The Bridge

Whenever I think of the emotional pain New Yorkers went through when the twin towers came down, I have to think of how I would feel if one of those bombs from N. Korea took out the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

I only lived in San Francisco for 18 years, the first 18 years of my life, but still think of the City as "home" and one of my favorite things is going up on some hill and looking at a view of the bay, with the bridge stretching across to Marin County.  I'm a bigger tourist than the tourists I take to view the City.  It would take a piece of my heart if the bridge were to be destroyed.

The two San Francisco bridges were built at the same time in 1937 and two of my uncles worked on both of them.

(no, those aren't my uncles! ... that I know of ...)

 

Strong winds come through the golden gate and workers were constantly buffeted by high winds and were in constant fear of plummeting to their deaths.

 

Here are some stats:

*The bridge is 8,981 feet long (1.7 miles) and contains about 88,000 tons of steel.
*The total weight of the bridge is 887,000 tons.
*There are two towers that hold up the two steel cables anchoring the bridge. Also, there are approximately 80,000 miles of wire inside each of the two steel cables.
*The towers stand 726 feet above the water and 500 feet above street level. They weigh 44,000 tons each and are 4,200 feet apart from each other.
*The bridge is 90 feet wide. There are six driving lanes and two sidewalks. The width of the driving lanes is 62 feet between curbs and the sidewalks are 10 feet each. Street level is about 220 feet above the water.

 

The bridge opened in May (and the first suicide off the bridge was in August of that year!  As of 2012, 16,000 people had jumped off the bridge, only 25 of whom survived.).  

My father and grandfather were among the pedestrians who walked across the bridge that first day.

 

I remember when I was a kid, the toll to cross the bridge was 25 cents.  I just learned that the latest raise in toll will bring the cost to cross this bridge to $9.

The 50th anniversary of the bridge was celebrated in May of 1987.  The bridge was closed to cars and pedestrians could walk across it.  Walt. Char, Mike (and others) went to do the walk.  I knew I wouldn't be able to keep up with them, so I drove them to as close as we could get so they didn't have that far to walk.  As it turned out, it was a madhouse on the bridge and so crowded that they never actually made on to the bridge, but were trapped on the road leading up to it.

 

It was a great idea, but they estimated 80,000 people would come and more than 800,000 did, 300,000 actually got onto the bridge.  Nobody anticipated that the weight of all those people would actually flatten the curve of the bridge. "The Golden Gate Bridge, all 419,000 tons of it, groaned and swayed like an old wooden plank thrown across a ditch," painting contractor Winston Montgomery wrote. "Frightened and seasick people vomited on their shoes.  People began throwing bicycles and strollers off the bridge in order to lighten the load on the bridge."  The engineers, however, stated later that there was never any danger of collapse.

 

The Golden Gate Bridge is my "twin towers," and when swords start rattling in other countries, I get afraid for the safety of my bridge.  It wouldn't be San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge, even if I had to pay $9 for the privilege of crossing it.

Christmas in San Francisco

Someone posted a picture of the City of Paris Christmas tree and it got me all nostalgic for the Christmases of my youth.

The City of Paris was a big department store on Union Square, one I always thought of as "the fanciest" department store.  We couldn't afford it, so we shopped at the Emporium or Macy*s.

But we always visited the City of Paris at Christmas time.  The big open rotunda was filled with a 3-story tall Christmas tree that was lavishly decorated.  You could spend an hour just staring at all the things that were hung on that tree.

It was where our downtown adventure started each year.  Sadly, the store closed and was torn down in 1980, to be replaced 2 years later by Neiman Marcus, which also has a kind of Christmas tree each year, but nothing like what I remember from my childhood.

(One thing I loved about the City of Paris, in my teen age years, was that I was studying French and they had a French bookstore in the basement--or maybe it was a regular book store which also sold books in French.  They also had a restaurant with the best creamed spinach I have ever had!)

When I was growing up, you "dressed up" to go downtown.  That meant, for little kids, patent leather shoes, our best dresses, and gloves (oh how I hated gloves!)  When I got older, the patent leather shoes were replaced with high heels.  You rarely see people dressed up downtown any more.  Jeans and t-shirts are just fine.

But as a kid, we loved looking at all the holiday decorations, but especially the fancy windows at the Emporium, on Market Street.

 

The other stores, like Macy*s also had decorated windows, but none as elaborate as the Emporium, which had a different theme each year and lots of moveable pieces.

After we had our fill of the windows, we went up to the third floor to see Santa.  I always think of those trips when watching the Davis Sedaris comedy, "Santaland Diaries," in which he was hired to play an elf guiding little kids like me into seeing Santa.  I remember that there was a zig-zag line and Sedaris  talks about "vomit corner" where kids who got progressively more nervous to meet The Man Himself, finally relieved themselves.  I don't think I ever vomited, but I had the largest butterflies ever waiting to see Santa.

And then when you had finally let him know what your Christmas wishes, you exited onto the Roof Rides.  It was an actual carnival n the roof, some 3-4 stories off the ground.  There was a train....

 

...and a merry go round, a long slide and other carnival rides.  But the one I remember most vividly was the Ferris wheel.

 

It always did make me nervous to go up in any Ferris wheel, but when you reached the top of this one and looked down, you weren't looking down on the merry go round or the train, you were looking four stories down to the street!  That's enough to need a "vomit corner" right there.

The Emporium closed in 1995 and there are no more roof rides and the stores in downtown now may decorate for Christmas (I think Macy*s fills its windows with adoptable animals from the SPCA) but I'm so glad I grew up in the hey day of over the top Christmas decorations in San Francisco.

