I’ve been doing some reading on San Francisco geography, as well—soon to be supplemented by reading on LA geography—to get a sense of how the city (and Bay Area more generally) is organized and try to fit that in with what I know of the California Forteans. And some interesting patterns have emerged.
Berkeley geographer Richard A. Walker recognizes four residential types. He writes, “This civic landscape springs from the distinctive class, political and cultural nature of the Bay Area—relatively wealthy, petty bourgeois, bohemian, cosmopolitan, labourist, environmentalist, egalitarian, anti-modern—and embodies the contradictions of the libertine capitalism that is a local trademark.”
The first, and most iconic, category is the Victorian homes. These resulted from the work of middle class reformers in the 1850s and 1860s, who saw San Francisco as too raw, too libertine, and sought to impose a more appropriate look for the city. These were not the “modern” buildings of, say, Los Angeles. Rather they were ornate and gaudy—Thorstein Veblen was thinking of them when he was at Stanford and writing the Theory of the Leisure Class. Many of these were burned in 1906. But the rich never abandoned downtown San Francisco as they did so many other inner cities, and so they remained as a tribute to the class identity of the nineteenth century rich.
A second category is what Walker calls ecotopian suburbs. This is composed of the mock cabin and craftsman houses tucked into hills and surrounded by oaks, redwoods, and eucalyptus. These areas, although they look natural, were made: the coast range of the Bay Area was mostly grass, and so homeowners and developers had to plant all the trees, as well as building the houses. The inspiration for these places, Walker argues, is Yosemite and Big Trees. Ecotopian suburbs can be found in parts of San Francisco, in the Oakland Hills, in Berkeley, and Marin. These are the homesteads of the libertarian, bohemian middle class. They combine mysticism, Romanticism, and Masonic ideals and stand in opposition to LA, once again: there the wave of modernist architecture expunged the arts and crafts movement. In San Francisco, there was a conscious anti-modern movement.
A number of Bay Area Forteans are associated with this ideal. Polly Lamb lived in Oakland; Anthony Boucher was in Berkeley—both in just these kinds of spots. Most prominent, probably, is George Haas. He idealized Big Trees State Park. He built organic gardens around his Oakland home. There were certainly anti-modern strains to his thought.
The third category is the suburb proper. Oakland does not fit into this category because in the late nineteenth century that city wrestled with San Francisco for industrial dominance, and soon developed its own urban infrastructure: it was its own city, taking advantage of new sectors that developed after San Francisco came of age, especially food canning, auto building, and electrical manufacturing.
San Francisco did try to push South but was stopped by the presence of many elite estates in San Mateo County, which prevented the movement. This fits into the Fortean story, too, for their developed a Bohemian connection between the Bay Area and less developed places to the south, especially Carmel, but also San Mateo. These places retained their Bohemian, mystical vibe. Marin did, too: remember, the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t completed until 1936, and for many seemed unnecessary.
Instead, development marched East, and the Bay Area did well: even as San Francisco’s manufacturing declined, around 1910 the region was only outpaced by Detroit (cars!), Cleveland, and its competitor to the South, LA. Again, new sectors allowed the outlying areas to compete with their older neighbors, food processing, oil, and chemical work, especially. Good wages and an extensive trolley system allowed workers to move East and North into new tract homes.
Past Alameda county, Contra Costa county developed its suburbs more slowly. Places like Hercules and Rodeo were essentially company towns, with workers shacking up on business property. (San Francisco financiers had a level of control this far out that they did not have in the East Bay, as much of the money for Contra Costa’s development came from the City.) To tie in with the earlier connections, these suburbs also came to be supported by defense procurements as fortress California also built out in this direction. But there is still some connection to Forteana even here, as Jack Parsons, the occultist rocket-developer from LA came north to work at Hercules Powder Company.
The fourth category is multi-family housing. The university in Berkeley and the industrial areas in Oakland—especially with the coming of World War II—supported such dwellings, but the center for this residential type was San Francisco. Apartments and residential hotels came into their own during the 1890s—before that, the need was taken care of by boarding out rooms.
The small rooms pushed people into the community: in places dominated by apartment buildings and residential hotels there was more life on the streets. People ate out. They went to coffee. They went to movies. These zones of dense dwelling, cheap entertainment, and public life are where experimental lifestyles took root. This was the natural habitat of Bohemians, beats, hippes, gays: political rebels and public intellectuals. (San Francisco was rich in such areas and so has a rich history of experimentation, with the Barbary Coast of the mid-nineteetnh century, the turn of the century Bohemianism, as well as the more obvious later manifestations.)
The Fortean connections here are obvious. Miriam Alan de Ford lived in a hotel for most of her life, within walking distance of the library (urbanism made Forteanism easier, as there were vast collections of facts to study). One thinks, also, of Kenneth MacNichol with his writers studio in the heart of one of San Francisco’s art districts, and Robert Barbour Johnson living in a little apartment and making appearances at the literary hotspots—indeed, it was this scene that drew him to San Francisco in the first place.
With the depression, and the drying up of investments, these areas began to decline. Jobs moved to the suburbs, leaving the area old, infirm, and with decreasing political clout. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the rich began to see these areas as blights in need of redevelopment. And so there were fights between them and the remaining rebels, especially the beats in North Beach—what Kenneth Starr says was a battle between Provincials and Baghdadders. Some of Old San Francisco was saved, and freeways were not allowed to cut through the old downtown. But, the most iconic Bohemian place was lost. This was the Montgomery Block, a warren of rooms housed by artists and such. (Likely, a number of the people who attended MacNichols’s Fortean meetings lived here.) In 1959, the structure—which had survived the 1906 fire—was bulldozed for a parking lot. Later, the Trans-America Building was built there.
