Category: San Francisco/California

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Memories Radio San Francisco/California

Remembering San Francisco’s KMPX

For most of 1967, the basement of a warehouse at 50 Green Street, near the foot of Telegraph Hill, was a place where nothing was supposed to happen. Chinese in the morning. Portuguese. Italian. Whatever middle-of-the-road filler could be stacked into the hours nobody had bought.

Then, in February, at midnight, for forty-five dollars a week, a twenty-six-year-old from Detroit named Larry Miller sat down at the board and played what he wanted. He called it folk rock. He let whole album cuts run, folk into jazz into classical into whatever he’d found that day, and he talked when he felt like talking. No jingles. No clock. No time and temperature.

I know because I used to ride over from Berkeley to watch him do it.

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Categories
Aging San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Permission of Fridays

Doug always walked a half-step ahead, which meant he saw things first, which meant I was usually watching him see them — the tilt of his head, the small pause before he brought the camera up — before I ever turned to look myself. Market Street on a Friday morning has its own weather system, independent of the sky: the gray light fog gives even bright colors.

We would set out with no destination, which was the whole method — what Jay Maisel, who died this summer at ninety-five, called going out empty. Leave the plan at home, he taught generations of photographers, so there’s room left in you to see something you didn’t already expect. You cannot plan to be astonished. You can only put yourself in the path of it and hope.

I have thought about those walks more than I expected to, now that they are gone. Not gone dramatically — no falling-out, no single last Friday we knew was the last Friday. Covid arrived and shut the passes between people the way weather closes a mountain road, and by the time it reopened, the rhythm had broken. We still talk. We just don’t walk anymore, and I have never entirely worked out why something so simple didn’t start back up, the way you’d think a habit that good would insist on its own return. It just didn’t come back.

Susan Orlean, in Joyride, writes about being a writer as a kind of permission — an excuse to linger in places past the point a normal person would move along, and then to go back and report on what was seen. She’s citing Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

A camera grants the identical permission a notebook does. Nobody stops a man with a camera on Market Street and asks him what he’s doing there. The camera is its own credential — I have a reason to be looking at you, at this doorway, at the light falling across these particular twenty feet of sidewalk, longer than is socially normal. Doug and I weren’t tourists and we weren’t reporters and we weren’t, most days, even talking about what we saw until afterward, over lunch. We were two men who had given ourselves formal license to pay attention to a city we loved, as if it might not be there next Friday.

It mostly was there next Friday. Until it wasn’t, in the way that most disruptions to a good practice aren’t dramatic so much as quietly permanent — a scheduling gap that never gets rescheduled, a street that starts to feel unfamiliar again because you stopped walking it with intention. I still have the pictures. A woman waiting at a bus stop with an expression I never satisfactorily explained to myself. The chess player’s hands, mid-reset, waiting on the next stranger. Doug, once, caught by someone else’s lens, walking a half-step ahead of a man he didn’t know was photographing him photographing the city.

The third instruction is the one that survived when the walks didn’t. I don’t walk Market Street with Doug anymore, but I’m telling you about it now, on a blog nobody assigned me to keep for twenty-five years. The credential just changed instruments — camera to keyboard. Orlean’s point, I think, is that the excuse and the obligation were always the same thing. You get to be there because you intend to come back and testify, and the testifying is the toll, due whether or not the place is still there when you go looking for it again.

Doug and I are not going to start walking on Fridays again. I’m too old for that kind of recommitment, and pretending otherwise would just be a nicer way of lying to myself. Plus physically it’s just beyond me now. This essay is itself a kind of substitute — the telling standing in for a habit of attending that got interrupted and never fully repaired.

Mary Oliver’s instructions don’t say what to do when the astonishment outlasts the practice that produced it. Maybe that’s the fourth instruction nobody wrote down: keep telling about it anyway, especially after you’ve stopped going. Or at least remembering.

