San Francisco history – Scott Loftesness

The Proof of Concrete

I drive Interstate 280 up the San Francisco Peninsula for my book — a history of how the world’s most beautiful freeway got its route, the people who chose it, the fights they survived — and some mornings the frustration lands all at once: this road is proof that California used to know how to build things, and the proof is fifty years old. The concrete is cracked in places. It hasn’t buckled.

My state created a High-Speed Rail Authority in 1996. Voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds in 2008 for a system that would run San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and forty minutes. There is real construction in the Central Valley now — guideway, viaducts — and the track-laying is only now beginning. Thirty years in, about $15 billion spent, and no one has ridden a train.

Building was never easy. Interstate 280 went through two full-scale routing wars over the Crystal Springs watershed. Conservationists organized, filed, marched. Courts got involved. The fights were real and consequential, and the road got built anyway.

The difference isn’t that we used to agree. It’s that the system could decide. We used to argue about where the road should go. Now we argue about whether there should be a road.

What the builders had was an apparatus pointed at getting it done. The Collier-Burns Act of 1947 gave California gas-tax money of its own. The 1956 Interstate Act brought the federal 90/10 match. The Division of Highways had engineers — actual state employees who designed roads, not contractors managing consultants managing contractors. The same decade that created the Scenic Highway Program, protecting corridors like 280’s, was the decade that built the corridors. We could protect and build at once.

Then the layers accumulated. CEQA, signed in 1970, is a good law that became a litigation weapon — anyone with a lawyer can stall anything for years. Proposition 13 in 1978 blew up local government finance and pushed every decision upward into a state apparatus less and less capable of deciding. The highway department hollowed out; the engineering went to consultants. Each reform was defensible on its own terms. Together they built a machine whose product is process.

Fukuyama has a word for this: vetocracy. Ruled by veto. “The problem is,” as he puts it, “it’s also a check against good government.” He envies China’s bridges over interior gorges — not the system, the accomplishment. I don’t need to look to China. I can look at the reservoir stretch of 280, threading along the fault line, and see what my own state did when it still could.

I don’t want to romanticize it. Some of what stopped us was worth stopping. In 1959, after petitions signed by 30,000 San Franciscans, the Board of Supervisors canceled seven of ten planned freeways — including one that would have cut through Golden Gate Park — the first freeway revolt in American history. The Embarcadero Freeway got built anyway, a 1.2-mile double-decker stub that walled the city off from its own waterfront, and it stood for thirty-two years as a monument to a bad plan until the 1989 earthquake finished the argument. The people who stopped those roads were right. CEQA has blocked genuinely bad ideas. And 280 had advantages no modern project gets: a federal money waterfall, a weaker litigation environment, a public that mostly wanted the roads.

The tragedy isn’t that we listen more now. It’s that we can’t decide. A system that can hear every objection but resolve none of them isn’t more democratic than the old one. It’s just slower, until the slowness becomes the answer.

I keep coming back to my road. It exists because a state that wanted it found a way through the watersheds, the courtrooms, the opposition. Drive it today and the cut of the road along the hills is still beautiful. The question that won’t leave me alone: would we build it now? The honest answer is no.

The concrete is still there.

Remembering San Francisco’s KKSF

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.

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