrain tracks. The gigantic gray arch of the 280 freeway towers like a Brutalist amusement park ride above the western end of the creek, its mighty pylons walking across the stunted waterway.

  I first came upon this unexpected stretch of water one night in the early 1970s. This whole part of town was part of what was once a vast world where the sidewalk ended. Near where AT&T Park now stands, there was a string of ancient warehouses, unchanged since the days of Harry Bridges. Nearby, a riotous old bar, appropriately named Bouncer’s, catered to a bruising clientele, a Jack Daniel’s–pounding mixture of bikers, rockers, and longshoremen. Management would have needed major bouncers, plural, to eighty-six any of these dudes. Vast empty fields stretched out to the south, the biggest open space in San Francisco. On the north side of the creek stood the sketchy San Francisco RV Park.

  But this strangely truncated body of water was not just a surreal afterthought. A few people called it home. On the south side of the channel I was enchanted to discover the last thing I thought I’d see a few blocks from the train station: a motley collection of houseboats.

  I wandered down along the less-than-perfumed banks of the creek, past the last houseboat, under the freeway. No one was around. A rotting board stretched out into the water. I walked onto it. After I had gone about six feet, it suddenly dipped into the water. Black water of unknown provenance ran toward my feet. Visions of one of those horror movies in which some hapless character falls into a maniac’s bubbling vat and emerges as a skeleton raced through my head. I managed to get back to the bank.

  Forty years later, those 20 houseboats are still berthed there, as they have been since 1960, when they were relocated from another one of the city’s vanished streams, Islais Creek. Running along the bank a few feet away from them is a delightful little handmade-feeling park named Huffaker. Shiny new lawns and sidewalks installed by the city peter out into a stretch of grass and shrubbery as scruffy and well loved as a hobo’s garden. A dusty collection of campers and old cars is parked nearby, having apparently been given some special dispensation from the authorities to remain forever.

  But forever is running out. The University of California at San Francisco has built an imposing high-tech, high-rise complex just south of here, leaving only a few hundred square yards of unused land between it and the creek. Through this last no-man’s-land, which is already fenced off, run two parallel chain-link fences, which meaninglessly delineate a Twilight Zone–like lane leading to Seventh Street. In early 2012 a few homeless people were camped out in this bizarre walkway; I saw a guy sleeping in a sleeping bag next to a shopping cart and, of all things, a double bass. The musical clochard and his brethren are gone now, probably forever.

  For the pitiless laser beam of money has found Mission Creek. The north side has been transformed: A big cluster of expensive new condos rises up, with manicured walkways, a dog park, and a fancy kayak shed at the far end. It’s only a matter of time before the laser turns to the south side and surgically excises the last patches of urban detritus, leaving the houseboats as a kind of floating museum of lost San Francisco funkiness.

  In Vanished Waters, Olmsted quotes a houseboat resident, Sharon Skolnick, as saying, “It’s an acquired taste to stick with an inlet that takes your house up six feet and then down six feet, twice in every 24 hours … that absorbs the effluvia of storm drains and simulates a sewer, and then two days later wins your heart back with a blue-lake duck.”

  The Mission Creek houseboats wouldn’t be easy to live in—partly because of the smell, but more because of the surrealism. Mission Creek is deeply schizophrenic. It’s simultaneously the most natural place in San Francisco and the most artificial, the purest and the most polluted, the most bucolic and the most sterile. If you lived on the creek, you’d feel the tide rise and fall—and look up at a monstrous freeway towering overhead. You’d see sea lions outside your front door—and stare up at condos that look like they’re in Legoland. And no matter how wonderful it would be to be rocked to sleep by the water, when you woke up, you’d still be living at Sixth and King, across from the train station.

  And yet, you’d have to be a zombie not to fantasize about living there.

  Some of the allure of Mission Creek is the idea of living on a houseboat. Having one’s own little portable house is a delectable dream, like Mr. Toad’s brief obsession with the canary-colored cart. But it’s more than that. It’s the water. Water in a city is irresistible. Even fountains are a magnet, as any visitor to Rome can attest. But natural, free-flowing water—that’s pure magic.

  There’s not much of it left in San Francisco. There’s the one-mile-long trickle of Islais Creek in Glen Canyon. The Presidio has Lobos Creek, the city’s last major stream, and El Polin Spring, its largest. There’s Yosemite Marsh, a small spring-fed pond in an obscure corner of McClaren Park, and the quasi-natural Chain of Lakes in Golden Gate Park, and a few others.

  These places feel like shrines. The city recently daylighted the Tennessee Hollow Watershed in the Presidio, and San Franciscans would restore more of their city’s lost waters if they could. The great paving-over, once seen as the pinnacle of progress, is now regarded as a tragedy.

