I couldn’t have been more than five or six when I fell head over heels in love with a cheap kid’s toy on sale at our local Kroger supermarket. It was a kiddy-sized car dashboard, complete with windshield, turn indicator, gearshift (on the steering column, of course), painted-on dials and speedometer, and battery-powered turn signals and horn. Oh, I wanted that thing. In due time it arrived under the Christmas tree and took up a prominent place in my room. As an introverted kid with a knack for keeping himself entertained for hours at a time, I was only too happy to sit there and drive hither and yon, going beep beep on the horn and dink dink dink on the turn signals. Turn here, turn there, pretend to be racing down a straight street, taking the left turn carefully, all that. I’ll be forever grateful to those no doubt criminally underpaid Chinese or Japanese sweatshop workers who assembled my little red plastic dashboard. They couldn’t know it, but they made a little kid in Houston very, very happy.
Flash forward to my adulthood and I’m driving down a San Francisco street in my 1989 Mustang. Of a sudden I remembered my red plastic dashboard. The act of driving my car down a near-deserted street in the blaher-than-blah Sunset District was immediately transformed into something magical. I was a kid again with his favorite toy, but this time the damn thing was real. It worked. I was really driving. It took a firm act of will to keep myself from going beep beep beep all the way down the street or flicking my turn indicator left and right and left again to make it go dink dink dink, or twisting the wheel with careless abandon and plunging Mustang and self into the nearest tree. I restrained myself and arrived at my destination (most likely the former SF Conservatory digs on far remote Ortega Street) intact.
There’s a lesson in my frisson of childhood memory, which is that adventure is where you find it and how you make it. One need not travel to the ends of the planet to find allure and mystery, or to discover anything new for that matter. There’s a ton of that stuff right at home, as long as you’re willing to make it so.
It being a national holiday today, and my to-do list being mostly checked off at present (the advantage of being a proactive, Type A worry-wart) I decided to have myself a minor adventure. Instead of staying in my own neighborhood for my usual walk—about 3-4 miles or so as long as the weather and my schedule permits—I decided to take myself downtown and have my walk in the touristy areas of town. After all, I live in one of the great travel destinations of the world, yet like your basic New Yorker who has never been to the Statue of Liberty, I am often anaesthetic to San Francisco’s best-known attractions. So off I went, taking the old-time surface trolley instead of the high-speed modern subway system. The idea was to look out of the windows and actually see stuff, even stuff I walk by every day.
So I did. I noticed anew what a charming area Upper Market is, with its center-dividing palm trees and sleek new buildings popping up hither and yon like so many high-tech mushrooms. The first signs of decay come at Market and Van Ness—that’s where I usually exit on my way to the new SF Conservatory building—but signs of hope also abound, thanks to the massive constructions at 9th Street, including the Twitter headquarters. But urban decay wins out once you pass 8th Street, with the severely blighted stretch of Market Street looking, feeling, and smelling as bad as ever. For four blocks Market Street is hideous, nothing but cheapjack stores, boarded up windows, and sidewalks covered in vagrants. Then it changes abruptly at 5th. Cross the street and you’re entering San Francisco’s downtown retail zone, with the grandiose San Francisco Centre (Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, and other such joints) on the south side and the cable car turnaround on the north. The massive slab of the Flood Building looms, still managing to retain some of its old-time Maltese Falcon cachet; Sam Spade’s office was in there, overlooking Powell Street. Walking up Powell—dodging the umpty-million tourists—and finally emerging into the light of Union Square, after its gazillion-dollar retrofit a much lesser place than it was before. Before it was improved it had at least some greenery to offer. Now it’s all just cement and glare, ugly and uninviting. The ring of stores remains as impressive as ever, Tiffany and Saks Fifth Avenue and the rest.
Kitty-corner across the parched blast zone of Union Square and down Post to Grant. Take a left at Shreve’s Jewelers (closed for Labor Day) and walk three blocks, and you’re at the Chinatown Gate. This is tourist San Francisco at its most intense, but it’s still a lot of fun. I had myself a fine old time, strolling down Grant towards Columbus, stopping once in a while to look in the clip-joint jewelry stores and enjoying the multi-lingual chatter all around me. Eventually I made it down to Jackson and stopped in for lunch at the Four Seas, an old-timey San Francisco Chinese restaurant that despite its mostly tourist clientele manages to retain some of its way-back-when-SF feel. On the second floor with wonderful views plunging down Jackson to the Bay, its red plush carpet and faux-Chinoiserie-tacky decor give a feel of San Francisco authenticity that you just don’t get in those flourescent-lit dropped-ceiling joints out in the Avenues where the real Asians go for dinner. You can imagine Aliotos and Browns huddled back in the bar, making deals that keep California running, or Zellerbachs haggling with Gettys over financing for the next opera season.
Given that the Four Seas offers girls-with-trays dim sum, I indulged myself but kept my natural gluttony and greed at bay, limiting myself to just some plain pot stickers, chicken in foil, and shrimp paste in eggplant wrappers. I’ll allow that no girl-with-a-tray came by with turnip cakes, or else I would have had one more dish. Can’t resist turnip cakes. Or the egg custard tarts, but I don’t think the Four Seas does those. Probably for the best; like most of the vanishingly few remaining old-time San Francisco restaurants, the Four Seas is actually pretty mediocre. But I enjoyed myself no end just the same. This was an adventure, and I wasn’t going to sit there and wax all picky.
Down Jackson for a few blocks, then a bit of aimless wandering took me along Columbus where a confused lady with a German accent asked me which street was Columbus and which was Jackson. Understandable; Columbus cuts through diagonally and the street signs are kinda crooked. I showed her Jackson and she sighed; oh, it’s uphill, isn’t it? I nodded. Everything here is up or down, I said. Yes, I figured that out, she said. We laughed and went on our ways, she no doubt trudging up Jackson and me strolling happily along the flat landfill areas, on my way through Sue Bielmann Park, that little patch of greenery amidst skyscrapers that opens up miraculously onto the Embarcadero, with the Ferry Building looming over towards the right. From there to the Embarcadero subway station and a zippy, air-conditioned ride home on the Muni Metro underground.
It’s a good reminder that I live in a spectacularly beautiful city, even if some parts are blighted, other parts are blah, and other parts yet were apparently designed by Soviet urban planners. More to the point, I made my little jaunt into an adventure, and had myself a fine old time. And I wound up walking way more than usual. I guess I needed to work off all that shrimp paste and eggplant.