Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

by Gary Kamiya

Cool, Gray City of Love brings together an exuberant combination of personal insight, deeply researched history, in-depth reporting, and lyrical prose to create an unparalleled portrait of San Francisco. Each of its 49 chapters explores a specific site or intersection in the city, from the mighty Golden Gate Bridge to the raunchy Tenderloin to the soaring sea cliffs at Land's End.

This unique approach captures the exhilarating experience of walking through San Francisco's sublime terrain while at the same time tying that experience to a history as rollicking and unpredictable as the city herself. From her absurd beginnings as the most distant and moth-eaten outpost of the world's most extensive empire to her instantaneous fame during the Gold Rush, from her apocalyptic destruction by earthquake and fire to her perennial embrace of rebels, dreamers, hedonists, and misfits of all stripes, the City by the Bay has always followed a trajectory as wildly independent as the untrammeled natural forces that created her.

This ambitious, eclectic, and beautifully written book draws on everything from on-the-ground reporting to obscure academic papers to the author's forty-year life in San Francisco to create a rich and insightful portrait of a magical corner of the world. Complete with hand-drawn maps of the 49 locations, this handsome package will sit comfortably on the short shelf of enduring books about places, alongside E. B. White's Here is New York, Jose Saramago's Journey to Portugal, and Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Travel, Essays, Cities, Book Club, Geography

385 pages, Hardcover

First published August 6, 2013

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Living in a city can be done in two ways; first, you can merely co-habitate with it. Sure, the city is part of your address and you can find the nearest grocery store, but that's about it. The other way? You don't just live in a city — you live in that city's community. Which way do you live in your city?

From the very first pages, Kamiya's love for the community of San Francisco sets the tone. San Francisco isn't just where he lives, it's an important part of who he is. As described in the introduction, Kamiya sets out almost on a whim to explore each square mile. His epic-scale exploration of a community isn't just the buildings, roads, and shores (though there's plenty of that!) — more importantly, it's the people, history, and cultural context that shape the places we visit every day.

While I was expecting something more block-by-block — I'm a literalist — the end result is richer and more stimulating. Kamiya provides a lively history of the city, each chapter tying events and historical figures to specific places and modern anecdotes. His own history in the city is scattered throughout, adding more personality and smoothing the tone. A handful of stories were weaker, generally those where Kamiya espoused his own views; however, Kamiya's beliefs are typical of the long-time San Francisco residents I know. In hindsight, perhaps the book was all the more valuable thanks to the flashes of local insight Kamiya includes.

I can't speak highly enough of this book for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of San Francisco. City-lovers across the globe may also be inspired in how they think about their own cities; if only every city had an introductory book of this caliber. If you want to live in a city's community — not just within the city limits — this is the book for you.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anybody who has talked to me about books in the last few weeks has heard me rave about "Cool Gray City of Love." This book has everything I've wanted from a San Francisco book in the last year. It's chock full of fascinating historical tidbits. It's also a veritable walking tour of the city. In fact, that's Kamiya's main conceit here. He set out to walk the whole city and write about his experience. Mission accomplished!

I try to avoid marring my books, but I couldn't resist dog-earring this one like crazy. It seemed every other page had some curious treasure I wanted to save. For example, the following passage depicts the hyper-inflation the Gold Rush brought to the city (comparisons to the current tech boom are apt):

"Rents and real estate prices were exorbitant. A shack with a primitive fireplace rented for $800 a month, a store for $3,000. A building on Portsmouth Square that before the Gold Rush had rented for $10 to $20 a month now rented for $75,000 a year. A lot on Portsmouth Square that sold for $16.50 in 1847 sold for $6,000 in late-spring 1848. Before the end of the year, it sold for $45,000."

IN MID-1800'S DOLLARS! I have trouble even fathoming what that must've been like. There's another anecdote that relates the cost of laundry. Apparently, it was cheaper to ship dirty clothes to Hawaii than it was to get them washed in SF, so most people (and it's important to note that the vast majority of the city's inhabitants at the time were young men—again apt comparisons) just bought new clothes and tossed the soiled garments onto the streets. I could go on, but you should just read the book.