Categories
Interstate 280 San Francisco/California

The Freeway That Saved the Hills

A curving six-lane freeway follows a ridge beside a long reservoir, surrounded by rolling California hills covered in oak and chaparral, glowing in warm golden-hour sunlight.

Note: I’ve written here before about Interstate 280 on the San Francisco Peninsula. It’s a beautiful drive along an unusually natural and undeveloped section of land. This afternoon I went down a bit of a “rabbit hole” exploring more about the history of how the route the roadway takes was decided. Turns out it’s quite a story. One that’s unlikely to have happened were it being decided in today’s political climate.

Drive north on I-280 past Woodside and the view still startles: a multi-lane interstate running the rim of the San Andreas rift, and west of it an almost unbroken sweep of water, oak, chaparral, and ridge. No subdivisions. No office parks. No golf-course mansions stepping down to the lake. The land above Crystal Springs, and the country around Filoli, looks as if the postwar Peninsula never happened.

It almost did. The emptiness is not an accident of topography. It is the residue of a late-1960s bargain in which local activists pulled the U.S. Department of the Interior into a state highway fight, San Francisco traded development rights on its watershed for a relocated freeway, and federal money became the lever that shoved Interstate 280 east onto the ridge and away from the reservoir. A highway argument became, without much fanfare, a federal conservation instrument.

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Memories Radio San Francisco/California

Radio Hill

Radio Studio in Hotel

In the mid-1960s you could stand on California Street between the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill and know that two different San Franciscos were being invented a hundred yards apart.

KSFO lived inside the Fairmont. KYA lived at One Nob Hill Circle, the annex that had once belonged to KSFO. They had traded rooms a few years earlier. The adult station and the kid station were living in each other’s former houses.

I listened from Westlake in Daly City. I was in high school. We had just moved from Ohio. It seemed strange, even then, that one of the voices came out of a hotel.

I was deep into ham radio then, so I studied how the stations actually worked, not just how they sounded. At the Fairmont you could see into the KSFO studios through glass walls. KYA’s transmitter sat on the hill above Candlestick. Both were 5,000 watts. Nothing special. Up on San Bruno Mountain, James Gabbert would fire up KPEN — later KIOI — licensed for 120,000 watts and the first FM stereo west of St. Louis. I knew the difference between those numbers before I knew much else about the city I’d landed in.

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Categories
AI San Francisco/California

Tsunami

Rocker on the front porch

The trucks are what I remember. Not the houses, not yet — the trucks.

This was 2012, Atherton, a Tuesday probably, and I was driving through on some errand that doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that the street had rearranged itself. Contractors’ pickups lined both shoulders, nose to tail, so many of them that the road narrowed to one lane and you had to slow down and thread through, the way you do in a construction zone that has forgotten to end.

White trucks, mostly. Ladders racked on top. A generator humming behind a hedge somewhere I couldn’t see.

Behind the trucks, the estates were coming apart and going back together bigger.

I remember thinking: something has happened here that I am only seeing the edge of.

What had happened was Facebook.

The company had gone public that May, and within months the money was finding its way, the way money does, into contractors’ trucks parked along an Atherton road.

I didn’t call it a wave at the time. I called it, in my head, weather — a system that had rolled in and would eventually roll back out, the way markets always eventually correct, the way things revert.

I was an investor. I’d seen booms before.

I believed in the mean.

I was wrong.

The prices didn’t stay at their old level. They didn’t return to the world I’d known. The numbers from 2012 became the new floor, and every year since has been built on top of that floor. Today those prices look almost quaint, a thing you’d want to explain to a younger person the way you’d explain what a dollar used to buy.

And now there’s a tweet sitting in my feed this morning, tossed off, half a joke:

Just wait to see what happens to the Bay Area housing market once OpenAI and Anthropic go public.

I read it twice.

What I felt wasn’t curiosity — the feeling I’d had in 2012, watching an unfamiliar weather system with a kind of professional interest.

