Amid San Francisco's beauty is the odor of civic failure

San Francisco Chronicle​

a day ago

I have a friend who owns a beautiful car. It's a mid-'50s classic, bright red with gleaming chrome, polished so that it looks brand-new. The owner is proud of this car, starts the powerful engine regularly and takes it for a short spin once a week. But the owner never goes very far because the classic car has problems: There are no seat belts, and the brakes don't inspire confidence. It's a car to be seen, not driven. If this automobile were a city, it would be San Francisco. Beautiful to see, but don't look too closely.
Sometimes San Francisco people forget how beautiful the city can be. Instead they see all the negatives: the drugs, the tents, the political squabbles that have become our sport. San Franciscans are always arguing. It's in the air, like summer fog.
I've been driving and walking around the city a bit lately. Lots of small errands. It's an interesting time of the year with long days and a twilight that extends until almost 9 o'clock; not quite summer. A good time to look at the city.
We drove the Embarcadero on one of those long summery evenings, headed south toward Interstate 280. Past the South Beach marina, past the ballpark, slowed up for traffic. There was a huge roar from the ballpark, as if someone hit a grand slam. 'What was that?' my companion said. 'I thought the Giants were out of town.' The Giants were indeed on the road. The roar at the baseball park was from 40,000 people, there to hear a band I'd never heard of.
There's a lot we never heard of. Or forgot. I was on the Embarcadero a couple of days later on a Saturday morning. The walkways on the edge of the street were crowded with people walking, running, riding bikes, pushing baby strollers. There was a farmers market at the Ferry Building, a landmark from an older San Francisco, now repurposed for a newer city.
It was like a county fair in the city: eggs, sausages, fine cheese, fresh produce, all manner of goods for sale. The market comes with San Francisco Bay as a backdrop.
We headed north around the sweeping curve that points toward the Golden Gate Bridge, past the Exploratorium, past tugboats and small craft tied up, past the cruise ship dock, past the pier where people line up to catch a boat that takes them to Alcatraz, past bits and pieces of the seafaring past.
Years ago I worked my way through college unloading mail trucks just off the Embarcadero at the time when San Francisco's working waterfront was fading away. Freight trains and big trucks ruled the street. It was romantic, colorful, and vaguely dangerous. There were dive bars full of tough guys. They made B movies about the waterfront. 'Hell on Frisco Bay' was one of them. When the port started to slip they built a double-deck freeway that cut the city off from the bay. It loomed over the Embarcadero with all the grace of a prison wall. Now we have a new and much different waterfront. We forget sometimes that change is not always bad.
The old Liberty ship Jeremiah O'Brien was offering one of its occasional bay cruises that day and I went aboard, out the Golden Gate for a quick taste of the ocean, back along the city front, under the Bay Bridge by the ballpark and back again.
We forget sometimes how graceful the Golden Gate Bridge is, especially from the water. The south tower stands alone, like an orange tower framing the city on its hills. From sea level the north tower blends into the Marin cliffs. Nothing like it.
The Bay Bridge has its own grace, but it's different, unpretentious, hard working. It gives off roars; cars, trucks. It's the main street of the bay region.
The usual afternoon wind had died down and the bay was flat calm. You could look right up the streets: Folsom, Howard, Mission. Beyond that, steel and glass towers. 'The city looks pretty good from here,' I said, half to myself. 'Yeah,' the man next to me said, 'You can't even get the smell.'
Everyone knows what that means — it's the sour smell of civic failure. You can see it a couple of blocks up Market Street where a homeless man sleeps under an advertisement for artificial intelligence. You can see it on Van Ness Avenue across from City Hall where another man made his home for the day at a bus stop.
You can see it in the people who walk by the lost souls without a glance. We've contained the misfits, the drug addicts, the homeless to certain areas, and if you're lucky you can go for a couple of days without seeing them. Out of sight, out of mind.
We forget, sometimes, how beautiful and how conflicted this city is. George Sterling, the poet, called San Francisco 'serene, indifferent to fate.' And more famously, 'The cool, gray city of love.' But we also forget how cold that gray city can be.