I live in a doll house on a miniature street in a compact neighborhood in a midget city. My doll house is surrounded by other doll houses, the street is lined with toy trees, the neighborhood is ringed by hills, and the city is enclosed by water. It couldn’t be more foursquare and shipshape if it were the backdrop for a video game.
The neighborhood nestles at the bottom of a bowl, snuggled into a fair-weather spot amidst summertime moodiness, almost precisely at the geometric center of San Francisco. Back when people were naming things, they liked to christen neighborhoods via the main thoroughfare—thus Noe Valley and Polk Gulch. Eureka Street runs north-south right through the cup, hence we live in Eureka Valley. To the east, the Mission District; to the west, Twin Peaks. Confusingly, you go north to get to the Western Addition, and south over the aptly-named Eureka Heights to reach Noe Valley below.
Eureka Valley was a working-class neighborhood for the better part of its existence. Beginning as the Rancho San Miguel of the 1840s, the future Eureka Valley was renamed "Horner’s Extension" in the 1850s and was considered to belong to the general Mission Dolores area until the 1890s. But Market Street got its first trolley in the 1880s, with the corner of Castro and Market forming a perfect terminus spot. (West of Castro, Market Street becomes downright alpine, impossible for a trolley car to negotiate.) Those steel trolley tracks acted as a conduit to the city proper and by the 1890s Victorian frame houses were springing up like so many sunflowers. Solid and respectable, blue-collar Eureka Valley was San Francisco’s answer to Levittown, a brand-new bedroom suburb just perfect for raising a family while working in the big city nearby.
Because Eureka Valley escaped both the ravages of the 1906 earthquake/fire, and even more critically those misguided urban "renewal" movements of the 1960s, bevies of those now-picturesque frame houses have survived. Pictures of Eureka Valley circa 1900 often look eerily familiar to the neighborhood residents—entire blocks stand almost entirely unchanged.
But Eureka Valley could have easily gone the way of older neighborhoods throughout America: slow decay to slum followed by bulldozing followed by block apartment buildings and condominiums followed by an eventual restart of the cycle. Given that it was never a wealthy neighborhood, it may not have seemed likely to withstand typical urban decline. However, San Francisco doesn’t follow the rules and a concerted city-wide movement to preserve older neighborhoods succeeded magnificently. Newer houses in Eureka Valley stand only where older ones have been lost to fire or neglect, and sometimes an apparently new house turns out to be an original with a new facade. Not surprisingly, it is the modern buildings that tend to wither quickly and become eyesores, while the old houses—most of them single-family, some three-story conglomerations of flats and apartments—soldier on steadily.
Eureka Valley morphed into the Castro during the 1970s, but that essential blue-collar character remains if you know where and how to look. Sometimes you see it barely out of the corner of your eye—a golden-age couple on their front stoop in the evening, chatting comfortably with the neighbors; a family-owned shop on Castro hanging in there amidst the louche glitz. The Castro may seem hysterically trendy and mind-numbingly diverse, but Eureka Valley persists in the sheer respectability of the area’s homes with their immaculate paint jobs, in the residents’ refusal to allow commercial encroachments beyond long-established limits, in the aura of peace and restrained prosperity that characterizes so much of the valley and the rolling hills above.
So, in my snug house on my toy street in my teacup neighborhood, I live as contentedly as a Raggedy Andy doll flopped in a kid’s rocking chair. It’s not actually my house in the sense of ownership, but after having rented it for a quarter-century I am hard-pressed to imagine living anywhere else. Nor do I see any looming portents of change; the owners are older people but they seem contented, so far, to make periodic trips from Santa Rosa into town for the Symphony or socializing, overnighting in the cozy downstairs pied à terre, confident that their oh-so responsible tenant upstairs is taking care of the property. In a town notorious for sickeningly high rents and dismal tenant-landlord relations, we have created a bubble of trust and contentment.
