San Francisco's Hit and Miss

A few good buildings and a monstrosity.

The fog lingered in thick wisps, blue sky flickering by only occasionally in the Marina District that August morning. The Chestnut Street Starbucks served lattes to the 30-something career women who'd taken a breeding sabbatical, the parade of strollers unceasing during the hours before noon. In the bars, grizzled old-school San Franciscans nursed their second and third drinks, interrupted by trips outside for a smoke.

We continued west to the Presidio, entering the former military reservation through the imposing gate and headed toward where the Letterman Army Hospital once stood. We had a long history there, at the Presidio and the hospital, and we can never enter those wooded environs without experiencing a flood of memories from throughout our past.

We visited an older brother at his barracks on the parade grounds at the Main Post once back in the '50s, seeing for the first time how soldiers lived, a foretaste of our own eventual fate. Just up the hill from the lines of big brick buildings is the Officers' Club, perhaps the oldest building in San Francisco, and General Vallejo's first significant command; from there he went on to establish Mexican influence in the north bay counties. We grew up just blocks from the forested military reservation, and the history it represented added extra allure to the games of army we played, already considerable because we could fight our battles from genuine concrete bunkers, by then abandoned shells overlooking the ocean.

Letterman Army Hospital didn't enter our awareness for a couple of decades, not until we had a parachuting accident and landed there after the initial incident; over the ensuing weeks we got to know it better as we visited for treatment and checkups. The building showed little art in its construction; it stood as a bland agglomeration of rectangles stuck next to each other, all painted an institutional cream color.

For several years we heard of the plans to replace the hospital with a facility for filmmaker George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic enterprise, and we casually followed reports of the progress. Now it was done, and the finished project awaited.

One of the great disappointments experienced by some natives of San Francisco is to note how much of the old city has been destroyed on behalf of big, crackpot devdelopment projects. The Yerba Buena Center and Museum of Modern Art displaced a wonderful Skid Row, full of small, old hotels, bars, coffee shops and a thriving district that catered to the underemployed and the down on their luck. Casual observers regarded it as a mere slum, but it provided the old and poor of San Francisco a community of their own, where they could feel welcome and find people of like persuasion, a cheap room, a filling meal and shop keepers who'd give them a few bucks credit. It served residents on the bottom rungs of the societal ladder, providing a means to climb back up after they hit bottom. Now, in its absence, they stay there, unable to make the lengthy leap back toward stable respectability. There are no rungs at the bottom of the ladder anymore, and what passes for a social safety net just as often works as a snare, trapping unfortunates in a cycle of begging for handouts when before they had at least the ability to fend for themselves on their own terms. They razed the district in the '80s, uprooting thousands, but even worse, destroying the cheap housing, and creating a homeless population that has taken over upper Market Street and turned it into a scary place of boarded-up storefronts reeking of urine. Some urban development.

Letterman Army Hospital could not have been described as a lovely building, and it had, after all, been long vacant; there was nothing much to lose, but that's no guarantee that what replaced it would be worth much either. So the pleasant surprise that greeted us was wholly unexpected.

The series of big buildings stand four or five stories high, presenting broad, massive faces a half block long or so, consistent with the scale of the lines of the great barracks surrounding the Main Post parade grounds. Rather than replicate the old, the architects evoked it in the new structures, creating the sense of a pleasing modern evolution solidly grounded on the local tradition. Constructed of concrete and brick, they lack the detailing common to many of the army buildings of the era, consisting of raised brick or molded concrete courses, and they certainly could have achieved the look with little added trouble had they desired. Just the same, they're a pleasing addition to the Presidio, and the landscaping still underway is integrating it with the rest of the old post with walkways, waterways and grassy expanses.

The new De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park provides a different approach, repudiating not only anything resembling tradition, but its site too.

As with the Presidio, we passed countless hours in Golden Park as well, most memorably on Sunday mornings after church at Star of the Sea, some blocks away at Eighth and Geary. When the family was especially well-dressed, we'd end up taking pictures in front of the white, wrought iron conservatory, before going to the museum and getting lost in its curiosities.

At that time, it was a genuine city museum, containing a random collection of artifacts reflecting the myriad tastes of several decades. In addition to the old paintings and reconstructed European interiors, the museum contained a section devoted to the Pacific Rim, featuring Polynesian culture and San Francisco's unique role in the development of trade and diplomacy with the great, watery West. And we remember most fondly an old tank, the significance of which now evades us. It was a fun, quirky museum that seemed to reflect the city that built it.