The Window Seat

We went to a play at the university last night.  It was called Gibraltar and is a study of a new widow adjusting to the death of her husband, and learning about grief (a real "upper" of a show!)

The set was designed by John Iacovelli, an Emmy award winning artist who teaches MFA design at UC Davis.  John was my very first interview when I started writing for the Davis Enterprise and my memory of him was that his hair was much wilder and I found him scary (mostly, I suspect, because it was my very first interview). 

He has designed everything -- more than 200 stage productions and often when you look at credits for movies or TV shows, John is the designer.  He's won all sorts of awards in addition to the Emmy (for his production of A&E's Peter Pan).

I particularly liked the design for this show because it is set in an apartment in San Francisco and it took me a little bit to realize that the apartment had a window seat. Maybe it was because the stage of the little Wyatt Theater is so oddly shaped that a window seat is the most logical thing.

But as a native San Franciscan, I appreciated that little touch, because one of my favorite things about San Francisco is that it seems to be the showplace of bay windows.  Drive around the City and everywhere you look, houses have bay windows, many with window seats.  In fact, it's only lately that I am noticing buildings built with flat fronts.  

When we were growing up, we didn't live in a fancy Victorian like these famous ones, but our house had a bay window with a window seat. 

(When we lived there, there were no trees on the street and no garage under the window seat.)  It seems that every house existing in the city when I was growing up in the 50s had a bay window somewhere in the house.

Our window seat was in the living room and looks most closely like this:

Though it was about twice as wide as this one and it was probably higher than this one is.

When we got our TV set, a giant Muntz TV, the logical place to put it was in the center of the window seat, which made it a great place to sit with your back against the TV and read or watch the world outside.  Our street was one of the steepest in the city, so it was a "show" to watch tourists try to drive up to the next street.  There was a stop sign at the top of the hill, so you had to be balanced on this steep street and then try to start up again without sliding back down--and when I was growing up, automatic transmissions were not commonplace.  In fact, in one of his very early bits, Bill Cosby had a whole thing about trying to drive in San Francisco and encountering a street like ours.

We watched many people get to the top of the hill and then slowly back down again to find a better way to get to Union Street.  Especially in the rain!

I loved to sit on the window seat in December and watch for the mailman.  Our house was the third house on his route and he took the bus from Rincon Annex and got off at our street early in the morning.  It was best on days when he delivered mail more  than once a day (can you believe they used to do that?)

When I think of our little flat in San Francisco, my two strongest memories are the floor heater, which I loved to stand over when it was cold, the warm air blowing up my skirt.  I could stay there for hours too.  And the window seat.  I still have fond memories of the window seat and wonder that now that the place is all yuppified what it looks like today.

So I'm going to give John Iacovelli a good review for his set design 'cause it made me feel all warm inside, even if I had difficulty understanding the play.

An Antidote

It's fair to say that I, along with more than half of the voters in the country, felt like shit last night.  We simply have to get rid of that damn electoral college.  This is the second time they have screwed the country!!

However, rather than sitting at home and moping, or crying (which I did last night), I had a WONDERFUL time! And I didn't think about DT once.

 

Kimberly L. is a blogger whose blog I read many years ago (until she took it down).  We are Facebook friends, so we have been acquainted for many years, but have never met.  She and her husband Peter are in San Francisco on vacation and I offered to give them my "grand tour" today.  What great fun!

The nice thing about internet friends is that when you meet, it's like meeting an old friend you just haven't seen in awhile.  You instantly relax into a conversation without having to explain a lot of stuff.  They were staying at a hotel on Fisherman's Wharf.  That it took forever to get there because of traffic delays was an omen for how the day was going to go.

We started the tour by going down Lombard Street, which they had seen, but had not walked down.  Then we went through the financial district to Market Street and up to Twin Peaks.

Peter is a serious photographer with serious equipment and Kimberly and I chatted while he took pictures of San Francisco.

I had to excuse myself because my bladder was full and Twin Peaks just happens to have a fancy-schmancy toilet...which is even free to us  I loved the instructions posted outside though I did wonder how many people actually use the thing for twenty minutes at a time!  But maybe I don't want to know...

..

Peter's photos having been taken and my bladder blissfully emptied, we were ready to continue the tour, through Golden Gate Park, It was a beautiful day to be in the park and my City put on its best bib and tucker.  And both Kimberly and Peter agree with me that the de Young museum is one of the ugliest buildings we have seen.

From the park we went back into town and past the Palace of the Legion of Honor with its statue of "The Thinker" in the courtyard. I took them through Sea Cliff and past Robin Williams' home, then through the Presidio down to Fort Point where you can look up at the Golden Gate Bridge and see where Kim Novak was supposedly trying to commit suicide in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Then we wended our way down Divisidero Street, into the Castro District and from there out to 29th and San Jose, to Mitchell's Ice Cream store.  It is apparently in somebody's best of the best ice cream places in the country and Peter has been trying to visit as many as he can. Having a look at the link for this place is worthwhile.  They have an extensive menu of exotic flavors.

I had two scoops -- Ube and Buko.  The former is made from purple yams and the latter from "baby coconut."  It was not only delicious, but colorful too!

It was time to head back to the hotel so I could get on the road before rush hour, but I had one more thing to show them, the steepest hill in San Francisco, a 17.5⁰ angle, which is pretty darn steep.  