  San Francisco’s vanished aquatic world is laid out in the elegaic “Creek and Watershed Map” published by the Oakland Museum. Here they are, in faint green lines: the waterfall that Anza saw tumbling near 18th Street and Castro; burbling Precita Creek, which cheerfully ran along the northern edge of Bernal Heights; the nameless little stream that ran down Sacramento Street and emptied into Yerba Buena cove. Other vanished waters, such as a spring that once bubbled at Washington and Powell, are too obscure to appear on the map.

  The human fascination with water is atavistic. It’s imprinted in our DNA. But for city dwellers, that fascination has a more poignant quality.

  For cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were. The waterways that existed before the skyscrapers and freeways are a vanished world that beckons to us. When we catch glimpses of them, the city disappears. Its too-known streets dissolve into unfathomable terrain. It becomes innocent again. We want to unmake the city. To regain a lost paradise.

  And perhaps we are also driven to unmake ourselves. To return to an earli
er time in our own lives, one not yet marked off with streets and signs. To become again the children we once were, playing with a hose in the backyard. Back when happiness was easy, and water was everywhere.

  Chapter 11

  Our Lady of Sorrows

  Mission San Francisco de Asís, 17th and Dolores Streets

  Mission Dolores is a riddle. Built in 1791, it is the oldest building in San Francisco, and one of the most beautiful. With its two-tiered colonnaded facade and four-foot-thick walls, the whitewashed adobe reposes on busy, palm tree–lined Dolores Street like a dignified old don, a white-haired survivor from a distant era. Its simple but majestic baroque interior, filled on a fall afternoon with golden light pouring in from the stained glass of the south window, evokes the monastic fervor and pious idealism of the Franciscans who journeyed to the end of the world to save souls. Indeed, Mission San Francisco de Asís—to give it its full title—seems to embody the entire Spanish era. To think of the church with anything but reverence while standing in its verdant little cemetery, where some of San Francisco’s first citizens are buried, feels like a sacrilege against the very origins of the city.

  But there is another way of looking at Mission Dolores. For also buried in its peaceful cemetery and the land outside it are some 5,000 local Indians who died during the half century that the mission carried out its appointed role. Most perished of measles, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and other illnesses brought by the Spanish. No one will ever know how many died of misery. The Indians living in San Francisco, the Yelamu, had the misfortune of living closest to the mission. They were wiped out. By the time the Americans took over, all of them except one old man and his son were dead, and their last descendant died in the 1920s. The other tribal groups that had lived on the peninsula were also devastated: Only one descendant of these groups, a sociology professor at California Lutheran University, is known to be alive. A people and a way of life that had existed in San Francisco for untold centuries had vanished forever.

  So it’s hard to know how to look at this small white building. Its beauty calls for gentle oblivion. But there is no statute of limitations on historical tragedy.

  Strangely, the work that best evokes the uncanny quality of Mission Dolores, just as it captures the unresolved darkness of California’s Spanish history, is a Hollywood movie about a completely different subject: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The scene when Kim Novak’s Madeleine visits the mission cemetery and looks at the gravestone of Carlotta Valdes, the Hispanic ancestor who committed suicide and is haunting her, summons all the dark ambiguities that hang over the church on Dolores Street.

  José Moraga, Juan Bautista de Anza’s lieutenant, started building the first mission in the summer of 1776, after work on the presidio had gotten under way. The small structure was completed on October 9, to the blast of cannons, the ringing of bells, and the launching of fireworks. The noise terrified the local Indians, who ran away. “The day had been a joyful one for all,” wrote Father Francisco Palou, who conducted the first Mass there. “Only the savages did not enjoy themselves on this happy day!”

  Palou’s words were inadvertently apt. The days when the “savages” would enjoy themselves were coming to an end.

  Spain had evolved a unique three-headed approach—military, civil, and ecclesiastical—to its goal of turning Indians into Spaniards. The presidio, whose roots went back to the Roman praesidium, or frontier garrison, defended the area against hostile natives and served as the social and governmental center. The pueblo, or town (San Jose was the nearest one; San Francisco would not become a pueblo until much later) anchored the Spanish population.

  The mission, by far the most important of the three, was responsible for “reducing”—i.e. converting and civilizing—the natives, who would provide manpower for the farming, cattle raising, and industry that would allow the entire colonial enterprise to be self-supporting. The 21 California missions, each about a day’s ride from the next, were intended to be temporary: The converted Indians, known as neophytes, were supposed to be emancipated in 10 years, at which time they would assume the full responsibilities and rights of their Spanish-speaking “benefactors,” who were known as gente de razón (people of reason).

  In fact, that goal proved impossible to reach. The missionaries did succeed in converting thousands of Indians, teaching them the rudiments of Christianity, and putting them to work, but almost none of their charges ever became independent. By the time the missions were secularized in 1834, the entire system was already a shambles.

