Palace of Fine Arts

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Here's another batch of old SF photos, this time from the famous Palace of Fine Arts, one of the few surviving structures from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, a World's Fair highlighting the city's recovery from the 1906 earthquake.

Although, strictly speaking, this isn't really a surviving structure. The fair's elaborate faux-Roman buildings were meant to be temporary, and were built cheaply out of wood, plaster and even burlap. The elements took their toll on the surviving buildings, and in 1965 the original palace was demolished and replaced with a more durable copy made with steel and concrete. I'm not sure why, exactly, but this story has always struck me as kind of hilarious. It stands to reason that a few cultural theory papers have been written about this, with the words "simulacrum" and "pastiche" used liberally, and many citations of midcentury French philosophers. I mean, I can't possibly be the first person to think of that.

Anyway, here's a Bollywood number filmed in part at the Palace of Fine Arts, from the 1999 hit film Biwi No. 1.

Telegraph Hill

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Ok, here's another set of early 90's tourist photos, this time from the little park on top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, home of the famous Coit Tower. Because I was new to traveling solo, I had the idea that I would just walk everywhere, instead of trying to figure out the local mass transit system. I did not realize at the time that San Francisco city blocks are substantially larger than Portland city blocks, so there was a bit more walking than I expected. I was also coming down with a major head cold at the time but didn't quite realize it yet. So I basically just sat resting my feet and spacing out while I was here.

I do recall overhearing a couple of random tour guide anecdotes from passing tour groups. First, in the first photo of the slideshow, there's a building on the right, with a big flag on top. The story is that this building was controversial when it went in; people thought it was too tall, and protruded into the view. So in a burst of early Tea Party-ness, the builder/owner put a giant flag on top, protruding even more into the view, but in a way that marked you as a commie sympathizer if you objected. This tactic probably wouldn't work in SF anymore, but at this point the flag is an expected part of the view.

Second overheard tour guide anecdote: The Coit Tower was built with with a bequest from Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a local socialite and patron of the city fire department. A widely-told apocryphal story suggests the tower is designed to look like a fire hose nozzle. The tour guide let his charges in on a "little secret", namely that the tower was actually a memorial to Coit's late husband, as the design reminded her of him. (This story is almost certainly untrue, since the tower was designed after her death and she only left vague instructions on what to do with the money.) Still, a knowing look was given, and the tourists snickered on cue. I probably just rolled my eyes, as it reminded me of a certain classic Monty Python sketch. Undoubtedly the tourists would relay this entendre to their friends back home in Peoria, after showing their blurry slides of driving down Lombard St., and before the story about how amazing it was to eat clam chowder out of a loaf of sourdough bread, and how the whole city looks just like the Rice-a-Roni commercials. Honestly, the entire SF tourist industry is just the worst. In 2014, SF locals go on about how the city is being ruined by gazillionaire tech bros, and I'm sure that's true, but bottom-feeding, mouth-breathing slackjawed tourists were ruining it for decades before that, with the help of an entire industry built up to cater to them. At least they finally banned the organ grinder monkeys that were at Fisherman's Wharf when I was a kid. That was creepy as hell, and the tourists loved it.

Of course now those tourists can't afford to visit SF at all, and I'm afraid they're coming to Portland instead. In place of the sourdough chowder thing, they want entendre-laden donuts from the novelty donut shop that shall not be named, and a photo of the Keep Portland Weird sign across the street, and Mill Ends Park, and the rest of some "Top 10 Portland's Weirdest" list from the Travel Channel or Food Network or whatever, and pestering locals to say or do something weird so they can tell folks back home in Peoria all about it. Perhaps what we need to do is fund some cable shows explaining that Boise is the new Portland. Or maybe Anchorage, or Oklahoma City, or Des Moines, or some other midsized city that could use the extra tourist dollars. Just don't tell people we funded the shows with a Kickstarter, since that would look hip and weird and bring in even more tourists.

Lombard Street, San Francisco

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So here are some old tourist photos of San Francisco's Lombard Street, taken sometime in the early 90s. To be more precise, these are of the famous steep one-block stretch of Lombard St. with the switchbacks. Tourists inexplicably come from far and wide to drive down this street, while other tourists gawk at them. This is possibly the world's most idiotic tourist attraction. It's a steep, narrow, windy street. Drivers often have to line up and wait to drive down it, and then they're too busy steering and riding the brakes to enjoy it, whatever enjoying it might entail. They do get to tell the folks back home they did it, though, for whatever that's worth. It's a cheesy tourist trap, and there isn't even a gift shop at the end that sells you "I Survived Lombard Street" t-shirts. Or at least there wasn't one the last time I was there. So it isn't even a tourist trap that makes money.

When I was a kid, we lived in the Bay Area for about a year, and I recall we made the trip into the city to drive down Lombard St. at least once. I went back as an adult I suppose just to confirm that it was what I remembered: Nothing but a steep windy street that people feel compelled to drive down for some reason. I also had the idea I was going to be all meta-ironic and get photos of the gawkers, because I was about 22 at the time and it seemed like an original idea that probably nobody had ever thought of before. As far as I know nobody was taking photos of me while I took these, but that possibility only occurred to me much later. There is probably a fun art project, or at least a Tumblr, in taking photos of smug hip people visiting Lombard St. ironically and thinking they're at the top of the meta-irony food chain.

Anyway, evidently I'm not the only person who thinks this is dumb. Due to complaints by area residents -- probably many decades' worth of complaints -- beginning in summer 2014 the city began closing the street on weekends as an experiment. If it's not too disruptive, they may eventually close the street on a permanent basis, or at least on a regular basis, and tourists will have to find something else dumb to do, like buying overpriced trinkets at Fisherman's Wharf, or taking selfies with a Haight-Ashbury intersection sign. Those two will probably never go away.

Washington Square, San Francisco

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Here are a couple of old tourist photos of San Francisco's Washington Square, a city park in North Beach, the city's historically Italian neighborhood. As a tourist, I didn't get beyond the standard shot of the Saints Peter & Paul Church with the park in the foreground. I seem to recall that at the time were actual old Italian guys there, smoking cigars and playing bocce. That was about 20 years ago, though. Today it's probably nothing but awful tech dudebros in polo shirts yapping on about their awful startups. It was obvious the city was changing the last time I was there, about 6 years ago, and I gather the demographic shift has really taken hold in the last 2-3 years, so now anyone who isn't backed by venture capital is rapidly being priced out of the city.

Vaillancourt Fountain

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Here's an old photo of San Francisco's modernist Vaillancourt Fountain, in a plaza along the Embarcadero across from the Ferry Building. You can tell this is an old photo because of the Embarcadero Freeway lurking in the background. This was taken a couple of years after the big Loma Prieta earthquake that damaged the old freeway, and the city was in the very early stages of tearing it out. If you look closely you can see construction equipment on the lower deck of the freeway.

The one thing everyone seems to know about this fountain is that it was vandalized by U2's Bono during a concert in 1987. I actually liked them at the time, but I still thought it was a dumb stunt. It looks even worse with a few decades of hindsight, as Bono's aged into a pretentious celebrity buffoon (who hasn't had a decent album since 1993's Zooropa). First he vandalizes a fountain, then he comes and dumps his new album on your iPod without even asking.