I dropped Peter and Kimberly off at their hotel and was happy that I only hit mild rush hour traffic crossing the Golden Gate bridge, but shortly after I crossed, I had a call from Kim asking if Peter had left his cell phone in the back seat of the car.  I pulled off at the next offramp, and yes he had, so I turned around and headed back into the city, which meant that my timing was for naught.  I gave them the phone and got back on the road again, this time in the traffic, which was horrible.  Thank god for ebooks because we were creeping along at a whopping 2 miles an hour forEVer.  Highway 37, which connects Hwy 101, through Marin County, and I-80, which takes you to Davis takes just about half an hour to drive.  Tonight it took an hour to get HALF WAY.  It began to lighten up enough that I could get up to 50 mph in spots, but it was now dark, it's a relatively narrow road and as I said recently, I am hating driving at night because I get kind of disoriented.  So I was traveling a safe speed until we were ending that part of the road and I was trying to decide if I was going to go right to I-80 or take a side road that I like to take in the daytime.

The decision was made for me by a guy behind me honking his horn and flashing his lights.  I got scared and took the offramp.  Only it was the offramp.  Not only that, but there didn't seem to be a way to get back to where I was.  This was a long road that was two lanes, but only one direction and no sign of a turn around anywhere.

I didn't know where the hell I was and it was so dark I couldn't see anything.  I crossed a bridge I didn't know existed.  I don't know if I was on Mare Island or in Vallejo or both.  I was looking for any sign that would tell me in which direction I should drive to find I-80.  I was lost in Vallejo for HALF AN HOUR!!!!  At one point I pulled over to get out our GPS, which was not in the glove compartment, where it always is.  I finally had driven so far that I was getting out of businesses, so I pulled over and turned around and drove back from where I had come and then farther.  I could see cars on an overpass, which was a promising sign.

And it was. I had found the way home again, after driving with all those big trucks the rest of the way, hugging the slow lane.

By the time I got home (9:00) I had been driving longer than if I had driven to Santa Barbara, given that I left at 9 a.m.  (It takes 8 hours for me to drive to Santa Barbara).  But I had a wonderful time, except for the getting lost part.  And it was so much fun to add Kimberly to the list of internet friends that I have met in person.

On a Clear Day

I'm madly in love with San Francisco, especially on a clear day, when it sparkles like a collection of jewels in myriad colors and shapes.

I suppose everybody loves the place where they were born, but if you're lucky enough to be born in a place that everyone wants to visit, you are, by nature, more proud of your home town.

And when that place looks as beautiful as my city by the bay...how can you help it--you keep falling in love over and over again.

I love all the faces of San Francisco. I love the fog so thick you can't see half a block ahead of you, and so cold that if you walk out onto the bridge, your goose bumps have goosebumps.

I love the wind that whistles through the tall buildings and, when I was a kid, would blow the smell of chocolate up from the Ghirardelli Chocolate factory, to be mingled with the roasting coffee beans down on the wharf to give a cloud of mocha to walk through at the start of your day.

I love the bay windows on the houses, jutting out over the sidewalks, and leaving wonderful little nooks and crannies inside, places to hide on a cold day, curled up with a good book.

I love the hills that make tourists gasp and make me feel powerful because I know how to drive them. (I can even parallel park on a 45-degree slope in a stick shift car!...or used to be able to.)

I love the sound of the cable car bells, the clatter of the underground cable, and even the long line of tourists waiting for a little ride, because I can remember when a ride was only 10 cents and you could usually get a seat. I remember using the cable car to commute when I was in high school.  I remember the days before queues, when you stood on the turntable and leaped on the car as it was being turned around at Powell and Market.

I love the diversity of the people--the business men and women marching with determined stride through the financial district. The little Chinese women carrying their net bags to the shops on Stockton Street (not the tourist Chinatown of Grant Ave., but the Chinatown of its residents), filling them with strange looking foods. The old Italian men lounging about in Washington Square Park, in the shade of St. Peter & Paul church.   The Latino restaurants in the Mission District sending wonderful smells wafting out on to the street. The homeless at the parking lot for the opera house and symphony hall, who smile and greet you and get to know you if you're a regular, and don't mind if you don't drop a quarter in their cup, but are very appreciative if you do. 

I love the tourist traps like Fisherman's Wharf.  I love walking Pier 39, watching the seals lounging on the boat ramps. I love standing on Twin Peaks of Coit Tower, taking more photos than the tourists.

I love the bridges and Golden Gate Park. I love the waves pounding off the shore of ocean beach.

I love knowing where I am at all times and how to get where I want to go, even if it's by some esoteric route.
I love having grown up two blocks from "the crookedest street in the world," and knowing the city's dirty secret--that it's not even the crookedest street in San Francisco.

But more than anything else, I love San Francisco on a clear, sunny day. 

The sight of the city glistening in the sun is so beautiful it literally takes my breath away. Not a cloud in the sky and not a speck of pollution. Just clear blue skies and clean air and that Oz-like mecca catching the rays of the sun as they bounce off the water of San Francisco Bay.

Tourists out in full force, walking across the bridge and taking each other's picture with the city as a backdrop. I smile smugly. "That's for civilians," I think to myself. They'll go back to Peoria or Duluth and show Aunt Martha their pictures...but I get to stay here. I'll cross that bridge again in the fog, and in the rain, and I'll be here when the next crystal clear day comes.

San Francisco is like a beautiful woman who never goes out of style and only gets more beautiful with each passing year. She's a woman I'm madly in love with and I don't care who knows it.