It was closer to dread.

Because I’ve already seen the after-photo.

And I know how to run the comparison forward.

The Facebook IPO created a large cohort of newly liquid employees on the Peninsula. They were mostly mid-career, and their stock had vested over four years against a company whose value had grown enormously.

The frontier labs are different.

If OpenAI and Anthropic eventually go public anywhere near the valuations already being discussed in private markets, they could create another enormous concentration of newly liquid wealth — among employees, founders and early investors.

I don’t know how large that wave will actually be. Maybe I’m overstating it. Not every employee will buy a house. Some will already own one. Some will move away. Much of the wealth will remain on paper for years.

And housing doesn’t respond mechanically to stock-market wealth.

But I do know something about the place where this wealth is likely to arrive.

There isn’t much of it.

Land is the constraint.

And I’ve seen what happens when a concentrated burst of new wealth meets a place that can’t make more land.

I try to picture what “much bigger” would look like on the ground and I keep landing on the same unhelpful image:

More trucks.

Longer lines of them.

People get ready..

Categories
Music Radio San Francisco/California

Remembering San Francisco’s KKSF

KKSF FM on the radio overlooking San Francisco

At midnight on July 31, 1987, KKSF came alive at 103.7 FM.

The first thing anyone heard was Steve Winwood, “Back in the High Life Again,” which is either a coincidence or the most on-the-nose piece of programming in the history of San Francisco radio. Because that is more or less what the station promised everybody who found it in the weeks after: a higher life, a smoother one, arriving at 103.7 on your dial like a room you didn’t know you’d been missing.

I found it not long after, in my kitchen, which is where I found most things back then. The radio sat on the counter, tuned low enough that it lived beneath the sound of dishes and the refrigerator door and whatever else was happening in a life that was in the middle of being built.

This was after 8-tracks and before anyone had figured out you could carry a hundred thousand songs in your pocket, which meant the radio still had a kind of authority it doesn’t have now. You didn’t choose the next song. Somebody chose it for you, and you trusted them, the way you trust a bartender who’s been reading a room for twenty years.

On KKSF, the person doing the choosing had impeccable taste and a voice like a hand on your shoulder telling you it was going to be fine.

I think about how strange that arrangement sounds now, handing your afternoon over to a stranger’s judgment, and how completely I didn’t question it then. Roger Coryell had the mornings, or near enough to them, and he had that particular gift — rarer than people think — of sounding as though he was talking to exactly one person, and that the person happened to be you, standing at your own counter in your own kitchen a hundred miles from the studio.

Miranda Wilson took the middle of the day and kept it there for years, eventually becoming the last live voice on a station that had long since become an institution.

I didn’t know, listening in 1988 or 1991 or whenever it was, that I was living inside something that had an expiration date.

You never do.

You think the kitchen and the counter and the voice on the radio are just Tuesday, just the texture of an ordinary life. It takes twenty years and a different city outside the window before you understand that you were actually inside an era, capital E, and that eras, unlike Tuesdays, do not come back.

There was a name for what KKSF was doing: New Adult Contemporary, or NAC. But nobody listening in the kitchen cared about the name. The idea was simple enough — give the Bay Area something between the rock stations shouting at it and the classical stations lecturing it, light jazz easing into soft rock easing into something with a saxophone in it that nobody could quite name. Holding it together, day after day, song after song, was a program director named Steve Feinstein, chasing down lesser-known imports and out-of-print oddities that gave the station its particular ear, until he died in September of 1996, still on the job.

What they created was a kind of ambient permission.

You didn’t have to hurry.

You didn’t have to shout.

You didn’t even have to know what you were listening to.

The music simply arrived, and you let it stay.

There was a version of San Francisco in those years that felt, at least to me, as though it had room for that kind of unhurried, unbranded taste. This wasn’t necessarily a gentler city in any objective sense. San Francisco had plenty of its own troubles then, as it always has. But it was the city I was living in, and KKSF somehow belonged to its frequency.