Berkeley geographer Richard A. Walker recognizes four residential types. He writes, “This civic landscape springs from the distinctive class, political and cultural nature of the Bay Area—relatively wealthy, petty bourgeois, bohemian, cosmopolitan, labourist, environmentalist, egalitarian, anti-modern—and embodies the contradictions of the libertine capitalism that is a local trademark.”
The first, and most iconic, category is the Victorian homes. These resulted from the work of middle class reformers in the 1850s and 1860s, who saw San Francisco as too raw, too libertine, and sought to impose a more appropriate look for the city. These were not the “modern” buildings of, say, Los Angeles. Rather they were ornate and gaudy—Thorstein Veblen was thinking of them when he was at Stanford and writing the Theory of the Leisure Class. Many of these were burned in 1906. But the rich never abandoned downtown San Francisco as they did so many other inner cities, and so they remained as a tribute to the class identity of the nineteenth century rich.
A second category is what Walker calls ecotopian suburbs. This is composed of the mock cabin and craftsman houses tucked into hills and surrounded by oaks, redwoods, and eucalyptus. These areas, although they look natural, were made: the coast range of the Bay Area was mostly grass, and so homeowners and developers had to plant all the trees, as well as building the houses. The inspiration for these places, Walker argues, is Yosemite and Big Trees. Ecotopian suburbs can be found in parts of San Francisco, in the Oakland Hills, in Berkeley, and Marin. These are the homesteads of the libertarian, bohemian middle class. They combine mysticism, Romanticism, and Masonic ideals and stand in opposition to LA, once again: there the wave of modernist architecture expunged the arts and crafts movement. In San Francisco, there was a conscious anti-modern movement.
A number of Bay Area Forteans are associated with this ideal. Polly Lamb lived in Oakland; Anthony Boucher was in Berkeley—both in just these kinds of spots. Most prominent, probably, is George Haas. He idealized Big Trees State Park. He built organic gardens around his Oakland home. There were certainly anti-modern strains to his thought.
The third category is the suburb proper. Oakland does not fit into this category because in the late nineteenth century that city wrestled with San Francisco for industrial dominance, and soon developed its own urban infrastructure: it was its own city, taking advantage of new sectors that developed after San Francisco came of age, especially food canning, auto building, and electrical manufacturing.
San Francisco did try to push South but was stopped by the presence of many elite estates in San Mateo County, which prevented the movement. This fits into the Fortean story, too, for their developed a Bohemian connection between the Bay Area and less developed places to the south, especially Carmel, but also San Mateo. These places retained their Bohemian, mystical vibe. Marin did, too: remember, the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t completed until 1936, and for many seemed unnecessary.
Instead, development marched East, and the Bay Area did well: even as San Francisco’s manufacturing declined, around 1910 the region was only outpaced by Detroit (cars!), Cleveland, and its competitor to the South, LA. Again, new sectors allowed the outlying areas to compete with their older neighbors, food processing, oil, and chemical work, especially. Good wages and an extensive trolley system allowed workers to move East and North into new tract homes.
Past Alameda county, Contra Costa county developed its suburbs more slowly. Places like Hercules and Rodeo were essentially company towns, with workers shacking up on business property. (San Francisco financiers had a level of control this far out that they did not have in the East Bay, as much of the money for Contra Costa’s development came from the City.) To tie in with the earlier connections, these suburbs also came to be supported by defense procurements as fortress California also built out in this direction. But there is still some connection to Forteana even here, as Jack Parsons, the occultist rocket-developer from LA came north to work at Hercules Powder Company.
The fourth category is multi-family housing. The university in Berkeley and the industrial areas in Oakland—especially with the coming of World War II—supported such dwellings, but the center for this residential type was San Francisco. Apartments and residential hotels came into their own during the 1890s—before that, the need was taken care of by boarding out rooms.
The small rooms pushed people into the community: in places dominated by apartment buildings and residential hotels there was more life on the streets. People ate out. They went to coffee. They went to movies. These zones of dense dwelling, cheap entertainment, and public life are where experimental lifestyles took root. This was the natural habitat of Bohemians, beats, hippes, gays: political rebels and public intellectuals. (San Francisco was rich in such areas and so has a rich history of experimentation, with the Barbary Coast of the mid-nineteetnh century, the turn of the century Bohemianism, as well as the more obvious later manifestations.)
The Fortean connections here are obvious. Miriam Alan de Ford lived in a hotel for most of her life, within walking distance of the library (urbanism made Forteanism easier, as there were vast collections of facts to study). One thinks, also, of Kenneth MacNichol with his writers studio in the heart of one of San Francisco’s art districts, and Robert Barbour Johnson living in a little apartment and making appearances at the literary hotspots—indeed, it was this scene that drew him to San Francisco in the first place.
With the depression, and the drying up of investments, these areas began to decline. Jobs moved to the suburbs, leaving the area old, infirm, and with decreasing political clout. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the rich began to see these areas as blights in need of redevelopment. And so there were fights between them and the remaining rebels, especially the beats in North Beach—what Kenneth Starr says was a battle between Provincials and Baghdadders. Some of Old San Francisco was saved, and freeways were not allowed to cut through the old downtown. But, the most iconic Bohemian place was lost. This was the Montgomery Block, a warren of rooms housed by artists and such. (Likely, a number of the people who attended MacNichols’s Fortean meetings lived here.) In 1959, the structure—which had survived the 1906 fire—was bulldozed for a parking lot. Later, the Trans-America Building was built there.