It's not all phenomenal prose, though. Kamiya is a former newspaperman, and his prose sometimes dipped into the kind of civic boosterism I associate with someone like a Carl Hiaasen, only with markedly less cynicism. At one point when waxing poetic about the Golden Gate Bridge Kamiya writes: "So the bridge returns San Francisco to the comforting, pre-Copernican center of the universe." Still, I give it 5 stars because I can forgive a little purple prose—Kamiya's earned it: he's got deep roots in the city—and because I drank the Kool-Aid long ago.

If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews!

[Michelle Welch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I probably wouldn't have loved this book as much if I hadn't picked it up shortly before leaving on a trip to San Francisco. I didn't finish it before going, and only saw a fraction of the sites discussed. But the book gives such a wonderful view of the city - its neighborhoods, its history, even its geology - that I feel I now know it much better than I do.

The other thing that appealed to me so much was the author's literary bent. As a reformed English Lit snob, I'm all over this book's structure: numerous short essays that are about the author's insights and epiphanies as much as they are about locations in the city. It was a book that made me sigh at the end of every chapter, and eagerly count the days until I can go back.

[Linden · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is a Bay Area native, and knows a lot about the city's history. His writing style is friendly and inviting, whether he is telling us about the racism experienced by Blacks, Asians, and the natives that first inhabited the area, or parallel descriptions of the 1906 earthquake and his experience living through the 1989 quake. Recommended for anyone who enjoys history or who loves San Francisco.

[Steve Sarner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this book down yet it took me “forever” to read. Sound counterintuitive? Read on to see why.

First, I must disclose that I love this cool gray city so I am naturally biased about Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.

As soon as I saw the title I knew it was going to be about San Francisco. Then I saw it was, appropriately, 49 stories (views) by Gary Kamiya, co-founder of Salon.com.

That sealed the deal for me – it was a must read.

Second, I really enjoy history and particular history of great cities so I am further biased with my 5 star rating.

Each of the 49 stories is captivating and well written, however, if one is not interested in California history in general, or San Francisco in particular, the book may not be satisfying.

And that brings up an important point. While billed as a taste or views of various neighborhoods this is not a “travel guide” in any sense. The focus of the book is really on the history of this 7X7section of land. And a well-told history it is.

Ranging from when the Bay was a giant valley with mammoths and sabretooth cats and one could walk to the Farrallon Inlands (I never knew that) through the Spaniards and Russians missing the “Gate” for hundreds of years, Kamiya covers the gold rush, quake, war, beatniks, hippies and up to the tech “takeover” today.

Now, to the question on why it took me so long to finish the book. It’s similar to exploring San Francisco itself. It’s very easy to become distracted and lost in wishing to discover more. What kind of shops are down that strange Chinatown alley? Where does this path lead to in Fort Mason, an even better view? Kamiya kept leading me down new alleys and paths to discover in every chapter.

This started, appropriately, at the start. The book’s introduction is where I learned of the poem that inspired the title. Written in 1920, by George Sterling, a contemporary of Jack London and Ambrose Bierce he was an “original” Bohemian.

So I was curious to learn more about this George Sterling character. What are some of his other poems? And off I went in search of more info that lead to pathways of further discovery and more questions and deeper down the alley. The introduction is 3 ½ pages and it took me a week to get past it because I was curious about so much of its content and had to further research the people, period and places referenced.

And that was the start of a true reading adventure. Kamiya’s tales took me to prehistoric SF and “digging” deeper into the science of the geology of today’s town. Through the Native Americans and first new settlers and many other notable people in history there was a fun distraction with every page turn. The book also introduced me to the people many of our current day streets are named after, including Alfred Spear whose street I work on today. It also reveled the namesakes of many other well known places and events today, such as The Outside Lands festival.

If you are interested in the history of California, the Bay Area and especially San Francisco – this is a must read. It’s cool, I loved it and, no doubt, will enjoy it many times over as I gray.