Early Photoshop

Tabloid journalism and manipulated photos have been around for a very long time, I discovered.  They predate computers.

I worked at Logos today and didn't really feel like reading, amazingly.  I did finish a Jon Katz Kindle book on dog training and played some games of Word with Friends and during a rare down time, I went walking around the store.  I found a fascinating book called "Three Fearful Days," by Malcolm E. Barker.   It's apparently Book 3 in a series of books he is writing (has written?) about early San Francisco history.  This particular book is subtitled "San Francisco Memoirs of the 1906 earthquake and fire."

As a native San Franciscan, I am fascinated by new twists on the story of the fire.  I wish I had been able to get my grandmother to talk about it.   She was a young girl when the earthquake hit and for the rest of her life had a pathological terror of earthquakes.  Hers was one of the thousands of families who lived in tent cities around San Francisco until housing was rebuilt.

I haven't gotten far into this book, the meat of which, apparently, will be personal memories of survivors, compiled from letters, journals, and whatever other forms of historical narrative the author was able to find.  The book was published in 1998 and there may have been survivors still left, since I think the very last survivor just died a couple of years ago (he was an infant when the earthquake hit), but it was 92 years past the event so the likelihood of personal interviews is slim at best.

In just the little bit I've read so far, I've found some fascinating stuff I didn't know before.  For one thing, we've always heard that it was a magnitude 8.3, but recent better data suggests that it was probably more a 7.8.   Still a big jolt, but not as big as originally recorded.

Also, there were supposedly only 400-something who died, but it was actually closer to >2,000.  Even that number may be low, since the fire burned so hot that if anybody had been trapped in the fire itself they would have been incinerated and thus not counted.

The San Francisco fire chief actually had a plan in mind for an event such as this, but sadly he was one of the first people killed, when the roof of his house tore a big hole in the floor of his house, the chief fell in and the roof collapsed on top of him.  His plan had been to let all the residential fires burn and concentrate on saving the business district.  That didn't happen.

The governor came to SF as soon as he realized there was no electronic communication and he set up a command center in Oakland, across the Bay, where he oversaw the mobilization of forces (apparently quite effectively) and sent out calls for help around the country.  Help came in all forms from all over the country. There was somewhere in Idaho where residents couldn't get any bread because every loaf of bread that was baked was sent to San Francisco.

The organization of tents, food, health, sanitation and other things seems to have gone incredibly organized and San Franciscans were lucky that they kept big plague-type diseases under control.

It all sounds very similar to the kinds of things that happen when natural disasters hit now.  And Americans around the country pull together to help the victims, only now there is the Red Cross and cell phons which make donating $10 to the relief fund so much easier.

But in addition to all that, the country had its own kind of tabloid journalism in 1906.  One paper, eager to show the destruction of San Francisco, didn't wait for photos from local people, but doctored its own photo.

Not bad for 1906...and no access to photo manipulation software!

Harumph!!!

Today was the first day I have been indignant at Logos.  It seemed to be a day like any other day.  I like it that my afternoons seem to be busier these days, with less and less time alone in the store.

This time I brought a book from home to read, a David Baldacci called "The Winner."  I knew I couldn't finish it, but I felt like reading a "blood and gore" novel, after finishing my non-fiction book about the Alaska gold rush, and have several perfectly good "real" boks here that I've been meaning to read.

I read the book for a long time and at some point got up to take a break and mosey through the stacks.  I was looking through the travel section to see if maybe we had taken in a book on the Ukraine (we had not), but I picked up a Baedeker travel book on San Francisco.

I'm always interested in books about my home town and this one had lots of nice color pictures and gave thumbnail histories on many of the buildings I am very familiar with.

However, reading one history stopped me cold and made me first check the publication date (1992), and second want to contact the publisher IMMEDIATELY to find out of the egregious printed error had been corrected.

The book was giving the history of the newish St. Mary's Catholic cathedral in San Francisco (the one that looks like a washing machine agitator) and in talking about how it came to be built said "it was built on the grounds of an old grocery store."

I. beg. your. pardon.  It was NOT built on the grounds of any grocery store.  It was built on the grounds of my old high school, which had been established on that corner in 1938.

I was still fuming about it when a guy came in with his wife and was talking to me about a cookbook from San Francisco, which led to a talk about San Francisco in general and of course I had to bring up the error I had just found in the travel book.   It reminded him of when his grandmother used to take him to Mass in the old Cathedral, a block away (which burned down--we always figured the Bishop got someone to set the fire so he could build this brand new church).

I told him about how the girls of my high school did a "living rosary" in that beautiful old building every year, where the seniors stood in line that wound around the aisles of the church, and formed the beads in the rosary.   (Walt always asked if we carried bowling balls.)

After work, Walt and I went out to dinner at DeVere's, the Irish pub around the corner from the book store, which was having, this month "Melt Night" on Thursdays, different toasted cheese sandwiches each Thursday.  Tonight was "crab melt" night so we decided to check it out.

We lucked out because the musicians, who usually play on a different night, were there and it was fun to listen to the music, or as much as we could make out over all the noise. 

At one point I looked around and pointed out to Walt that I thought we were old enough to be grandparents to everybody in the place!  He agreed.

But dinner was delicious.

and I even had a Stella Artois beer to go along with my crab.  I ate all the inside part of the sandwich and then asked for a box for the crusts, because I am so used to saving the crusts for the dogs!  (They were very happy when we got home and I gave them to them!)

