USA Independence
Day Special: American Beauty
My new-found land: Discover Manhattan's
hidden bars and New Englands
shopping secrets. Daring to explore Los Angleses on foot and visiting a shrine
to the Deep South's great romantic heronine.
By Jeremy Atiyah
Published: 30 June 2002
When it comes to
San Francisco,
Americans are unanimous. It is urbanity itself. It is handsome, worldly,
cosmopolitan, cool and sophisticated. With those precipitous streets and
terraced houses, those trams, bridges and ocean views, it effortlessly
transcends all other world cities. The residents of
San
Francisco, according to this important sub-clause in
the American dream, are uniquely fortunate, liberal and civilised human beings,
enjoying the best music, art, food, wine (and real estate prices) on the
planet.
A miracle? It seems like it, when you consider that most of
San
Francisco was built in a scrambling hurry, by people
who had just arrived from the Wild West. I'm here on a fresh sunny day, in
shirtsleeves, eating elegantly on a pavement, being served by a waitress who
probably has a PhD from
Berkeley.
The notion that this lightly grilled tuna and that glass of chardonnay owe
anything to the gun-toting, railway-building, Indian-killing,
racoon-hat-wearing men of the prairies is clearly an absurdity. This city must
have other origins. No citizen of
Europe need find these
hard to discern.
There is no mystery about this. After all, Europeans colonised this coast
before the Americans did. Nor did it happen very long ago. As recently as
6 November 1769, in fact, did Gaspar
de Portola of
Spain
find himself looking down from a neighbouring hilltop on to a bay the size of
an inland sea. "We halted," he later recalled, of that blessed
discovery, "in a level place, thickly grown with oak trees, having many
lagoons and swamps."
He and his men spent the subsequent night encamped, surrounded by reeds,
brambles and roses. And the next day in the morning they were sensible enough
to annex this goodly harbour for
Spain.
They did so by erecting a cross on the southern side of its entrance – an
entrance that would later become known as the
Golden Gate.
Which is where I am now, on a warm afternoon, looking at clipped lawns and
trees and American flags and redbrick houses. Before being designated as
parkland in 1994, this area was one of the most scenic army stations in the
United
States, but San Franciscans have only ever
called it the Presidio.
Because here it is, right beneath these manicured lawns and pavements and
shiny cars: the foundations of the Presidio itself, that is to say, of
Spain's
northernmost garrison in the
New World. In 1993,
archaeologists unearthed the remains of 5ft-thick adobe walls. I call it the
proof, if any were needed, that
San Francisco
does have a history pre-dating Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. The British
too were here. Their first ship to enter
San Francisco
– under George Vancouver – arrived in the autumn of 1792. After waking up on
his first morning to catch a pleasingly English glimpse of cattle and sheep
grazing, Vancouver himself opined that this was "as fine a port as the
world affords".
Not that the Spanish Presidio amounted to much back then. "What was
pompously called by this name, had but a mean appearance," scoffed
Vancouver's
botanist, later. And Vancouver himself admitted that he had been expecting an
actual city, before instead being shown "a square area, 200 yards in
length, enclosed by a mud wall and resembling a pound for cattle".
In fact the original Spanish Presidio contained a church, royal offices,
warehouses, a guardhouse and houses for soldiers and settlers. But the
buildings and furniture, being "of the rudest fashion and of the meanest
kind", hardly accorded with the ideas conceived by thrusting British
explorers, "of the sumptuous manner in which the Spaniards live on this
side of the globe". And it was laughably ill-defended. In short,
summarised
Vancouver, "instead
of finding a country tolerably well inhabited and far advanced in cultivation
... there is not an object to indicate the most remote connection with any
civilised nation". I just wish he had known what history had in store.
What place has changed so much, so quickly, as
California
in the past 200 years?
In
Vancouver's day, even places
such as the pueblo of
San Jose, on
the southern fringe of
San Francisco Bay,
or
Los Angeles further down towards
Mexico,
contained only 100 or 200 people, and otherwise comprised fruit trees, vines
and gardens. George Vancouver had little clue that this coast would soon become
the economic and cultural juggernaut of the world, home to beatniks, hippies,
gays and dotcom millionaires. From where I am standing, I see the massive red
supports of the
Golden Gate Bridge;
joggers in designer apparel padding the shoreline; vast highways funnelling distant
traffic; aeroplanes cruising the skies; the Transamerica Pyramid twinkling from
downtown. Everything around me has been imported, assembled, collected and
constructed –in almost no time at all. Not even the natural environment seems
to have been exempt from this process. Now it is wooded, but none of these
grand old eucalyptus, cypress or pine trees turns out to be indigenous. When
the Spanish arrived 200 years ago they found the shore overlaid by sand dunes,
with grass and a few oak trees dotting the edges. Marshes along the shore
attracted seagulls and pelicans, a few deer and the odd mountain lion or
grizzly bear. Visitors described the land south of the
Golden Gate
as windswept and barren. Could a visitor from the 1790s, I ask myself,
recognise anything of the modern city at all?
As if in answer, a bank of ocean cloud suddenly blots out the sunshine.
Perhaps this is the one point of continuity. The notoriously clammy and
bone-chilling coastal fog of the San Franciscan summer.