[Helen]

I learned a lot from this book, but I definitely did not love it. Here's why:

1. Gary Kamiya relies too heavily on external, unrelated references to describe atmosphere. I feel I missed much of the mood of the book because of this.
2. Kamiya is good at the overarching, big-picture world view insightful conclusions we learned to do after every essay in high school. They're really beautiful individually, but as he does this at the conclusion of every one of his 49 chapters, it gets to be too much.
3. Kamiya is fond of using the same words and phrases repetitively, especially when he slips into deep nostalgia. It gets really boring to read. In general his style is so slow I ended up having to skim to get through it all.. Lest I fall asleep.
4. Kamiya skipped the Richmond. Like seriously? So rude I could puke.

Despite those points, this book was pretty digestible and well researched. It's definitely enhanced my everyday experience of living in the city and that's invaluable.

[Amar Pai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars if you love SF

This guy is a kindred spirit!

I related to a LOT of this book, esp. secret stair ways, the mania for covering every square inch of the city, the appreciations of its myriad beautiful spots and romantic infatuation w/ the city as a whole. He has the cojones to claim Land's End is the best urban walk in the world. I call it 2nd best in SF! (First is Philosopher's Way in McClaran. But agree Land's End is sublime)


illustration from sf cool gray city of love, chapter 27. kamiya calls this larsen peak but gmaps says it's grand view park. regardless of what you call it, the stairs are amazing!

Chapters I would add to this book:

50. Public art
51. Sidewalk chalk lines
52. The walk around the city
53. Philosopher's Way
54. Mori Point

[David Sasaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Call it historical schadenfreude: I’ve been greatly comforted over the past couple of months by reading historical accounts of just how much worse things used to be a century or two ago. Take the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as an example. I already knew that it destroyed 80% of the city and killed around 3,000 people, but I had no idea that up to 500 of those deaths were caused by soldiers shooting unarmed residents during an anti-looting order that put the whole city on curfew, even as buildings and houses were burning down. As Gary Kamiya describes his 2013 book Cool Gray City of Love:

Dennis Smith argues in San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire that the presence of often undisciplined and trigger-happy troops, combined with Schmitz’s draconian shoot-to-kill order, prevented San Franciscans from fighting the fire themselves—which they could have successfully done. Again and again, residents or neighbors were needlessly driven from their houses or offices by zealous troops and police, and the buildings they had been defending were left to burn or blown up. San Francisco archivist Gladys Hansen estimates that 500 people, many of them innocent, were shot by soldiers—one-sixth the total number of casualties.

See, doesn’t that make you feel better about our current situation?

Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland in 1953, just two years before my parents were born a mile or two away. But I relate to him as if he’s of my generation, a brother from another mother. He was raised in a half White, half Japanese-American household, dropped out of college, worked in a shipyard, then as a taxi driver while studying literature, and eventually becoming a journalist — first at the Examiner, then as a co-founder of Salon.com, a columnist at the Chronicle, and now the executive editor of San Francisco Magazine. (It’s hard to imagine Kamiya, a cerebral and scholarly lover of literature, overseeing pieces like “Five Looks For Your Little Ones We’re Loving For Summer.”)

Cool Gray City of Love, it seems, is the enviable result of making the most out of a double-knee replacement. He dedicated his time recuperating to “doing the knowledge” — reading dozens of books and archival accounts of San Francisco’s relatively brief history. Then, once his knees were back in working order, he starting “doing the work,” hopping on his bike to explore every nook and cranny of the city’s 46 square miles. Inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s 1820s series of woodblock prints “36 Views of Mount Fuji,” he set out to narrate San Francisco’s history and geography with the subtitle “49 view of San Francisco.”

I started reading the first of the 49 chapters during my week one of “sheltering in place.” It turned out to be the perfect companion to get through a pandemic. Each night, I’d read about a new place and its history, and the next day I’d hop on my bike to visit during my lunch break. To make this easier, I created a Google Map List of 60 places mentioned throughout the book with the relevant excerpt saved as a note for each location:

The book is a breeze to read and I easily could have finished it in a couple of days. But it was more rewarding to take it one chapter at a time and spread it out across a couple of months. I came to appreciate and enjoy my city even more. At points, I felt embarrassed that there was so much of San Francisco and its history that I didn’t know. I read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in high school, but I had no recollection that a major plot point of the book is her family’s move to San Francisco during WWII, as the Western Addition transitioned from mostly Japanese American to mostly African American; Blacks migrated from the south to work in the shipyard while Japanese Americans were taken to internment camps.

