Mascarons of New York, San Francisco Elegy

 

Dis is gonna hoyt!

Funny how six years in New York gave me very little appreciation of its architecture--besides that it occurred on a grand scale and that there was a lot of it. The day-to-day grind of living and working in the city partly explains this. When it's freezing rain or 90 degrees with 90 percent humidity, and you're trying not to get hit by a cab or trampled by crowds of shoppers, it's hard to notice the small gems that adorn the buildings. That and much of the city is hidden by scaffolding most of the time; when it goes up, it never seems to come down. You might notice some grandeur in off-moments, like the tops of the skyscrapers that robber-barons adorned for each others' envy, or the brick and masonry brownstones of lower Manhattan. But we lived in a "charming" 19th century walkup on Leroy Street, up four flights of crooked stairs, with paper thin walls, and slanting floors. Once a rainstorm knocked out the phone service to the building. After a while, it gets harder and harder to admire the little details.

Sugar, sweating it out last year on the steps of our ancient homestead in the West Village, NYC.

I enjoyed New York the most whenever we got out-of-town visitors, which allowed me to see the city through the eyes of a tourist. So last month when we returned to do some visa paperwork that had to be physically completed from within the US--in a shabby move typical of immigration bureaucracies worldwide--I was delighted to have the chance to take in a bit more of the style and care that once characterized the city's architecture. Maybe living in Paris for a year had also made me more attuned to paying closer attention. 

A West Village green man.

Several "exotics" adorn the 1912 Woolworth building, Tribeca, NYC.

Before leaving for New York, I made a mental inventory of things to compare to Paris. For example:

• Does New York have as many very-old people walking around town? Life expectancy in France is 82 years, compared to 78 in the US. The gap in healthy life expectancy is even wider; Americans start experiencing substantial declines in their functioning at an average of age 66 compared to 72 in France.

• What's the youngest age that you might see a kid riding the subway or walking the streets without any adult supervision? Kids in Paris seem to have the same kind of independence we enjoyed as suburban US kids in the 1970s. I've seen kids about 10 years old riding the Metro alone, and even younger ones walking to school and to stores on their own--unheard of today in the US, and probably a crime in some places.

• How much dog shit is on the sidewalks?

• Does everyone smoke?

When I got to New York, it occurred to me instantly that I needn't have bothered. The adage holds true: at some point, quantitative differences--in the scale of the buildings, the number of people, the intensity of the pace--themselves become qualitative differences. For the most part, a compare and contrast exercise misses the point (but no, there is relatively little dog shit on Manhattan sidewalks; Paris is in a league of its own on that measure). But also, in a real way, I'm different in New York than I am in Paris simply because I speak the principal language and pretty much understand the place as a former resident and commuting drudge.

The more meaningful comparisons for me are between New York now and when I left it 20 years ago, and New York and San Francisco, which I left one year ago.

Overall, New York seems to be getting better and better in terms of efforts to improve the quality of life for the people who live there--an implicitly favorable comparison with Paris. Manhattan seemed cleaner than ever. Bike lanes were well-used by bikes rather than taxis and other driving scofflaws. Some of the streets in mid-town--including a section of Broadway--have been turned over to pedestrian thoroughfares, but I didn't notice as much gridlock and traffic chaos as I saw in my last pre-pandemic visit (probably in 2018). Restaurants have moved a lot of outdoor seating off of the sidewalks and into former-parking spaces, which has freed up a lot of space for people to either get by quickly or saunter casually without becoming instant irritants to one another. Neighborhood parks seemed to have plenty of seats and bistro tables for picnickers and lunch breakers, and the gardens and grassy areas provided some relief from the heat island effect of all the surrounding concrete.

Stuyvesant Square, Manhattan. A little of this goes a long way.

One of my favorite "new" areas was down by Hudson River Park Tribeca. There seemed to be a lot of new or revamped apartments in the neighborhood, which may or may not make it easier for some residents to find housing (New York real estate seems impervious to anything as basic as supply and demand). Best of all was the Pier 26 Tide Deck, which runs out into the Hudson and was designed to provide changing views of a salt water marsh below as it floods and drains with the daily tide cycle. It is a great place to take in a bit of nature as well as views of the lower Manhattan skyline, the Jersey City waterfront and the one of kind Lackawanna Station across the river in Hoboken.

The Financial District as seen from the Pier 26 Tide Deck.

We'll always have Hoboken.

No question, New York still has a lot of problems that won't be solved by creating spaces for what are basically leisure activities like sports, sitting in the park or strolling along the river. Street misery was definitely on display in the form of panhandling and rough sleeping in doorways and on sidewalks. The Lower East Side in particular seemed untouched by improvements, economic or cosmetic. In front of the Houston Street Whole Foods at East 1st, some people had spread out blankets and were selling food items such as boxed pasta, cans of vegetables and bags of rice--the type of items we recalled packing into delivery bags as Food Bank volunteers in San Francisco. We saw more than our share of rats, in places where times were hard and where the good times were rolling.