As soon as we had watched Jeopardy and the dogs had been fed, I came in here to the computer to look up Baedeker and see if there was any contact information with the publisher, but I discovered it's a German publishing house whose web site is in German and they don't seem to be active any more (though Wikipedia has a geneaology history of the Baedeker family back several generations!)

I did, however, leave a snarky comment on the Amazon page for the 2000 edition of the San Francisco travel book..

You don't mess with St. Vincent alumnae and get away with it all that easily!

My City by the Bay

This has been a relatively slothful weekend, one I didn't deserve.   If I had hosted a big Thanksgiving dinner, with lots of relatives, clean house, etc., I could have justified taking a couple of days off, but all I did was cart food to my mother's and cook it--she even cleaned up (which she insists on doing).  But I did take a couple of days off, mostly because there were good movies to see.

I couldn't pass up the chance to see Hitchcock's Vertigo again.  One of my favorite classic movies, and a toss-up between this and North by Northwest as my favorite Hitchcock.

This particular movie is near and dear to my heart because it's set in my neighborhood.  For one thing, John "Scotty" Ferguson (James Stewart) lives about 3 blocks from where I grew up.  I used to drive by that house with the iconic red door all the time (the door has since been painted).  But all the places they visit--Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge, where Kim Novak leaps off into the bay (an impossible situation today, since the area was fenced off after 9/11); the Palace of Fine arts; Mission Dolores (the oldest building in San Francisco, across the street from where I used to work for The Lamplighters); and many other famous sites.

Hitchcock loved San Francisco and filmed many movies there, Shadow of a Doubt and The Birds for example.  Authors Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal wrote a book called "Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco."  I had never watched Vertigo with the book in my lap before and it was fun, following the back story of the shooting locations as I watched the familiar story unfold on my TV screen.

I learned a lot about Ernie's restaurant, for one thing.   Ernie's was "the" place to go for dining in San Francisco.   With its dark wood paneling and red flocked wallpaper it represented for me the ideal in elegant dining.  Hitchcock recreated Ernie's on a stage in Hollywood, but borrowed or copied art work and other ephemera from the actual restaurant.  The owners of the restaurant appear in the movie as a waiter and the maitre d' and Hitchcock was so concerned with realism he had actual meals from Ernie's served on the set when filming that scene.

Alas, Ernie's went out of business in 1998, so I never did have the "Ernie's experience."

But the authors failed to answer a question for me (the reason I bought the book, actually!) which I must investigate myself some day.  Kim Novak as Madeline enters the Mission Dolores chapel and walks toward the front of the church.   She exits out the door on the right side of the chapel.  Scotty follows her into the attached cemetery.  BUT, the cemetery is on the left side of the chapel.  I don't know if there is a path that leads around the back of the church and into the cemetery and it bothers me every time I see the movie.  It seems such a glaring error to anybody who is familiar with San Francisco, and especially a director who is so persnickity as Hitchcock was.

(This photo is also wrong.  Scotty's windows face the street
and it would be impossible to see Coit Tower from those windows)

Glaring errors are common in movies about San Francisco, though, most commonly those exciting chase sequences where a car goes sailing over the top of a famous San Francisco hill...and lands on a hill that is on the opposite side of the city (Foul Play is the movie that comes immediately to mind!)

On Saturday evening, Walt and I watched a strange movie called Dark Passage. This was the third of four movies that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together and it got mixed reviews, with Bogart getting poor reviews and Bacall glowing ones.  It's a strange movie where Bogart, wrongly imprisoned at San Quentin for the murder of his wife, somehow manages to escape from death row and tries to solve the mystery of his wife's murder.  The first third of the movie is seen entirely from Bogart's point of view since he get plastic surgery so we don't see the familiar Bogart face until after the surgery (which is performed in office in about an hour, with no follow up, a one-week recovery time and no scars...Talk about suspension of disbelief!)

The movie has plot holes that you can drive a truck through though somehow it was strangely entertaining.  Most of the reviews, however, talk about the real star of the film as San Francisco. 

[t]he city of San Francisco, which is liberally and vividly employed as the realistic setting for the Warners' Dark Passage...For Writer-Director Delmar Daves has very smartly and effectively used the picturesque streets of that city and its stunning panoramas from the hills to give a dramatic backdrop to his rather incredible yarn. So, even though bored by the story—which, because of its sag, you may be—you can usually enjoy the scenery, which is as good as a travelogue -- Bosley Crowder

Unlike Vertigo, this film noir movie deals more with the seedier sides of the city, but also sweeping vistas, for which San Francisco is best known.  I love seeing movies made in this era and comparing the skyline to the skyline of today.

There are so many movies made in San Francisco and I love watching every single one of them.  It always reminds me of Judy Garland at the end of Meet Me in St. Louis when she looks out at the big world's fair and comments that she didn't have to come from a great distance (or in my case go to a theater), but that she could see sights like this every day, because it was right where she lived.

I don't live there any more, but it's still "my city by the bay."

A Bridge to Somewhere

There is a scene at the end of Meet Me in St. Louis, where the young Judy Garland and Tom Drake have gone to the St. Louis World Fair with the family and as they start to gather to go get ice cream or something, a fireworks display goes off.  Judy and Tom lean, enraptured, against a wall and watch it all--the fair, the fireworks, the people...

...and Judy says something to the effect that so many people had come from distances to be there at the fair, but they didn't have to because the fair was right there where they lived, right. there. in. St. Louis.