Somehow I had never once visited Lily Pond in Golden Gate Park or Mountain Lake in the Presidio even though I ride my bike past them both nearly every day. I reread Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums a couple of years ago and was entranced by its description of the Six Gallery reading, where Allen Ginsberg first performed Howl. I had always assumed that the gallery was somewhere in North Beach and had no clue that it was in the Marina neighborhood in what is now an upscale taqueria across the street from my cycling club. 

I should have read this book when I first arrived to San Francisco, but better late than never. At the end of the book is a helpful bibliography, a long list of diverse readings to continue deepening my relationship with San Francisco. I’ve also been digging into Kamiya’s column in the Chronicle, which includes entertaining descriptions of the city’s past with headlines like “Sex and cycling: How bike craze aroused passions in 1890s San Francisco.” 

Cool Gray City of Love was a reminder of why I read: it simply makes life a bit more interesting.

[Trisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this sprawling exploration of San Francisco. As someone who’s lived an hour away from the city for my entire life, it has always seemed like this intricate and complicated place. Kamiya breaks the city, its rich history, its geology, and more down into digestible chunks. I’m going to be rereading this book soon just to find all the spots he mentioned and to use it as a guide for my summer questing in the city. His prose is also very interesting and engaging.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. This book could only have been written by someone who has had a lifelong love of the place, enough to research in depth its geological and human pasts, and write about it so eloquently. Myself, I lived in the City for 10 years, during which time I walked many of its streets, appreciating the variations in architecture and mood provided by each neighborhood. Kamiya's chapter on the two earthquakes (1906 and 1989) was beautifully handled - everyone who was there has their own story (I was at Candlestick, waiting for Game 3 of the World Series to begin and remember the eerie ride home on a MUNI bus through streets devoid of traffic lights). Probably, this would appeal more to those with knowledge of the city than others.

[Spiros · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely valentine to the City, from the natural grandeur and isolation of the Farallones to the artifice of George's Log Cabin, which straddled the County line and was thus able to serve alcohol after 2:00AM, on the Burlingame side of the establishment. Kamiya explores the City's geography, nature, climates, prehistory, history, and current social issues, all in an intensely personal voice. This book feels like what Peter Ackroyd has been doing with his series of histories of an infinitely vaster and more historical city, London.

[Raja · Rating 3 out of 5]

After living in SF for a bit, I figured I should get to know its history -- take some small measure to counteract the transient way I and many of my social set might otherwise inhabit it. So I googled books about SF and this one was on a bunch of different recommended lists. I was also attracted to the idea of combining the historical and the personal -- Gary Kamiya has led a life as connected to SF as any. A long time resident and local journalist, he moved to SF to vibe with the tail-end of the hippie movement after dropping out from Yale. He was also a cabdriver in the city, a co-founder of a startup of sorts (Salon.com), and is now a reluctant landlord.

Kamiya covers a variety of topics, jumping off from a landmark in each chapter, but following no particular organization (though chapters often reference previous chapters -- so it does seem to suggest a front-to-back reading). Many of the city's most-well known landmarks and topics are covered: the presidio and the mission and Spanish colonialism in general, the beat and hippie movements, the AIDS crisis, Japanese internment, urban "renewal", and the 1906 SF earthquake and fire. Kamiya also has an interest in SF's unique geology, its port history, and the way of life of the Bay Area's native peoples. My two favorite chapters covered:
-the history of Save the Bay, an activist organization initially ignored by mainstream environmentalists, which won the creation of a regional planning organization, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and made the bay swimmable again
-and the multiracial labor solidarity of a few men which allowed a Japanese American to work as a railway mechanic in the immediate aftermath of WWII (see excerpt below).
There's also a great narrative bibliography at the end.

Overall though I wouldn't recommend the book to SF residents trying to get to know their city better. The author didn't seem to have a clear perspective on what makes SF unique, which could have given the book a throughline and made the chaotic organization a little more manageable. I found several parts of the book rather boring and struggled to finish it. The landmarks chosen as jumping off points for each chapter were only loosely focused on and I didn't feel compelled to visit very many of them, as I'd hoped I would've been.