I also recognize that New Yorkers themselves may not see progress anywhere, particularly if they slog through their daily commutes on the decrepit, dirty subway system--still the best in the US, which would make it one of the worst in European cities large or small--and deal with infrastructure that is inadequate to the heatwaves and drenching storms that are becoming more intense and more common.

There are also people who revolt at the idea that a cleaner, safer New York is a better New York. These are the types of people who used to bemoan the "Disneyfication" of the city when I lived there, recalling wistfully the grindhouse scuzziness of places like Times Square with its picturesque hookers and street junkies. I think of these New Yorkers as afflicted by what I would call "42nd Street Syndrome." They were so traumatized by living through the 1970s and 80s that a generation later they had internalized desperation, poverty, crime and squalor and come to identify with the grifters, pimps, muggers, drug dealers, criminal landlords, rapacious real estate developers and other predators who made daily life a living hell for so many. Either that, or they were sociopaths who thought that others' suffering added interesting color to their own lives, or felt that it was somehow an unfortunate but necessary ingredient to the era's authentic musical, cinematic, and artistic breakthroughs.

Which brings me to San Francisco which I still consider my hometown, at least for now.

Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Sadly, you can't choose only one memory.

As much as I enjoyed visiting New York again, the progress I saw there sadly brought to mind how much San Francisco has been going backwards since I first returned in 2003. Even before the pandemic decimated the business climate of the Financial District, huge swaths of the city seemed to be spinning out of anyone's control. Entire blocks around San Francisco State University and Lake Merced had become permanent encampments of tents, RVs, vans, and other vehicles--many of which looked non-operational. Piles of garbage and discarded household items filled in the spaces between these makeshift living units. From my downtown office at 2nd and Market Streets, I once watched four cops form a haphazard cordon around a sheeted body that was slumped against a building across the street. At least one pedestrian slipped between them without apparently noticing the dead person or even looking up from their phone at all. There was a woman in the neighborhood who periodically would have psychotic episodes. They began as shrieking fits and progressed to throwing herself to the ground and up against the buildings, and, eventually into traffic. I could hear her screams from up in my office on the eighth floor. Everyone on the block could. On one occasion, a passing bicyclist put himself between a speeding Muni bus and her body splayed across Market Street. On another occasion, a policewoman put a spit mask over the handcuffed woman's head and waited at least a half hour before an ambulance arrived. The next week, she was out screaming in the streets again. This went on for several years.

This degree of street misery in San Francisco was an everyday occurrence. At its most innocuous, you couldn't avoid people sleeping on the streets anywhere in the city. Each day I'd see at least one apparent psychotic episode on my mile walk to and from the office. There was shit and piss all over the sidewalks downtown--not necessarily from dogs. It was widely known that the BART station escalators would get so encrusted with fecal matter that they would need to be taken out of commission. When BART--a sick joke of a "transit" system that runs down exactly one street within the city--was running, it was often delayed by "police activity" or "medical emergencies." This rarely seems to happen in Paris which has more people and a much more extensive Metro system. If you chose to drive in San Francisco instead (and there was little other choice), you had to deal with crumbling asphalt and streets that were never resurfaced after being dug up for PG&E or sewer work. 

I can't even guess at how such a prosperous city fell into such deep and thorough disarray. Citing "high real estate prices" just replaces one question with a spool of others. And I certainly don't know how it will dig itself out, if at all. No one in San Francisco wants a decaying infrastructure, filth and desperate street poverty--the unhoused people certainly don't, but neither does the business community nor the wealthier residents.

But what other conclusion can you reach except that the people who are best positioned to put the city on a better path have tacitly deemed the situation acceptable? And how many of them can envision things spiraling into an economic and social collapse on the scale of rustbelt cities like Detroit? After all, in the midst of San Francisco's dissipation, there are still beautiful Victorian homes, 4-star hotels, and Michelin-starred restaurants. Tourists keep coming. Maybe the hope is that money will always flow into town for as long as there is a mild climate and scenic views of the Golden Gate. But in the coming years, climatic events will seriously test even that excuse for doing nothing.

As long as we have this, we don't have to think about that.

Then again, San Francisco has always been a boom and bust town. New York itself rebounded from its Five Points and Fort Apache eras, in fits and starts anyway. Paris emerged from the destruction of the Commune and occupation by the Nazis. San Francisco might get itself together again.

But as the business cliché goes, hope is not a plan. Betting that some generalized past will guide the future simply lacks imagination and engages in lazy, magical thinking. I'd like to hope that at the very least, maybe a great creative scene will emerge from San Francisco's ongoing chaos. But I still have enough imagination to consider that it probably won't.