Homebody, yes; Martha Stewart, no. I tend to let the housework pile up, but because I’m an instinctively tidy Raggedy Andy, nothing ever gets all that messy. Cat fur and litterbox impedimenta account for the lion’s share, as it were, of the mess. Martha Stewart would call it a pig pen while your basic bachelor slob would declare it immaculate. I never let it get dirty, just a bit lived-in here and there. Much of the disarray is reserved for my home office, located in a sunroom that was originally the back porch but was covered over and closed in sometime in the 1940s. But it’s a professor’s, and a writer’s, clutter: books, CDs, computers, printers, hi-fi equipment, paper and papers, digital piano, lamps, telephone, bookshelves, two desks, and a faux-ivory Buddha raising his hand benevolently over the semi-organized chaos.
Over the years I have renovated the interior, gradually, one step at a time—new carpet here, repainting there. The house sports a new bathroom courtesy of the owners and a completely revamped master bedroom, courtesy me. The appliances are recent vintage, the plumbing is in good shape, some dry rot and sagging timbers have been repaired, and the flimsy original back doors have been replaced with attractive yet sturdy affairs.
Like all old houses, it receives cosmetic primping with joy and savagely resists hardware modifications. My heart bled for the poor installer from Lowe’s who was obliged to replace a 1960s vintage GE dishwasher with my shiny new Maytag. I warned him in advance that the house would probably fight him to the death about it. When an appliance has been in situ for fifty years, it becomes part of the woodwork and the plumbing, difficult to dislodge. In this case, the situation was exacerbated by the dishwasher being crammed into a jerry-rigged cubby that was improvised half a century ago with a freewheeling approach to plumbing and electrical connections. San Francisco appliance installers rapidly acquire experience along such lines, and so every time the house threw a punch, my seasoned Lowe’s veteran had a counterpunch ready. For about a half-hour I really thought the house was going to win—he simply could not get the new dishwasher connected to the plumbing without water spewing hither and yon. After burrowing deep into his collection of fittings he found, almost by accident, a coupling that fooled my bitchy old pipes into thinking that their old friend was back. The spewing stopped and the dishwasher could be shoved into the cubby. That took some doing, since the dishwasher is cubical and the cubby no longer is. Even after Lowe’s appeared to have won the day, the final operation—screwing on the kick plate—turned into a Keystone Kops exercise in sweating, swearing, and the application of just about every tool the poor schmuck possessed. But ultimately the house conceded defeat and I had a new dishwasher.
Like Henry Higgins, I’m a quiet-living man who prefers to spend his evenings in the silence of his room. Perhaps my definition of "quiet" differs from Prof. Higgins; being both a musician and an audiophile, I often spend my evenings-at-home in my living-room concert hall, exploring new music or deepening my relationship with old friends. I think through my program a bit in advance, usually identifying the pièce de resistance, the kingpin recording, for the evening. Last night, Simon Rattle’s Birmingham recording of Britten’s War Requiem; the previous evening, Iván Fischer’s stellar Mahler 2nd with his Budapest Festival Orchestra. The I add other works, sometimes planned and sometimes left to serendipity. Last night Britten was joined by some Liszt (First Hungarian Rhapsody, orchestral version again with Fischer and the Budapest Festival), Bartók (Four Orchestral Pieces, Op. 12 from Pierre Boulez in Chicago), and Haydn Symphonies Nos. 54 and 86, courtesy of Adam Fischer (no relation to Ivan) and the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra. I’m not partial to earth-shattering volume, preferring concert hall-ish dynamics to blasts. Thus I’m not likely to cause much, if any, annoyance to my neighbors. Besides, my living room is surrounded by airspace and can be closed off from the rest of the house, so the folks next door may not even know that my living room houses a spectacular audiophile rig.
As my gentleman’s life settles about me for the long summer break, I putter about comfortably, researching and writing the forthcoming season’s program notes and pre-concert lectures, teaching a few students who have intrepidly opted to keep the fires burning over the break, cooking myself nice things, taking in the occasional concert or movie, trotting over to the SF Symphony every once in a while to deliver lectures (the season continues on for a few more weeks), and in general just having a fine old time. In due course I will toss off my gentleman’s garb and resume my workaholic togs as I balance my typically towering stack of responsibilities and activities. But for now I’m just soft little Raggedy Andy, plopped down in my little chair in my little house on my little street, smiling my happy little smile.