It was certainly the fog that drove most of the Spanish settlers inland. I
already know where they ended up: not here by the Presidio, but a couple of
miles away, across the peninsula, where the weather was better, at the Mission
Dolores. And this is where I am going now.
The mission, alongside the Presidio, represented the other essential pillar
of the Spanish occupation of
California.
Its function was to house monks, whose task was to convert native Americans up
and down this coast. I am delighted to note that the relevant district of San
Francisco still goes by the name of
Mission.
I'll get there from the Presidio by bus. Two centuries ago, travellers covered
the same ground on horseback.
The journey, either way, takes around an hour, though for
Vancouver
the ride "was rendered unpleasant, by the soil being very loose and sandy,
and by the road being much incommoded with low grovelling bushes".
According to a Russian visitor, "Above half the road was sandy and
mountainous. Only a few small shrubs here and there diversified the barren
hills." Those barren hills, of course, now go by such names as Pacific
Heights, Nob Hill and the Haight, and are best crossed by cable car.
Meanwhile, I'm reaching the Mission Dolores. Stepping inside the chapel I
confess to intense feelings of disorientation. Is this the same land that has
given the world
Hollywood and the
silicon chip? It turns out, in fact, that the Spanish missionaries had an
excellent sense of timing: they reached this spot in the week in which American
Independence was being declared on the other side of the continent. Today, the
thick, whitewashed walls and heavy roof tiles of
San
Francisco's first building still present a startling
image of an alternative
America.
Its cool floor tiles, saints, candles and Mexican altars astonish me as they
astonished George Vancouver 210 years ago. He was dumbfounded by "its
magnitude, architecture and internal decorations"; I'm dumbfounded that it
exists at all.
And there's more. Later, from 18th-century drawings inside the mission
buildings, I will see how this chapel once overlooked meandering streams,
hills, Indian reed huts, and a scattering of animals at pasture. I look again,
and gulp. Right outside this building, at pavement tables, people are consuming
cranberry juice and bagels with smoked salmon for breakfast. Here in the gloom
I am peering at sketches of Indians emerging from the reeds, handing gifts of
fish and acorns to priests, with a hazy sun rising from behind the
Oakland
hills.
Whose vision of paradise is this? Not
Vancouver's.
In his mean-spirited view, the natives here were "a race of the most
miserable beings possessing the faculty of human reason, I ever saw". They
were "ill-made" and their "ugly" faces presented a
"dull, heavy and stupid countenance". Their houses were "abominably
infested with every kind of filth and nastiness".
But by most other accounts the Spanish monks and Indian hunter-gatherers of
San
Francisco lived agreeably together, off Mexican corn
and chillis and native acorns and fish. A German naturalist who visited in 1806
was amazed to note that the Indian converts "three times a day ... get a
measure of soup of meat, pulse and vegetables, about three English pints in
size". And he himself did even better, stuffing himself on a "dinner
of soup, roasted fowls, leg of mutton, vegetables salad, pastry, preserved
fruit". The wine and tea – regrettably – were only of middling quality,
but that was compensated for "by super-excellent chocolate".
Such were the charms of Spanish California. Don't expect any drama to this
story, though: we know how it ended. After its first 100 years, the Mission
Dolores was already ruinous and crumbling, overgrown with fig trees and wild
flowers. Today, I find its cemetery in a ramshackle state, with roses and
lupins sprouting in the long grass, amid stones marking the graves of Italian,
Irish and English, as well as Spanish, Catholics. I pause at the forgotten
obelisk of Don Luis Antonio Arguello, "the first governor of Mexican
California", then step outside to find a bearded dropout with a
supermarket trolley, flogging a spare tyre, a pot plant and a pile of
pamphlets. "And," he exclaims to me, lifting out a polystyrene box,
"the most beautiful mould of Jesus I've ever seen. Wanna look?"
No thanks, I tell him, speeding up to overtake. Yes, the enterprising
Americans got here eventually. It was they who built this impossibly
picturesque city, after all, competing to set up farms, chop down trees, build
sawmills, open workshops and pan for gold – but without ever quite forgetting
the spirit of the place.
Or so it seems to me. And with this in mind, I decide to stop at one of
those pavement cafés to order a dish of angel-hair pasta with sun-dried
tomatoes and fresh basil. Over dinner, at sunset by the old Spanish Mission, I
will take time to reflect a little more on the origins of the world's most
wonderful city.
The Facts
Getting there
Jeremy Atiyah flew courtesy of American Airlines (0845 606 0461;
www.aa.com). Return fares in July from
Heathrow via JFK in
New York cost
£565 including tax. The fare drops to £498.20 in September. Cheaper fares may
be available through discount agents such as Quest Worldwide (020-8546 6000).
Being there
Jeremy Atiyah stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel on
Market
Street near
Union Square.
Double rooms at the hotel cost from $469 (£321) per room per night.
A special introductory rate of $369 is available from now until 31 December,
subject to availability (00800 6488 6488;
www.fourseasons.com).
A cheaper alternative could be the atmospheric Archbishop's Mansion (001 415
563 7872;
www.thearchbishopsmansion.com)
which overlooks the historic
Alamo Square,
home to
San Francisco's famous
"painted ladies", terraces of brightly decorated Victorian houses.
Double rooms start from $195. Visit
www.visitcalifornia.com for more information.