  This was not surprising. As Malcolm Margolin, author of the classic The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area, points out, the Spanish “expected the Indians to desert everything they knew about life and to adapt overnight to a most peculiar and highly evolved European institution, the monastery—an institution under which, even at the height of its popularity, only a small number of Europeans themselves ever chose to live.” People who had roamed freely through the hills and forests, who had a casual attitude toward sex and worked only when they needed to, were suddenly required to rise at dawn, say prayers, go off to work, attend religious classes, and sleep in segregated dormitories. Their entire universe, from their daily life to their spiritual beliefs, was simply erased. It was as psychotic a transformation as Pol Pot’s Year Zero in Cambodia.

  For the native people, the result was abject misery. Foreign visitor after foreign visitor commented on how sad the Indians looked. Otto von Kotzebue, leader of a Russian expedition that visited San Francisco in 1816, wrote of the Indians at Mission Dolores, “A deep melancholy always clouds their faces, and their eyes are constantly fixed on the ground.” Another member of the expedition, artist Louis Choris, wrote, “I have never seen one laugh. I have never seen one look one in the face. They look as though they were interested in nothing.” These are the same Indians whom earlier explorers had described as carefree and cheerful, who loved to dance, and whose incessant singing prevented the explorers from sleeping. They were, in effect, suffering from an incurable, culture-wide depression.

  So-called gentiles—unconverted or “wild” Indians—came into the missions for a variety of reasons: awe at European technology, the presence of family members, and gifts given by the monks. Despite a prohibition against involuntary conversions, many Indians were brought into the church by force. As they lost their lands and ability to live, most Indians complied. But some did not. An Indian named Pomponio who lived at Mission Dolores in the 1820s escaped numerous times and killed those Indians sent to bring him back. When the commandant of San Francisco condemned him to death and shackled his legs with iron rings, Pomponio cut off his heels with a knife, squeezed his bloody feet through the rings, and fled.

  Over the years, thousands of Indians tried to escape. In 1796, 200 of the 872 neophytes at Mission Dolores fled, a number so great that the governor convened an official investigation. Asked why the Indians had left, four soldiers stationed at the mission said it was the three muchos: too much work, too much punishment, and too much hunger. When some of the Indians were recaptured, six of them said they had run away because they had been whipped or beaten by one of the priests at the mission, Father Antonio Danti, who had already been upbraided by the governor for his cruel treatment of the Indians.

  Serra’s successor as president of the California missions, Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, replaced Danti with a kind priest named José María Fernández. Fernández arrived full of idealism, but he found that the two other priests at the mission treated their charges as harshly as Danti had. Appalled by their behavior, Fernández wrote an anguished letter to the governor, saying that the Indians had run away “due to the terrible suffering they experienced from punishments and work … I love the Indians very much and I will feel their misfortunes even more if they are to be treated like this. I repeat, I love them very much, because they have caused me great sorrow, very bad days, many sleepless nights, some tears, and ultimately my shattered health.” The
other priests retorted that Fernández was an impostor and a troublemaker. When the dispute became public, Fernández was recalled to Mexico City, a broken man. He was not the only priest whose mental and physical health was destroyed by his experience in California.

  The punishments Fernández referred to, usually for disobedience, included whippings, shackles, and stocks. The most grotesque punishment was meted out to native women who had miscarried, and were thus assumed to be guilty of infanticide: Their heads were shaven, they were flogged for 15 straight days, they were shackled for three months, and as others taunted them, they were forced to carry a hideous red-painted wooden doll, known as a monigote, representing the dead child.

  Sometimes priestly behavior tilted into sexual pathology. At Mission Santa Cruz, Father Ramón Olbes demanded that an infertile couple have sex in front of him to prove that they were incapable of having children. When they refused, Olbes insisted on inspecting the man’s penis to see “whether or not it was in good order” and attempted to do the same with the woman’s genitalia. When she refused and tried to bite him, Olbes ordered that she be chained, whipped, imprisoned, and forced to carry a monigote.

  But such priests were the exceptions. Most of the monks who dedicated their lives to saving the souls of the “children of the wilderness” did not intend to harm them. As defenders of the missions have pointed out, the corporal punishments doled out to the Indians were standard practice in the Spanish culture of the time. Most missionaries were like Father Fernández: well-meaning, deeply devout men who believed they were doing God’s work. They regarded the native people as their children, whom it was their holy duty to convert to the true faith. Many felt real affection for them and did their best to defend their charges from the soldiers, whose constant sexual misconduct led to constant conflicts with the church leaders, including Serra. At the fourth mission to be built, San Gabriel Archangel, a disgusted Serra reported that troops were lassoing women to rape them and that “even the boys who came to the mission were not safe from their baseness.”