Letters to the Editor
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Memory Lane
It's been a really long time since I read anything this soulful about North Beach, or San Francisco at-large for that matter. Kudos to Kamiya!
I lived in the Haight from 1989 to 1997. I loved the history and memories, the fantastic little alleys and paths up the hillsides, the sound of foghorns drifting off the bay on fog-bound mornings.
This article is so deep it makes me understand my feelings about the Haight better.
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This takes me back...
I, too, lived in the Haight, from 1984 to 1995, when I moved to Chicago. I haven't been back since, but I miss San Francisco every single day. I wish I could have afforded North Beach, but it was enough to be able to wander through its narrow streets and alleys whenever the urge hit. Thanks for taking me back there, if only for the time it took to read this.
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Thank you...
As someone who also grew up in Berkeley, the daughter of a SF cab-driver/artist from the NY Jazz/beat-scene...I enjoy reading pieces like this.
Berkeley, Oakland, SF...all full of people who've been there for 40-some-odd years, full of stories. Before all this history gets buried in the post-DotCom era, I'd love to see some interviews and chronicles of these stories. Cafe-table interview/biographies, lives on bar napkins, truth being stranger than fiction... We can all each remember only so much in our own heads. We can tell only so much half-remembered to our kids. There's more to it than just alcohol, drugs and rent-control. There's names, long-gone locations and faded atmospheres. Is anyone getting them down?
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all I know is...
...that everyone, everywhere, secretly, or not so secretly, wants to live in San Francisco. Even if they don't know a thing about it. Even if they know something about it. Even if they know all about it.
San Francisco is the best.
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Nice piece
Loved the Child's Christmas in Wales take-off.
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Beautiful piece
That's a soulful piece of writing. I'm not a cover to cover reader but that's the first thing quite like that I've read in Salon. A little bit of Jean Shepherd in there . . . Keep it up.
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forever is about right...
I live in North Beach and it lives in me too I suppose. My wife and I went to Montmartre for two weeks last year (Paris is a place where ACTUAL art and ACTUAL culture came from -- North Beach is just a rinky dink little faker) but there were many nights walking around there where I was thinking "ya know I could find a spot to eat as nice as this a block from home... I could find a place to sketch about as good as this two blocks from home." We're about to have a baby and our small one-bedroom flat isn't gonna cut it for long, so we've been looking for places on Craig's List (places that might seem close-by on a tourist's map like Russian Hill and Nob Hill). And we get there and walk around and try to picture ourselves becoming residents of these neighborhoods, and it turns out we just can't move away from North Beach. So we're now stuck: we're not millionaires so we'll probably never be able to buy anything here (or even rent a 2-bedroom), but our lives are so happy here. I don't understand how anyone can leave once you've adjusted your life to this place, and everyone knows you at the cafe, and the bartenders know your dog, and all the other things Gary mentions. This neighborhood is like flypaper...
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Thank You!
You know when someone just nails it? Takes the essence of a thing, boils it down and makes beauty? That's magic my friends.
I'm sitting here in tears knowing that as many times as I've walked North Beach, I really never got it until now.
Thanks for that. Great piece.
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kamiya yes
Thank you, Gary, for a powerful meditation on North Beach. My experiences in SF are few, but powerful. This is a true story.
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Um...
I lived in San Francisco too, from 1977 to 2000. Spent my share of time in North Beach. Never found it more meaningful or profound than any other neighborhood in the city. Which perhaps explains why I found this piece utterly lacking any meaning broader than a writer's excuse to proclaim me-me-me for a few hundred words.
Zzz.
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North Beach Reality -- good essay
It's a beautiful paean... the only thing you left out was Flo, at the Savoy Tivoli...
"Where you left your heart, and where you found it", yeah -- great place to Grow Up, North Beach.
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Thanks Gary
Very nice article. I lived in North Beach in the late 60s, after being, for want of a better word, a 'regular' at a few of the spots mentioned in your piece. I headed for the East for a quick trip, and upon my return, it was the time of the Yuppies. Just like that. Little BMWs, camel hair everything... man, it was so depressing. I reclaimed my memories, though, twenty years ago, and your sweet long note to the neighborhood just brought it all back. Thanks.
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Specific Street
Let me summon up the ghost of Herb Caen for a moment to insist crankily that you never strolled down Pacific Street on your way to the Condor Club; it was and is Pacific Avenue. That matter dealt with, I'd like to buy you a horn and hear some more stories.
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Bulldog Drummond?
No, dude, it was BULLSHOT CRUMMOND!
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Whatever San Francisco was
it's not that now. I left North Beach in 03 and the rent has almost doubled on my old place (damn if I didn't sublet it). It was expensive even beforehand, especially if you're a writer without the ability to hold a corporate-level paying job at the same time as you write. But what's really sad about it to me is that there used to be room to move around, margin for error and fucked-upness, experimentation- but that's all gone. You can't mix it up in the 'real' cities in the U.S. anymore, at least not without 5 roommates, and you definitely can't do it near downtown. In SF, the Tenderloin was rich to live in too (I was there in the dot com craze and the rising rents everywhere felt like water rising above my neck) but now even a studio there will cost a thou. The whole city is like that. It's a real shame because SF has so many layers of reality to dip into- I miss it every day. All the other great city's boho/working class/music neighborhoods tell the same story. If you don't have real money you've got to live out in the shitty part of the burbs and drive everywhere, and you lose the magic. Yes, I'm nostalgic for what North Beach was (or never was, according to Kamiya), and felt that way every day I lived there. I wish I could go back. But like probably a lot of other people, I'll go to some smaller, less dazzling city to do my work. Maybe those unglorified towns will be the places that inspire what wealth cannot.