-----

"In late August 1945, more than 60 members of the AFL Machinists Union threatened to strike after they learned that a 37-year-old Nisei named Takeo Miyama had been placed as a mechanic with the Municipal Railway. Mayor Roger Lapham and State Senator Jack Shelley tried to convince the workers not to strike, but they refused to back down. Miyama was going to withdraw, but after a three-hour meeting with JACL (Japanese American Citizens League) and War Relocation Authority official, he decided he would go to work, saying that he "would be betraying other Nisei and other minority groups if he abandoned his fight for a job." Miyama showed up for work at the barn the next morning, and the machinists put down their tools.
Facing 60 angry men, 2 men rose to defend Miyama. Both of them were bus drivers and part of a different AFL union. The first driver was a black man named Robert Gray. As the Pacific Citizen reported, Gray said, "When Negro bus drivers went to work for Muni there was some fuss at first, but soon everybody got used to it. If you boys let this man go to work, you'll find it'll be the same way." The second driver was an American Indian named James Burns, who said, "Do you want the sort of thing here that goes on in the old South?" But the machinists refused to yield, saying that because Miyama had not fought in the war, they would not work with him.
At this moment the chief radio technician at the barn, Harold Stone, spoke up. Just five months earlier, Stone had been awarded a Silver Star for bravery when his carrier, the U.S.S. Franklin, was devastated by Japanese dive-bombers on March 19 and 807 men were killed--the most casualties on any American warship during the war except the Arizona, sunk at Pearl Harbor. Stone said, "I didn't go out to fight in the Pacific so people with differently colored skin would be discriminated against when I got home." The war hero's speech made the difference. By a better than 2-to-1 margin. the machinists voted to stay on the job." (303)

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been reading this book off and on for a few months, mostly on BART rides. Each chapter is essentially a standalone essay about a corner of San Francisco, which makes for ideal subway reading. The topics of the chapters and the history they cover are wide-ranging, from an overview of the Pleistocene forces that shaped the landscape to an ode to a specific neighborhood Kamiya once lived in. I've learned a lot of very interesting tidbits about San Francisco (and not only - Kamiya is clearly very well-read, and makes abundant reference to literature, philosophy and art) from this book. Even the "boring" parts have stuck with me, as I found on a recent hike where we happened to encounter the site of Portola's discovery of the bay.

However, I'd hesitate to call the book more than okay, because I'm just not that enamored of Kamiya's writing style. I don't know much about him except that he's worked for various periodicals, and his prose shows it badly; grand pronouncements about humanity and half-baked metaphors stacked three deep might be okay in a thirteen-inch column, but chapter after chapter of them gets wearying quickly. Kamiya also has a tendency to introduce the central conceit of a paragraph as the closing sentence of the paragraph before. I'm not sure if that comes from newspapers, but it is disorienting until you get used to it.

There's also something very dudely (maybe dad-ly?) about his writing - present in his affectionate tribute to Herb Caen's "skirt-admiring" ways (is that a more genteel form of skirt chasing?), his glib characterization of "junkies, drunks, transvestites, dealers, thugs, madmen, hustlers, derelicts, prostitutes, and lowlifes" as the "radioactive core" of the Tenderloin, and his self-indulgent tales about his wild younger years. It's just not my style.

In short, I'll probably keep this on my Kindle as BART reading, but I won't feel any qualms about skipping around.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you think you love San Francisco? Reading Cool Gray City of Love will make you will fall in love with this enchanting city even more. This is a real treat of a book. The writing teases you to engulf every last word in one sitting, yet to do so would be to cheat yourself of its literary excellence. The prose is lyrical and playful, honest, and yet mildly mysterious—you can only imagine what he will say or where he will go next.