The old De Young was a leftover from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition--we believe so, anyway--and it consisted of a central tower of squareish floor plan, tapering towards its upper stories and topped with a pyramid roof; rectangular wings on both sides completed the front view. Originally, a mass of architectural detailing graced it, but a later modification removed it all. This last configuration wore a coat of mauvish paint. A pond greeted you before the museum steps, a bronze of a boy aborigine seated at its edge; he played a flute as a bronze mountain lion looked on.

Across the great central courtyard sat the natural history museum, a building of severe classical lines; the city fathers defaced that in the '60s with an insulting facade reflecting the bland architecture of the day. At the top of the square sat the baroque bandstand, so far left alone. Even though the buildings did not strictly match, they complemented each other well in their old diversity before the city program of vandalism commenced.

Trips to the museum were often accompanied by old-fashion concerts, John Phillip Souza numbers constant favorites. Well into the '50s it was still possible to partake of the sort of American traditional Sunday trip to the park known to San Franciscans back to the turn of the 20th Century,

But world-classitis attacked the museum in the '80s, the age of the blockbuster traveling show. No city of pretension could bear to lack all the identical elements of every other city of pretension, and local individuality gave way to the desire to have all the same old art and artists everyone else in the world aspired to.

San Francisco had its own pioneering art tradition, however, in the literal and figurative senses. By the time the French Impressionists were first making their ways out to the countryside, artists of every sort were discovering the unique natural grandeur of California, and painting it. Albert Bierstadt, of the Hudson River school, painted the state, and Virgil Williams and William Keith captured much of it in their own impressionistic styles, at roughly the same time the French developed theirs. One could make the case that their brooding treatment of the subjects was even more modern in sensibility; contemporary painters who replicate the French modes are considered cornily derivative, while anything that looks like Williams or Keith is beyond dismissive critique.

And the greatest photographers from around the world came here as well, documenting the many fantastic phenomena while advancing their art and its technology; Eadweard Muybridge essentially built the foundations of motion picture photography here.

You'd never know any of that, though, and we one day overheard a gallery owner on Jackson Street bitterly denounce the disregard shown in San Francisco for its local traditions and treasures, the aping of international museum trends blinding them to the wonders in their midst. It seems that none of San Francisco's museums ever did a show of the local giants so enamored are they of the same old stuff you can see anywhere.

The repudiation will be complete now with the new De Young, the exterior of which we finally went to see after we left the Presidio. It is, in some respect, a masterpiece, in much the same way Charles Baudelaire's Fleur de Mal is a masterpiece. Baudelaire, of course, introduced the modern sensibility to art with that book of poetry, Flowers of Evil. We've barely sampled the book in translation, but the first poem, if memory serves, is about the hate a mother feels for her child. But it's so beautifully written and evocative it almost makes sense. We can thank Baudelaire for the idea that art should not necessarily express the beauty of life, but rather emphasize the ugly as well. Revolutionary at the time, the idea seems to have swept away all before it.

Sheathed in copper sheets with two-inch holes separated by an inch of space, the structure squats low, a great flat slab with dark openings for entrances. The grim form is broken by a large, asymetrical tower of such fascinating aspect that you can't really grasp its actual shape, and as your perspective changes, so does the tower. From one angle, it has a large top and narrow bottom; from another, a narrow top and large bottom. And while walking along and watching the gradual transition, the shift is so subtle that it seems almost to be magical.

We happened to encounter an architect and a builder who had made a pilgrimage similar to our own; we shared opinions. The architect agreed that it did look like an aircraft carrier, as others had suggested, while the builder just shook his head; they detested it, characterizing it as ugly, forbidding and inappropriate to the surrounding space.

We couldn't have agreed more, but our feelings were mixed, ambiguous. As we said, it is some sort of masterpiece, and we believe the Swiss architects are justly proud of their work if their intention was to create a great, new aesthetic statement as building.

But we hate it with all our being, despite our fascination. It's a structure one might have expected to see had the Nazis won the war and had their way with the world; it looks like nothing so much as the new face of an Auschwitz, a building that screams fear, death and destruction, a building that could process people by the thousands, turning flesh and blood into smoke and ash with maximum efficiency. The entrances evoke the holes to hell, a great inferno turned loose on the heavens through that great tower, the perfect modern smokestack.

It's a negation of everything we know as Western Civilization, and we doubt that the curators would be bothered by that at all, given current avant garde sensibilities. Good is bad, beautiful is ugly and honored tradition is utterly despicable. It is the true expression, in every way, of the New San Francisco.

Charles Baudelaire would love it.

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