Redbridge

I wished to like it. That is the part that perhaps no one believes. But I did. I wished it sincerely. I left, and then I came back, and I said to myself: no. You were too harsh before. You were impatient. You did not yet understand it. Go again. Look again. Be more generous this time. Look beyond the red bridge and the civic hallucination. Look beyond the postcard. Look for the city beneath the image.

And I did look. I looked in earnest. I looked with patience. I looked block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, hill by hill, corridor by corridor. I looked on foot. I looked by bicycle. I looked in the morning and in the evening and in the empty middle hours when a place reveals whether it has any life in it of its own. And what I found, sir, is that it wore on me. Daily. Quietly. Completely. It wore on me in the way that only a place can wear on a man when he has tried, truly tried, to make peace with it and cannot.

This is not some grand revelation. I like some places and I do not like others. That is all. But usually one learns this simply. Usually one finds, here is a place that suits me, or here is a place that does not, and then one goes on with one's life. It should not require this much argument. It should not require this much pleading with oneself. And yet with San Francisco there was always this pressure to doubt my own senses. Always this insistence that if I was not charmed, then I had somehow failed to understand. As though the fault were mine for not loving what was put before me.

But I am the man that I am. And the man that I am does not wish, every day, to be pressed so tightly into the world. He does not wish every outing to feel like vigilance. He does not wish every block to carry some low-grade tax of noise, friction, caution, interruption. He does not wish to hear another man's footfall always at his back. He does not wish always to look over one shoulder and see another body there, another car there, another hazard there, another claim upon his attention there. He does not wish for a city in which movement itself feels like abrasion.

I like a good city. That is all. A good city, where one may get a little lost in a residential neighborhood and not at once fall out of the world. A good city, where one may climb onto a bicycle and leave the day behind without making an expedition of it. A good city, where one may drift. Where one may find a street of peace. Where one may pass from one mood into another without every transition feeling like a dare. Where the residential fabric is not merely a place to store oneself between errands, but part of life itself. Where the ordinary act of moving through it has some grace.

And this city, sir, is barren of grace.

Every road is a freeway in miniature. Every road. Find me one road of peace. Find me one road of fun. Find me one road where the body may loosen and the mind may wander and the eye may rest. They cannot. They will not. Instead there is always the same humiliating choreography: the car that must surge around you only to stop ten seconds later; the driver who endangers you to arrive nowhere; the U-turn, the right hook, the lurch, the scream, the throttle, the absurd petty race to the next light where you will, inevitably, pass them again on the bicycle. It is a city of pointless acceleration. A city forever hurrying into its own narrowness.

And then they tell you: no, no, you must go to the Panhandle. Sir, the Panhandle is but an overgrown median. A ribbon of compromise. A place where men race past one another and everyone pretends this counts as pastoral relief. Or they say: go to Golden Gate Park. And so I go. And what do I find? Mosquitoes. Mosquitoes! In this supposedly urbane jewel of the Pacific, this city so expensive, so self-regarding, so convinced of its own exceptionalism, I am asked to accept not the compensations of true urban life, nor the consolations of true nature, but instead the inconveniences of both. At least be a city, for God's sake. If I must pay the costs of the city, then let me have the city. If I must bear density, noise, friction, vigilance, filth, and absurdity, then let there at least be abundance, ease, pleasure, and movement in return. But no. The bargain is forever broken here. One pays the premium and receives the parody.

And even in the things most simple, most civilizational, the city reveals its emptiness. You go for groceries and find either some extortionary simulacrum of a market or some dim little store that calls itself a grocery by courtesy only. The proper store closes early, or closes forever, or survives in some half-degraded state, and everyone acts as though this is normal, as though it is not an indictment that a wealthy, vaunted, globally mythologized city cannot reliably provision ordinary life. This is not complexity. This is failure. This is not charm. This is not urbanism. This is thinness wearing expensive clothes.

And always, always, when you object, when you say that the city does not feel good to inhabit, that it does not feel good to move through, that its daily life is harsher and hollower than its defenders admit, they point to the bridge.

The red bridge.

The stupid red bridge.

As though one beautiful object were absolution. As though a city might neglect the human scale, neglect the daily substrate, neglect the peace of movement, neglect the common needs of life, and then hold aloft one photogenic artifact and declare the debt paid. Look, they say. Is it not red? Is it not splendid? Is it not world-famous? And I say: what has that to do with anything? A bridge is not a city. A skyline is not a city. A postcard is not a city. A city is the lived arrangement of ordinary life. A city is whether a man may move through it without being worn down. A city is whether one can provision a life, breathe a little, drift a little, wander a little, belong a little, without feeling continually rebuked by the very texture of the place.

And San Francisco, for all its fame, for all its scenery, for all its self-love, is too often merely a facade of urban virtue stretched over a strangely underfed reality. It has the bones of humane urbanism in places, yes. A few square miles here, a corridor there, some fragment of continuity from Mission Dolores through the Castro and Duboce, some echo of neighborhood life through the Haight into the Inner Sunset. Enough to tease you. Enough to suggest the city that might have been. Enough to create the illusion that the whole place works if only you would squint correctly. But it does not. The good part is real, but it is tiny. The livable part is conditional. The pleasant part is fragile. The whole thing is forever asking to be admired from a distance rather than inhabited up close.

And perhaps there are men for whom this is enough. Men whose lives compress neatly into a few agreeable blocks. Men content to live inside a small approved circuit and call it city life. Men who do not ask the city to yield itself under motion. Men who walk a little, take the train a little, order the groceries in, and make peace with the rest. Let them have it. I do not begrudge them. But I am not such a man.

I want a city that rewards drift.

I want a city where movement is not punishment.

I want a city where a bicycle is not merely an implement of vigilance, but an instrument of freedom.

I want a city where one may leave the world behind for twenty minutes without ascending to some sacred overlook or fleeing to the one officially sanctioned green strip.

I want a city where the beauty is not only scenic, but civil. Not merely there to be photographed, but there to be lived inside.

And because San Francisco does not give this, because it asks instead for admiration in exchange for abrasion, because it offers symbolic compensation for practical failure, because it confuses iconography with livability and scenery with grace, it has worn on me. It has worn on me daily. Quietly. Repeatedly. It has said, day after day: here is friction; call it texture. Here is scarcity; call it sophistication. Here is narrowness; call it intimacy. Here is dysfunction; call it urban life. Here is the bridge; shut the fuck up.

No.

I will not look at your bridge anymore.

Let others sing hymns to the red span. Let others write sonnets to fog and hills and painted ladies and all the other civic narcotics by which this place excuses itself. I have looked beneath the image, and I have found a city too often hostile to the simple human pleasure of moving through the world. I have found a place that admires itself more readily than it serves its people. I have found a city that is forever being forgiven for what, in any lesser city, would simply be called failure.

And so I say: enough.

If this poor little peninsula cannot remember what a city is for, then let it return to the sea. Let the waves take back the gradients and the facades and the little islands of conditional charm. Let the red bridge stand for nothing at all but the route by which sensible men and women once departed. Let history say of us: they were the ones who finally refused the bargain. They were the ones who looked upon the famous bridge, so red, so praised, so endlessly invoked, and said: no. We do not consent. We will cross over it, and beyond it, and make our homes in a land more suitable to human life.

And from afar, sir, from a place of better streets and easier air, we may yet look back and mock the good city and its red bridge together.