Cool Gray City of Love has a bit of something for everyone. Anyone interested in anthropology, geology, oceanography, culture studies, LGBT issues, World War II, and more will enjoy this work. Even if you favor learning about certain time periods, Kamiya will bring others to life with intrigue and entertainment. Not only did he undoubtedly relentlessly research all of his subjects, he morphs the golden nuggets of anecdotes into a narrative that nearly transcends non-fiction. He doesn't sugarcoat history, and shares his experiences, just enough that you hope you may run into him at a cocktail party. It is a well-rounded biography of a city, never lingering too long on any one subject. The narrative doesn’t run chronologically, thus allowing you to make virtual twists and turns through the city's history.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

To paraphrase a clever criticism, As a writer, Gary would make a good cab driver.
I knew in the first paragraph that I couldn't read this book. The third sentence had six modifiers, as did the fourth. The fifth had ten!
Michael Krasny's jacket blurb comparing him to Herb Caen is the finest example of the art of the blurb!

Following the classic creative writing directive to write what you know, Kamiya did that and the result seems mixed. I read 6 chapters. Some I found interesting. I liked The Haunted House and accounts of racial disparity and ebb and flow of ethnic groups. The Lost City, the creek and the decaying houseboats. The Western Addition.

Some left me incensed. The "topography of the peninsula and the city .… was oddly unimpressive" as you approached the Golden Gate from the West. He preferred the Bay Bridge approach and the lights of the city! In one chapter he tells us that the land where SF is now was ugly wasteland until the city was built. Pardon? As ugly as it is above the city which is now a National Seashore it's so magnificent? And below the city with its golden hills?

I had to read some Carl Sandberg when I put this down!

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

We were given this book when we moved to SF. It is a natural history/history/travel guide to SF. We saw some cool things we wouldn't have seen other wise and I loved learning more about the history of San Francisco. I can now dazzle/bore visitors with my knowledge.

If you live in SF or have lived here you would probably really enjoy this. The author is very detailed on specific street locations and neighborhoods so if you don't know where Polk St. is or Bernal Heights, you may be lost at times.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

After 24 years of living in SF, I am still smitten with the city, so its great to read a book by someone who is equally smitten, especially by someone from the Bay Area. There is lots of history that I either didn't know, had forgotten or had heard a different angle on. Lots of us could write 49 chapters on SF - kudos to Gary Kamiya who actually did it.

[Bill Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book that is part history and part local interest / culture. 49 chapters (for 7x7) each covering a different place in the city and its backstory or fun facts, inspired by a series of landscape prints called 36 Views of Mount Fuji. Would have been five stars if it were shorter, it dragged on a little bit. I read this after Peter Hartlaub (chronicle journalist) talked about it on his podcast

There was a lot of lighthearted stuff about random dirt trails, or specific parks, or crazy stories from the gold rush. Some of the most interesting parts were also the saddest:
- Very dramatic parallel telling of 1906 and 1989 earthquakes
- San Francisco’s cardinal sin, multi-part tragedy in the Western addition… first internment destroyed the Japanese community there, then urban renewal hollowed out the black community that had partially taken its place
- AIDs epidemic and how the community responded

[Kristin Delo · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who loves SF, this was such a treat to read, and a perfect book for me specifically. It reads like a love letter to San Francisco, told in 49 short stories that focus on hundreds of years of the area/city's history. I learned so much and have a list of places I'd like to visit on our next trip. A great format for introducing a lot of topics/issues and covering a lot of ground. Obviously, not a thorough study on any one topic but it includes a fantastic list of references.

[Anjali Zyla · Rating 5 out of 5]

love love love gary kamiya please take me on one of your walks

[Potluck Mittal · Rating 5 out of 5]

An all-time favorite for me!

Kamiya's style is fun and engaging; I deeply enjoyed the mix of history, culture, geography, and geology. I haven't had much exposure to SF history before, so I learned a lot. Definitely expect to revisit parts of this one again some day.

[Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was interesting to read this in nyc, a city i actually love, while preparing for my move to sf, a city i am trying to love. the author’s enthusiasm is palpable and wide ranging, and made me feel like of course, i could also one day call this city my own.

at it’s best, the prose is wistful, descriptive, full of vibrant anecdotes and small town characters. the histories, esp of early “discovery” through gold rush, did drag ass (a lot of the book, unfortunately)

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This urban travelogue is a witty, erudite, playful, and occasionally lyrical love poem to the fabled city by The Bay. You're welcome to just plow through from start to finish, but I believe it's best read intermittently between visits to the various scenic/historic spots he describes.