Every time I hear someone dream about seeing the Golden Gate Bridge some day, or find it on a list of top XX number of sights in the world, and especially every time I come out of the rainbow tunnel above the bridge on a clear day heading for San Francisco and see it shining off in the distance, that is the scene I think of.   I don't have to come from a long distance to see the Golden Gate Bridge, it's right where I live...Right in my own back yard.  Sort of.

The bridge has been a part of my history since before I was born.   My Uncle Frank (Peach's father) was one of the builders of both of San Francisco's bridges, which were built at about the same time.   Each time I drive through the area of Sea Cliff and head out through Lincoln Golf Course and up toward the Palace of the Legion of Honor, I stop and look back on the bridge and think of the picture I have seen so many times, taken at the same location, of the two towers standing but no roadway yet.

The bridge opened in 1937, before my father met my mother.  He and his father walked across the bridge that first day, before they opened it to automobiles.

I walked across the bridge myself (on the sides, though!) a few times with friends in high school and have taken a few guests walking across the bridge when giving my famous tour of San Francisco.

Twenty five years ago, the bridge celebrated its 50th birthday.

The city celebrated in grand style, as only San Francisco knows how to do.  They closed the bridge for the day to allow people to walk on the bridge.  They had absolutely no idea how popular that idea was going to be.

Walt and Char did the walk, but they couldn't get anywhere near the bridge, so they had to walk for miles from the ocean beach just to get to the bridge.

When they got there it was gridlock on the bridge.  People were walking across from Marin County toward the City and from San Francisco toward Marin County and the idea was to meet in the middle, but it was so jam packed with people that you couldn't move.

Walt and Char never made it onto the bridge, but they did get past the toll plaza...just barely. And they can look at this picture and know that they are in there...somewhere.

(This is an interesting article about how that 50th anniversary celebration went)

There is one photo of the bridge which is very scary and which caused a lot of heart palpitations among the organizers of this grand celebration.  I have not seen that picture but the once, but it shows the middle of the bridge actually sagging under the weight of all those pedestrians.  It could have been a real disaster, but it wasn't.

It's 25 years later now and this week end the bridge celebrated its 75th anniversary.

There were events all over the city, but nobody decided to repeat the debacle of the bridge walk this year.  I don't know if Char and Mike went to any of the events, but their son Cam and his wife Evelyn were there to watch the sun go down behind the bridge and watch the fireworks, and, since we are now in the age of smart phones, post photos to Facebook for the rest of us to enjoy.

 When I was watching her video and her photos, I was Judy all over again.  People had come from far away to be there for the celebration of the bridge....but I could go there whenever I wanted.  Because it is right in my own back yard.

Sort of.

Tales

I took my new jacket out for its inaugural spin today.

We (and Walt) went to San Francisco to see the new musical Tales of the City. It was a perfect day for a perfect jacket. There was a cool wind blowing and the jacket was neither too heavy nor too light, but just the right weight. And a woman in the garage elevator on the way back to the car complimented me on my jacket ("Just perfect. Good choice," she said. I resisted the temptation to "place drop" and tell her where I bought it!)

For those who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon that is Tales of the City, in 1976, a then little-known reporter named Armistead Maupin started writing a story for the San Francisco Chronicle. The story appeared in serial form in the newspaper and told of a young woman, Mary Ann Singleton from Cleveland, Ohio, who arrived in San Francisco for a vacation, fell in love with the city, and, on an impulse decided to stay.

She happened upon an eclectic boarding house at 28 Barbary Lane, a fictitious street but whose location was given as across the street from our flat on Leavenworth Street. Barbary Lane was not modeled on the small enclave across the street from us, though, but on Macondry Lane, which was a block away, not really an "alley," but a wooded world with small houses and a wooden walkway that wended its way down to the end of the lane which ran from Leavenworth St. and down a tall set of steps to Jones Street.

The boarding house at 28 Barbary Lane was run by the pot-growing Anna Madrigal, a middle-aged woman hiding a deep secret that has something to do with an anagram. Mary Ann becomes friends with other tenants of the building: the hippyish bisexual Mona Ramsey; heterosexual lothario Brian Hawkins; the sinister and cagey roof tenant Norman Neal Williams; and Michael Tolliver, a sweet and personable gay man known to friends as Mouse.

Maupin's original serial was wildly popular and he went on to write two more serials for The Chronicle, then turned those three into published book and followed them with five additional books. In the latest, "MaryAnn in Autumn" the Barbara Lane crew are all (or those who did not die of accident, AIDS, or cancer) in their 50s and 60s (and the ageless Mrs. Madrigal is also showing her age), but it was like revisiting friends you just haven't seen in a long time.

In 1993 there was a TV mini series with Laura Linney as Mary Ann and Olympia Dukakis as Mrs. Madrigal

Then they decided to make a musical out of the first book. Tickets have been selling like hotcakes and I ordered our tickets months ago. Sticker shock of having to actually pay for tickets -- $85 each! But there was no way I would have missed it. I had high hopes for it, with music written by the Avenue Q crowd.

I loved it but would probably give it only 3½ stars (out of 5). The music disappoints. There are a couple of blockbuster numbers, but mostly the tunes are forgettable. I don't think anybody will be humming any of them. The set is gorgeous, moving up and down and sideways and some of the lighting effects are wonderful. The story goes in fits and starts, but then so did the original serial, so it follows that course. There's lots of sex (implied rather than explicit), drugs and rock & roll. The first act is a bit long, but the second act hits hard and doesn't let up. I was crying in more than one spot, and joined the standing ovation for the cast at the close of the show.