Real estate hadn’t yet eaten everything. The tech money was already there, but it hadn’t yet rearranged the furniture of the entire region around itself. There were still corners of the Bay Area where nobody seemed to be optimizing anything.

KKSF didn’t optimize.

It curated.

And there is a difference.

The station lasted twenty-two years, which sounds like nothing until you try to think of anything else in your life that lasted twenty-two years without you noticing it was a relationship.

Then, in May 2009, it stopped being itself.

By then Clear Channel owned the station, and economics won. The format disappeared, the music changed, and Miranda’s voice — which had been finding its way into kitchens across the Bay Area for years — went quiet on that frequency for good.

I didn’t hear it happen.

I was somewhere else by then, doing something else, the way you are when the things that shaped you quietly stop existing without asking your permission first.

I only found out later, the way you find out most things now: long after the fact, scrolling, discovering that a piece of your own furniture had been sold at auction while you weren’t looking.

What I keep coming back to isn’t the music, exactly, though I could still hum half of it.

It’s the kitchen.

And the particular quality of trust required to let somebody else choose what you’d hear next — to be doing stuff and suddenly hear a song you’d never have chosen on your own, and follow it somewhere you wouldn’t have gone. I miss the feeling that the world could still surprise me without first asking what I wanted. Old world radio curation.

Sometimes I think about the city outside that kitchen window, too. It doesn’t sound like that anymore. It doesn’t have quite the same room, at least to my ears, for anything that isn’t trying to be the loudest thing in the room.

Sometimes when music is playing in the background and my mind is wandering I think of KKSF and how a radio station is just a number until somebody fills it with twenty-two years of somebody else’s kindness and wonderful taste.

Categories
Bread San Francisco/California

Best San Francisco Sourdough Bread

A while back I wrote about my old favorite sourdough bakery: Larraburu. Unfortunately long since closed.

Recently the San Francisco Chronicle did an updated review of the best sourdough bread in San Francisco. Their winner was one I’ve never tried before: Josey Baker Bread.

I love sourdough bread but really have to watch my carb intake so I’m forced to limit my consumption!

Categories
Aviation San Francisco/California

The Queen’s Last Climb Out of SFO

I watched the video this morning and felt that familiar tightening in the chest that only a certain airplane still produces in me.

It’s labeled simply enough: The Last 747-400 Departure out of SFO 5/31/26 LH455. The aircraft is D-ABVY, a Lufthansa 747-430 that first flew in December 2000. The passenger filming from seat 12K didn’t know it yet, but this was the final scheduled passenger 747-400 departure from San Francisco. Four engines spooling, wings flexing under the load, slats retracting, then the long climb out over the Bay — South San Francisco’s industrial lettering, the dark mass of Mount Diablo, two right turns, the airplane’s shadow racing across the ground, and the Pacific opening up ahead.

The Queen of the Skies, still doing what she was built to do, one last time from this airport.

The 747-400 has always sat at the top of my personal list. Not the stretched -8, though I flew one and respected it. The classic -400. The proportions are right. The upper deck still reads as a second story rather than an afterthought. The cockpit sits high enough that landing always seemed to demand something extra from the pilots. And those four engines have an authority in the sound that twins, however efficient, never quite match.

I first saw a 747 coming into SFO around 1970, watching something that size on final approach and finding it almost absurd. My first flight on one was a TWA trip from San Francisco to New York. I managed a few upper-deck seats along the way, which always felt like a quiet privilege. The last time I flew a 747 was 2016, a Lufthansa 747-8 from Bangalore to Frankfurt. I remember thinking the type still had years left, and being glad of it.

A few years ago, when Boeing delivered the final 747, I wrote a short piece called “Ode to a Queen.” I still feel the same way. The airplane made long-distance travel ordinary for people who’d never have managed it otherwise — and it was beautiful in a way pure efficiency rarely is. The -400 refined the original idea without losing its character. For decades it was the default long-haul workhorse, the one you hoped to see on the departure board.

