San Francisco: Heaven’s gate

The city has long lured the best, the brightest ... and the bohemian: beatniks, hippies, homosexuals, techies, greenies. "When I found San Francisco," wrote novelist Herb Gold, "I found my home. I found Left Bank Paris and Greenwich Village in permanent laboratory condition, wrapped in a convoluted time warp of past and future within the instant present tense of California."

I am sitting with Gold — 83 years old, trim, dapperly dressed in pastels and earth tones — in his Russian Hill apartment. It is the abode of a luxurious monk, books and literary journals spread about the small cushioned rooms, each with a view toward North Beach and, beyond that, the harbor. He has written 31 fiction and nonfiction books, built a reputation, seen it wither, and then rebuilt it, remaining vigorous and relevant even as he's watched too many of his contemporaries pass from the scene.

There is no pathos in Gold, although there is a filigree of sadness, etched delicately around the eyes. Yet his enthusiasm is youthful and infectious; he is more alive than those costumed techies I saw duking it out on Halloween. To me, Gold embodies a previous generation drawn by the promise of West Coast hip and of a cultural life as rich as that of Greenwich Village — and because, as Gold recalls, "in the middle of winter, I was playing tennis and the sun was out and there was glorious light and warmth and I thought, That's it, I'm staying."

I suggest to him that, in a city ever more intoxicated with the Web and wealth, he may be the last of the true bohemians. But he disagrees. And as we make our way down the 45-degree sidewalk along Broadway, he restates his belief in the Beat-and-jug-wine paradise that first drew him here. The houses on either side of us appear poised to slide downhill at the next sizable tremor; Lombard, that famously sinuous route that no film shot in San Francisco seems able to neglect, is just a few blocks away. "There is still a bohemia," Gold asserts. As proof, he mentions the name of another renowned writer, who lives a few houses down from him. "But he's an ass- hole," Gold says with a laugh.

We drive up Columbus to the Baker Street Bistro, where, over a bottle of red wine and a bowl of bourride, Gold lays out his life and times, his good relations with his five children from two marriages, his joy at being a grandfather, and his continuing quest for that elusive perfect woman, that beautiful young girl in a café, thumbing through the Hudson Review. He's convinced that she's still out there somewhere; that San Francisco produces them in prodigious amounts, imports them by the Boeing-load; that the city itself is the draw and that all he has to do is wait for them to feel the pull.

Slide show   City by the Bay San Francisco’s unique mix of physical characteristics, landmarks and attractions make it one of the most popular cities in the United States. more photos

It's alluring, this notion of city as a honeypot into which you can stick your nose and find it sweetly stuck. I almost moved here from New York myself a decade ago, accepting a position at one of the magazines that was then phone-book thick and making a bundle covering the first Internet gold rush. I flew out to meet with the editor, a pretty woman a few years older than me, and we went to lunch in one of the cute little restaurants along South Park in SoMa. Her pitch sold the city as much as her magazine. She had moved here from New York, she explained, and had no regrets. At the time, it was the quaintness that I found striking. If compared with Los Angeles it was civilized, then compared with New York it was positively manageable. My wife and I were expecting our first child, and San Francisco seemed a better place to raise a family than Manhattan. At the last minute, however, I stayed put.

I still wonder, every time I visit, if perhaps I made a terrible mistake. San Francisco, being just seven miles square, is more accessible than other international supercities. "Whoever laid the town out," wrote John Dos Passos in Harper's magazine, "took the conventional checkerboard pattern of streets and without the slightest regard for the laws of gravity planked it down blind on an irregular peninsula that was a confusion of steep slopes and sandhills. The result is exhilarating."

Lisa Limer The more things change, the more they stay the same. A recent gathering in Mission Dolores Park is reminiscent of the Haight-Ashbury's heyday.

Equally bracing is San Francisco's capricious weather, which can be balmy in the dead of winter and practically Canadian in high summer. Today, I am lucky to have caught a sunny afternoon, so instead of ordering the car from the valet at the St. Regis, I decide to indulge in a tourist cliché and take a streetcar down through Chinatown for a quick stroll along the Embarcadero. Still wallowing in that nagging regret over never having moved here, I hail a taxi up to AB Fits, a trendy boutique in North Beach. It takes just five minutes before I am let off at the quirky little storefront down the street from Italian bakeries selling macaroons and cannoli and around the corner from Gelateria Naia, where elderly Italian women look surly surrounded by visiting Japanese and Swedes. Inside, I try on some denim from Japan and begin flirting with a woman named Zia who moved here from Los Angeles ten years ago. She's a painter and owns a floor in a building in the Mission District, a few miles to the south.

"Never looked back," she says of her relocation as she studies her silhouette in the full-length mirror. She's wearing a peasant skirt with some brocade along the hem. ("It's meant to go with this jacket," the salesman tells her, holding out the matching garment.) "Los Angeles always felt like it was going to become a great place, but then it wouldn't happen," she explains. "Like downtown was going to become a great arts center, or Venice was going to become this great gallery area. And then a few years would go by, and I would realize that whatever was supposed to have happened hadn't." San Francisco, she says, "is already a great city."

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