[Alia S · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first problem I had with this book was that its title/sub combination caused me to keep referring to it as "50 Shades of Gray" (...). The second problem was the writing, which suffers from a bad case of unnecessary analogies: Kamiya will spend several paragraphs transporting you into the Pleistocene and then abruptly snap you out of it by comparing something to a Midwestern bowling ally on a Saturday night. It's kind of annoying. And for my taste the attempts at one neat little conclusion per chapter are in places strained. Sometimes an interesting building is just an interesting building and not a metaphor for man's inhumanity to man. Like, it's OK -- I would have still read the chapter.

However: Well researched, genuine, and genuinely interesting, full of fun stories. The blend of natural and human history is enjoyable, and Kamiya's skill as curator of miscellany more than makes up for the writing.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book a couple days before I left San Francisco two weeks ago, but I wish I had read it beforehand. This is a marvelous introduction to the city, written by a journalist who has some good chops for telling history and discussing everything from politics to history to geology and beyond. If you're planning a trip to San Fran anytime soon, pick this up as an unusual guidebook. I know I'll be returning to SF some day with this book in tow.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely picked up some interesting tidbits about SF. I guess that I just wasn't i the mood for such decidedly male perspective on the city.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

And now I love S.F. even more

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this book up before our first trip to San Francisco last November. I thought it would give me more insight into the city and its history, culture and people. It did. I liked the author's idea of walking each of the city's neighborhoods and exploring connections to the past and to his own life. I love discovering a city by setting out on foot, so I thought this might give me a few ideas of walks to take during our trip as well.
The walk that I most enjoyed that came from this book was the Filbert Steps. Wandering down these steps through residential gardens from the Coit tower to the waterfront really made me feel like I'd discovered a secret gem. I was able to get more out of our guided walking tours as well because of the knowledge gained from this book. The parts that dealt with the Gold Rush and the 1906 earthquake left quite an impression on me. I didn't realize the magnitude of those two events until reading this book. Kamiya does a great job of bringing them to life and setting the scene and making you feel what it would have been like to have been there.
The first chapter made me look up day trips to the Farralones (which we didn't include in our itinerary because they are not easy to get to, but I was inspired) and the last chapter made me wish I'd finished the book while we were still in San Francisco, so we could have taken that spectacular walk at Land's End he writes about. Well, as he says in that last chapter, better to leave a little mystery, something undiscovered. Or perhaps something for the next trip.
I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because it did drag at times. This book is probably best read a chapter or two at a time. It's a book to savor. If I lived in San Francisco, I would read this book over the course of a year and set out to explore the areas that interested me one by one. It's a book to read slowly, both guiding you and mingling with your own explorations.

[Kyle Boehm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally finished- loved the matter of fact way the author spoke about the city, the good, but especially the bad. For every negative article about SF I read going forward, I’ll remember this quote:

“Still, anyone who isn’t concerned about San Francisco’s future is not paying attention. Some unique combinations of class and politics and ethnicity and geography and history and a dozen other ingredients have gone into make it the place that it is. Some of those ingredients have changed, and some of them don’t exist anymore. It’s worth fighting to save what can be saved, to ensure that this city remains ornery and compassionate and out of step with the American mainstream. But nostalgia - which San Franciscans are prone to indulge in fat too much- is a fool’s game. And it is ultimately antithetical to the city’s spirit. Born in a frenzy, destroyed in catastrophe, the destination of renegades and dreamers, San Francisco has constantly reinvented herself. There are many prayers that one could say for her as she approaches the 250th anniversary of her founding, but the one that matters most is that she stay forever young.”

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

San Francisco. No other place on Earth moves me quite the way it does. The way the fog curls silently around Sutro Tower as it slowly engulfs the city. The red of the Golden Gate Bridge against the Martian tan of the Marin headlands. The way the fickle weather constantly changes - from hour to hour, district to district. The ravings of a harmless lunatic as he stumbles along Market Street. The sleepy afternoons in Japantown. The endless milling crowds at Powell and Fishermans Wharf. The invigorating, slightly biting breeze as I cycle down the sunlit Marina. San Francisco is a city unlike any other, an urban agglomeration teeming with life and industry, yet perched precariously at the gates to another world - a wild, cold world of sun and fog, implacable and recondite. For me, San Francisco is a collection of moments from the grotesque to the sublime, a heady mass of contradictions, a city so simultaneously ugly and beautiful and endlessly fascinating.