Lufthansa has been the last major carrier flying passenger -400s into U.S. cities. The grounding is happening in stages now, with the last ones expected out of service next year. The 747-8 will hang on a while longer, but even that presence at SFO gives way to the A350 this coming winter. The video from May 31 caught something real closing: the last scheduled passenger 747-400 leaving the airport where so many of us first fell for the airplane.

I’m not usually one for nostalgia. The newer twins move people and cargo more efficiently and more safely, by almost every measure that matters. And still — something goes out of the sky when a design that carried this much of our collective imagination finally leaves the stage. The 747 never looked like a compromise. It looked like an answer to a question no one else had dared ask at that scale.

Watch the video if you have a few minutes. Sit with the wing flex and the engine note, the long view of the Bay Area falling away beneath a machine that made long-haul flight feel both ordinary and slightly miraculous, for more than three decades. D-ABVY did its job that afternoon in late May. The passenger in 12K, camera running, got something that airport won’t produce again.

I will miss her.

Categories
San Francisco/California Writing

The Company of Fog

Note: a little fun this morning with a piece envisioning Jimmy Breslin writing about lunch with Herb Caen at Tadich Grill…

I went to San Francisco to meet a man who writes about the place the way a guy writes about a woman he still wants to sleep with after thirty years.

His name is Herb Caen. He has been telling this city about itself every morning since before most of the people reading him were born. They call him Mr. San Francisco. In New York we don’t hand out titles like that. In New York you earn the right to be called a son of a bitch, and you take it as a compliment.

We met at Tadich Grill. Open since the gold rush, and it still looks like it never got the news that things change. Dark wood. White tablecloths. Waiters old enough to remember when the bridge was new and still sore about it. The fish comes out of the water and onto the plate without a lot of conversation in between.

Caen was already sitting when I got there. Neat. Jacket. That California tan that never quite goes away, like the sun signed a contract with him. He stood up and shook my hand like a man who has shaken a lot of hands and still means it. I ordered a martini, because when you’re in another man’s town you drink what the town drinks, even when the town is wrong.

He had one too. Stoli, twist. He called it Vitamin V.

We talked about columns. About writing for a city that never sleeps against writing for one that takes long naps in the fog and calls it lifestyle. I told him New York will rob you and hold the door on the way out. He said San Francisco smiles while it’s doing it, then writes a nice item about your necktie.

He works in three dots. Little pieces, one after another, like a man feeding a parking meter all day instead of buying the car. Gossip, jokes, the name of whoever just opened a place on Union Street. I need more room than that. I need to turn around. He said my way was fine if you like carrying a piano up the stairs every day. I told him his was fine if you don’t mind never sitting down long enough to find out what you actually think.

The sand dabs came. Caen looked at his like a priest looks at the host. I ate mine like a man who skipped breakfast. Everything on that table was good — the bread, the butter, the light coming in off the street looking like it had been there as long as the wood and knew it.

He leaned in. “You know the difference between our two cities?”

I waited.

“In New York, the people are the story. Here, the city is the story. The people just get to live in it for a while.”

That’s a hell of a thing for a man to say about his own hometown — that the place is bigger than everybody in it, including him. I told him about the man who dug Kennedy’s grave, the one nobody else thought to ask. Caen nodded. He understood the assignment. It was the only time all lunch he didn’t have a joke ready.

We stayed too long. The martinis did their work. Outside, the fog came in soft and certain, the way it does out there, like it’s been rehearsing. Caen put his coat on like a man who has never once been in a hurry. I put mine on like a man who has somewhere else to be, even when he doesn’t.

On the sidewalk he tipped his hat. An actual hat. Nobody tips a hat in New York anymore. We’re too busy hailing something.

“Come back,” he said. “The city likes company.”