The SF Chronicle reviewer appears to have agreed with me: "...if it has New York aspirations, as implied by the many Broadway credits behind and in it, it needs to hone its storytelling and develop a more distinctive musical voice."

But I'm so glad we went. I loved it. It was worth every dollar!

Of course, this being the kind of story it is, there were, shall we say "unique" items for sale at the gift shop!

When we left the theater, we decided to stop at Lefty O'Doul's, that old haufbrau a block away from the theater, for a prime rib dinner. It's been a San Francisco institution since 1958, though the last time I was there was 1983, on my 40th birthday. The prime rib was as good as I remembered it!

The dogs, who had been locked up all day, were very happy to see us return!

All in all, a very good day. My jacket liked its first outing.

Thanks, Everyone!

I have been overwhelmed with the messages of support following yesterday's entry, both on Funny the World and Airy Persiflage, plus those of you who wrote to me on Facebook or privately, by e-mail. It is so gratifying to discover that you all get it, where my angry respondant did not. All of your comments, as well as the stories that you have shared about your own aging parents, have made me feel so much better about all sorts of things. I very much appreciate your input!

We had an interesting evening last night. We drove to San Francisco to meet a friend for dinner. We were approaching Golden Gate Fields race track before getting to Berkeley, on our way to the bridge, when the radio we were listening to got the news of the big gas line explosion in San Bruno, near the San Francisco airport. At first nobody knew exactly what had happened. Some thought a gas station had exploded, some thought it might have been a plane crash. We could see the huge plume of smoke as we drove into the City,

though we didn't see the extent of the damage until we returned home and could watch the evening news. So far at least six confirmed dead, 50 homes destroyed and over 100 homes damaged, and the cause now known to be a gas line which exploded. Someone on the radio described the wall of flames as being as high as a skyscraper, with the fire department staging area half a mile away from the fire itself because it was too hot to get closer.

As for our dinner, it was delightful.

Dave is someone I first met on CompuServe many years ago, when computers were still powered by squirrels running in wheels. We were both members of the CompuServe Issues forum and participated in a host of interesting, maddening, frustrating and irritating discussions with people who held some pretty weird views.

I'm not sure if it was the first time I met him, but we were together in Washington, DC when Georgia Griffith, our then-boss on CompuServe, was being honored by the Smithsonian for her contribution to information technology for the handicapped.

The last time we saw each other was about four years ago when Dave and his new bride came to San Francisco and we had dinner at a Fisherman's Wharf restaurant.

Now he's in town to see his 97 year old ex-father-in-law and called to see about having dinner together. We went to Max's Cafe in the Union Square area and enjoyed sitting and talking about old times, and getting caught up on new times. Dave has always been one of the good guys.

---

Today we went to Costco and bought a new TV. Yay! I can sleep again tonight.

Walt spent the afternoon getting it set up, to the consternation of the dogs, who were locked out until it was all working.

When everything was all set up and working again, and I let the dogs in, Buttercup, who had never been outside for that long before, collapsed and napped for a long time.

Oh, and BTW, while we were at Costco, I picked up Polly's Prozac, the medication Ashley hopes calms her down enough to allow her to let strangers handle her. According to the Costco Pharmacy, her name is now officially Polly K-9 Sykes.

All's right with the world again!

My Infamous Tour

A few weeks ago, I had an e-mail from someone I'd "met" on Facebook, saying that she and her son were going to be in San Francisco and wondering if we could meet face to face. Naturally I offered to give them my San Francisco tour.

So today I drove down to the Holiday Inn, a few blocks from where I grew up, along Fisherman's Wharf and I met Nicole and Benjamin and we started our day together. Benjamin, 14, had worried that I might be an axe murderer, but I promised his mother that I would leave (most of) my knives at home.

Not only did I leave my knives at home, though, I also, unfortunately, left my camera at home, and so this report does not come with the usual collection of photos, only a few that I took with my cell phone.

It was kind of an odd day even before I left Davis, because I had received an e-mail from Char saying she had just made reserations for her and Mike, Walt and me, on a cruise in China next year and that a deposit must be made by tomorrow. We hadn't really discussed this trip, other than very peripherally. She said she would call me in an hour ("to let the shock wear off"). I e-mailed back that I would be gone, but that she should call Walt, who would be waiting for her call.

So Nicole, Benjamin and I set off on our tour, down along San Francisco's Marina, up Doyle Drive to the Presidio and down to Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge, then out the Presidio through Sea Cliff (and past Robin Williams' house). As we were leaving Sea Cliff I had a call from Char, saying she had talked to Walt and that we were set and that she thought she had talked him into the extension trip to Hong Kong. While I was talking to her, Walt called, so I pulled over at a Golden Gate Bridge view spot to talk to him while Nicole and her son took some photos.

When I got off the phone, we had decided to do both the China cruise and the extension to Hong Kong. Since we hadn't even thought about China before this, that was one snap decision. It's nice that we have Char around to plan our lives for us. She does such a good job of it!

My little local tour group continued on past the Palace of the Legion of Honor down to the ocean beach and past the Cliff House. We stopped for lunch at the Beach Chalet Brewery and Restaurant. This place is a definite viable alternative to Greens, which is closed on Mondays. It has a spectacular ocean view and the food is quite good.

I had--what else?--Crab Louis, which was delicious. Benjamin had fish and chips that were huge and looked fantastic. For dessert I had a creme brulee while Nicole and Benjamin shared the Chalet's apparently signature "castle" dessert, which was a study in chocolate indulgence, with a pathway of chopped peanuts leading up to the castle itself.