It's that sentiment that led me to pick up this book, written by longtime SF resident Gary Kamiya as an ode to the city from 49 different perspectives - a study that takes us on a mind's tour of the city through space and time, much in the tradition of Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji. Kamiya loves the city far more than I ever could - a bond established through decades of wandering the city's forgotten paths, both as a taxi driver and as an inveterate urban explorer. In the book, Kamiya describes undertaking the equivalent to the Knowledge for San Francisco, wending his way around the city's many places, both famous and forgotten. He shies away from nothing - not even from taking a trek into Bayview/Hunter's Point, often considered the most dangerous part of the city. From his travels comes this book, written in two interwoven strands - one strand in which Kamiya talks about San Francisco's places in respect to their contemporary psycho-social and literary significance to the city; the other in which Kamiya takes us on a historical odyssey, using the city's places as launching points to narrate its rich and varied history - and what a history it is, a tale that shows up the city at its most ridiculous, tragic and sublime. San Francisco is the protagonist of its own magnum opus, the star of a storied narrative that rivals anything the world has ever seen.

Kamiya is at his best when penning down his wry thoughts on the city's most famous neighborhoods. His knowledge of the city's sundry spaces is encyclopedic, his prose elegiac and compelling, and his empathy and sheer understanding profound. His chapter on the Tenderloin is perhaps the single most interesting chapter of the book, combining autobiography, sociology and economics to paint a picture of the city's most dystopian district in vivid and macabre colors. Another standout is the chapter in which he describes the slow wasting away of the indigenous peoples under the not-so-tender ministrations of the Spanish Mission, embodied today in the Mission San Francisco de Asis, a picturesque church by Dolores Street whose pleasant facade belies its less-than-noble past. His chapter on the Castro shines with a tragic account of the HIV/AIDs epidemic of the 1980s, where the district rallied to look to "the nursing, cheering, burying" of their own. But Kamiya is a great admirer of nature as well; his tramplings lead him across the city, on sylvan dirt paths that traverse the city to its many and sundry stairways, the grey rocks of the Farallon Islands, miles from the coast. He is a great conoisseur of the city's geology, and with reason. The city is unique in how closely tied to natural forces it is. The last bastion before the Pacific, it is a city enveloped in clouds, susceptible to earthquakes. It retains a strange quality of wildness, of being untamed by man. Great natural spaces - Bernal Heights, Glen Canyon, Ocean Beach and Land's End - persist as uncultivated spaces that retain the harshness and wildness of what came before, great holes in the urban fabric that reveal the naked essence of San Francisco beneath. Kamiya also dwells on some of his personal haunts, quiet spaces unknown but having great personal connotation to him. Those are somewhat more hit-and-miss, at least to me. Kamiya has his sacred spaces, and that's okay. But many of those vignettes accrue not from the city's history but his own association with it, and are less compelling than the chapters that tell of the story of the city, told in the silhouettes of its buildings and hills amid the rolling fog and the brilliant sun.

The book's great virtue is its understanding of San Francisco as an idea that endures across a swath of time and tide. It tells us that the city has always been a harbor, a haven for the wretched, the weird and the excluded. It was the idyllic and pastoral village of Yerba Buena, the teeming city of the 49ers, the disembarkation point for Chinese and Japanese laborers and immigrants, the refuge of hippies and homosexuals. It had its blots, like the Chinese Exclusion Act, but those were transient and ultimately contrary to the city's inherent nature. And San Francisco retains that essence today, even as it welcomes throngs of tech workers into its streets and precipitates yet another conflict over what the city ought to become. Kamiya never quite reveals who he sides with, however, never quite says where he stands on the city's contemporary issues. It is the only good choice for such a book. It suggests that he sides with the city as a whole, in defense of its heterogeneity, its imperfections, and its weirdness, and the tensions and dynamism that that brings. A city of sin and hope, a harlot with a heart of gold, luxuriating on the rocks at the ends of the earth.

I give this book: 4 out of 5 stolen taxis