Back To The Garden

I first went to San Francisco in February 1967, the winter before the Summer of Love. The trip was more pilgrimage than planned vacation. I had just turned 19, and was living on St. Mark's Place in New York City's East Village.

A few weeks before embarking on my journey westward, I'd been in the audience at the Fillmore East when Timothy Leary issued his psychedelic rallying cry, "Turn on, tune in, drop out!" Like someone swept away by religious fervor, I heard the call and followed. But after turning on and tuning in, I wasn't sure what to do next, so I set off to find the answer in the place where dropping out was invented.

As it happened, I only stayed for a couple of party-filled weeks (actually, it was one continuous party, interrupted by the occasional be-in in Golden Gate Park), crashing with people I had just met. But I fell in love--with brightly colored gingerbread houses, staggering vistas and a robin's egg-blue sky that licked the bay and gave off a diaphanous light unlike anything I'd ever seen in the bricked-in East. I promised myself that someday I would return for good.

It took seven years, one divorce, numerous pit stops (Boulder, Colo.; Topanga Canyon; British Columbia) and one small child finally to arrive at my destination. I was not disappointed. The San Francisco Bay Area was more than a breathtakingly beautiful place; it was a state of mind--the edge of the culture as well as the continent--that embraced the misfit, dreamer, bohemian, gay, artist, hippie, rabble-rouser types who had been flocking there in successive waves since the Gold Rush and in whose company I counted myself. My first digs were in a feminist communal household on Potrero Hill, where we shared meals, child care and feelings for a grand total of $500 a month rent, or $150 for my share. It was the perfect arrangement, allowing me to live well (with "vu") and follow my bliss as an actress and writer for a song. Practically everyone I knew was on a similar track. We felt smug and superior to our arty counterparts who were toughing it out in New York City.

"Generation after generation has repossessed San Francisco physically and imaginatively as the expression of their ideal life," says Kevin Starr, California state librarian and a fourth-generation San Franciscan. "In the '60s and '70s people saw San Francisco as an alternative to escape the competitiveness of American life. There was an enormous availability of housing stock. You could go out to the Castro or the Mission and find Victorians built for working-class people that are just stunning."

We had our cake and ate it too (at Chez Panisse, when we felt like splurging) without having to worry about such pesky grownup considerations as having a real job or buying real estate. This was still true in 1988, when I followed my new husband to New York and gave up a $600-a-month, shabby but charming three-bedroom Victorian flat in sunny Noe Valley. As the movers drove off with our belongings, I vowed--as I had back in 1967--to come back someday.

My son, Clay, now 29, has beaten me to it. After a few postcollege years in Boston, he hightailed it back to the only city in America he deems worth living in and found an affordable but tiny basement apartment before the rents went sky-high. But as my husband and I toy with the possibility of joining him there, it's becoming clear that the San Francisco we once knew is in peril of disappearing.

"This city is over!" shouts a character in City for Sale, a recent offering by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has been serving as the city's theatrical conscience since the 1960s. By all accounts there's been a war going on--between neighborhood preservationists and developers, between low-income artists and the dotcommers who've invaded their turf, between small businesses that can no longer afford skyrocketing rents and the chains, real estate offices and pricey boutiques that can. Says Mime Troupe playwright Joan Holden: "It's been a David-and-Goliath knock-down, drag-out fight--the people against city hall." In the November election, the battleground was competing ballot propositions. Prop L, advanced by artists and activists, would have protected artists' spaces from dotcom takeovers, while Mayor Willie Brown's Prop K would have set less stringent limits on new office development. Both propositions lost--L by a razor-thin margin. But the people may be gaining the upper hand. In December's district runoff elections, the 11-member board of supervisors swerved sharply to the left, upsetting the mayor's politically moderate, growth-friendly power base.

There's no question that the city's struggles are the result of a--until recently--booming economy, and in that respect San Francisco mirrors what's taking place in Austin, Seattle, New York and other cities that have benefited from a hefty infusion of cash: unprecedented housing prices, hellish traffic and a growing gap between the haves and have-nots. The difference in San Francisco--apart from its jewel-like beauty--may lie in its mythology.