While we ate, we tried to figure out if that animal in the parking lot was a cat or a fox. With no camera, I wasn't able to zoom in and check it close up.

When lunch was finished, we continued the tour through Golden Gate Park, the Haight-Ashbury, and up to Twin Peaks, though by this time the fog was so thick you could barely see the road, so scenic views were totally lost. But we went down the other side, and through the Castro District to Dolores Street, where I showed them the old Mission (first building built in the city), then down Market St. to Filbert and up past Davies Symphony hall, the opera house, and City Hall, up Geary St to go past the washing machine agitator that is St. Mary's Cathedral, out Geary St to Divisidero and then up and down one of the steep hills (it's always such an impressive hill that I never warn the guests that I have an ever steeper hill farther on!) and to the Palace of Fine Arts.

And then we headed for Lombard Street and the crooked street, which was totally mobbed by tourists today. Up Leavenworth St. to point out the flat where I was raised and then around again to Filbert Street, the steepest hill in the city (a 31.5% grade--there is another hill in the city which is the same steepness, but none steeper), and then down to Columbus Ave and back to their hotel.

I had a marvelous time and found Nicole and her son to be delightful people. I'm batting 1,000 with meeting friends from the Internet!

After I left them, I went home over the Golden Gate Bridge, expecting to hit pockets of rush hour traffic, since it was 5 p.m. but I didn't hit heavy traffic anywhere. I was almost disappointed, since I'm so close to finishing my latest Diana Gabaldon novel (audiobook version) and would have enjoyed being stuck in traffic for awhile!

Fortunately, I had thought to do a crock pot dinner, so I didn't have to cook after I got home. And then I had the evening free to check out the itinerary for our next trip! (Did I mention that we're going to China next May?)

Perks

I have said, more than once, that one of the perks of having been around the blogging community for so long is that once in awhile you get to meet other bloggers that you've known for a long time. I have never been disappointed and today was no exception.

I don't know how long I've "known" or "known of" or "read" Wilma Scott's writings, but for a very long time. She was one of those bloggers who was on my list of people to read regularly, and then I kind of got out of the habit but then was reconnected with her when we both found ourselves on Facebook and started playing Lexulous (a Scrabble-type game) together. I've always found her delightful and so was very pleased to hear she was coming to California.

Wilma lost her husband last year and was invited to come to help Willy (William Baker) celebrate his 96th birthday this coming weekend. She has been helping Willy with his blog for some time now and they had become good internet friends. It would be her first trip to California and their first chance to meet, face to face...and my chance to meet the two of them.

I was new to Willy's blog, but have come to discover that he is a fascinating guy. He describes himself as:

Born June 12, 1914, married 57 years, octogenarian widower as of 3/4/1997, 4 children, 5 grandchildren, 9 great grandchildren.

Log cabin in the Arkansas Ozark mountains at Norfork 3 years, Oklahoma oilfields 16, California San Joaquin valley at Corcoran with aunt and uncle 2, CCC camps 2, San Francisco Bay area since 1936. Electronics engineer with the Lawrence Berkeley lab over 40 years (Staff Senior Scientist rank last years), inventive type, retired since 1980.

(Inventive type he still is. He was showing me today a contraption he's invented for baking a cake in the microwave...

It involves double layers, and elevations and steam and took him a couple of dozen cake mixes to perfect, but you can see the resulting cake in the background. Cooked in 10 minutes, and cooked all the way through, without any soggy spots in the middle, he told me. The birds that come to his yard were thrilled with the 2 dozen failed attempts, since they got the crumbs!)

I drove to Orinda, where Willy lives, this morning and met the two of them, and then took Wilma on an abbreviated version of my tour of San Francisco. It was an absolutely gorgeous, warm, clear day and so naturally we had to start at Twin Peaks and get an overlook of the city.

We drove down through the Haight-Ashbury district, over some steep hills, and down to the Palace of Fine arts, and then along the Marina Green, to my favorite restaurant to take out of town visitors, Green's, a wonderful vegetarian restaurant, run under the auspices of the San Francisco Zen Center. I'm not a vegetarian, but I've never been disappointed in the food at Green's, and the view, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, is always spectacular.

Today, we also watched some sea lions sunning themselves on the piers where the luxury yachts were moored.

As always, the food did not disappoint. I had something called a "Mezcla sampler," which I assume is Cuban food.

It was a quesadilla with guacamole and salsa, and then a quinoa salad with plantains. All very tasty, and followed by an amazing "flour-less chocolate cake" with butterscotch gelato on some honey that was hardened and broken into pieces. The cake tasted less like "cake" and more like a huge slice of chocolate truffle!

We did the second half of the tour, the Lombard Street crooked street drive, Filbert Street (the steepest in San Francisco), through North Beach (Italian section) and Chinatown, through the financial district and then back onto the freeway. We left town in time to miss the rush hour traffic, which was my hope. I was early enough that I missed it all the way home.

I stayed at Willy's house for a bit to chat (and find out about that cake baking invention of his) and then got on the road to stay ahead of the traffic. The dogs had been locked in the house for 7 hours (because I just could not in good conscience leave them access to the yard when they had barked so badly yesterday), but they seem to have survived and apparently only the puppies pooped in the house.

It was, all things considered, a simply delightful day and it was so nice to put faces and bodies to Wilma and Willy. I look forward to joining the hundreds of people who will offer Willy birthday greetings on Saturday!