I walked toward the cable car line, the fog thick enough to make the streetlights float like they’d given up on the ground. Two men, two ways of loving a place. One writes it in little pieces that catch light for a second and go dark before the next one starts. The other digs until he finds the one man nobody else remembered to ask about, and doesn’t stop until the shovel hits something.

Neither of us was going to change. Neither was the city. That’s probably why we got along.

I caught the cable car and rode it a few blocks just to feel it move under me, the way you touch a thing to make sure it’s real. Behind me somewhere, a man who’d spent his life telling San Francisco it was beautiful was walking home through the fog he’d helped invent — which is either the best job in America or a life sentence, and he never once let on which.

I never did find out if he got tired of saying the same true thing a different way every morning. I didn’t ask. Some men you let keep their secret. Besides, I had my own city waiting, and it doesn’t smile at you while it robs you. It just takes the money and tells you to have a nice day.

Categories
Aging Living San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Zone

Sail Away - San Francisco - 2014

I have been alive for nearly a third of the time this country has existed. It arrived the way facts do at a certain age, sideways, while I was thinking about something else, and it sat me down. Two hundred and fifty years, and my own decades take up a third of it — whether I meant to claim that much room or not.

I used to think the road was where I went to escape the smallness of a life. Now the road doesn’t call the way it once did. Some of that is willingness. More of it, if I’m honest, is a body that’s less steady, a bladder with a mind of its own. The body files its objections. I used to override them. I no longer do — not because I’ve grown wise, but because the overriding costs more than it used to and buys less.

But I want to tell you about what I got instead, most Fridays, for not quite a decade, because it isn’t nothing.

Doug came across on the ferry from Larkspur, and I’d meet him at the Ferry Building — watching the boat come in, watching him pick his way down the gangway with his camera bag, before either of us had said a word or made a single decision about where to walk. Then we’d head out along the Embarcadero, sometimes up into the financial district, and for the first ten minutes my mind would do what minds do. It would analyze. It would compose. There, the light coming off that glass tower, wait for the man in the overcoat to cross into it, no — too late, gone. Appraising and timing, the way I’d once weighed a stock, or a runway, or a route.

And then, without my choosing it, something released. There’s no threshold you feel yourself cross. But sometime after the tenth minute, the appraising stopped, and seeing took over. Not looking for. Not looking at. The street would stop being a set of problems to solve and become only itself: a longshoreman on a break outside a pier, a gull working the same patch of pavement three times, fog sliding under the Bay Bridge like it had somewhere to be. Doug, a few yards off, would go quiet the same way, and we’d shoot for an hour or two and then find each other again at the end of the block.

By then we’d have worked up an appetite for something other than pictures. Tadich Grill, if we could get in — the linen and the old wood and the waiters who’d been there longer than some of our careers. We’d order something plain and good, and that’s when the talking would start. Not small talk. The real kind. Work, kids, the state of things, whatever had lodged itself in each of us that week. The seeing on the street and the talking over lunch were not two different activities. They were the same hour, extended. One was attention paid to the world. The other was attention paid to each other.

I have flown airplanes and driven through weather I shouldn’t have, and I loved both for the demand they made on me — the total, narrowing attention that leaves no room for the self that worries. What I didn’t understand then was that a boat crossing from Larkspur, and a Friday, and an old friend across a table at Tadich, could ask the same thing of me, for free, without a single mile of my own driving.

Covid stopped it. Not gradually — the way most rituals fade, through scheduling and distance and the slow drift of people’s lives — but all at once, the way everything stopped that spring. The ferry didn’t run. The restaurants closed. We never quite picked it back up, not the way it was. I don’t think either of us decided to let it go. It just didn’t survive being interrupted.

A third of the country’s whole life, and it took me most of my own to learn what those Fridays were teaching me — and then to lose them before I’d finished learning it. I still see the ferry pulling in. I still see Doug on the gangway with his camera bag, in no hurry, already half in the zone before his feet touch the dock.