San Francisco, the city that time forgot

By IRENE CHAPPLE

San Francisco's mist has been sliced apart by bright sunshine and a ragged, grey-haired woman, leaning heavily on her crooked cane, is peering through luminous blue star-shaped sunglasses at the road's walk signal.

This is the Haight-Ashbury district, where declarations of love and harmony are scratched in vibrant graffiti across the concrete walls and decorative gold brocade of terraced housing. And so the old woman finds a friend, a man with faraway eyes and a shaggy haircut.

He tells her he loves her glasses, and she says to him: "Yeah, you know I hardly even feel like I'm wearing them." The cross signal buzzes, and she stumbles on. He watches her progress. "You," he raises his voice so she can hear, "look beautiful."

Well, not in the traditional sense, but then maybe the bright glasses had triggered a flashback to the 60s.

San Francisco's a bit like that: past decades splash their energy into the present. The history of liberal thinking and art has created a society proud of its politics and fiercely loyal to the city.

San Francisco is a place where your senses are relentlessly pounded: An African-American trio is loudly "PUTTING THE FUN! BACK INTO FUNK!"; a woman is shaking her hips and whooping under the sunshine. Across the road the smells of Italian pizza waft through the crowds.

Glorious architecture stands watch - the glass-arched Marriott building, the striped lolly-like stumpiness of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the seductive Golden Gate Bridge. And the trams, jammed with tourists clinging in the "Standee" spaces, chug peacefully up and down the hills.

Haight-Ashbury, which I visit to trace where Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead once walked, has its own spirit. The area's history of hand-holding has made way for an edgy mix of wild-eyed wanderers and young urbanites. Musty second-hand stores snuggle beside bright creations cashing in on the area's history and cred.

The Smiths' sweetly morose song There is a light that never goes out - remember the line "to die by your side, is such a heavenly way to die" - is a favourite sing-along among gothic shop staff.

Then at vintage treasure trove Wasteland, a DJ is busy bopping to some booming funk tunes.The racks are filled with glittering 60s dresses, bow-tied 80s rejects, clip-on earrings and spotted flower brooches.

When I photograph the house where Joplin is said to have lived the neighbours wander by and I learn more. "That," says Mary, a young brunette who has just spent a year backpacking around New Zealand, "is where Jimi Hendrix stayed, and that" - the house next door - "is where [heiress and kidnap victim] Patty Hearst was held captive."

Whether Joplin did live at 112 Lyon St, or the grungier house just down the way, is debatable: "They all just crashed on each other's couches. It was the 60s," dismisses Mary's sister.

The area is now gentrified, painted with flourishes of gold and purple with landscaped water features. Joplin's old crash-pad is said to be worth around US$1.4 million ($2.1 million).

At the opposite end of town, up and down hills whipped by a constant wind, is City Lights Booksellers and Publishers.

The book store, cosied against Jack Kerouac Ave, was made famous for its publication in the mid 50s of Allan Ginsberg's Howl. The anguished dream poem - it starts, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" - eventually made it through censorship trials.

The upstairs poetry room has a tribute to Ginsberg and others of the Beat generation, Neal Cassady, Kerouac, City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photos adorn the walls: Cassady hanging out, Ginsberg eating Grape Nut flakes for breakfast, the Beats, all of them inspirations to Bob Dylan, posing in the pictures too.

San Francisco remains the artists' city, and I get talking to one on the bus. Zach, an aspiring author with round glasses, tells me if he moved he'd go to Europe. He'd live nowhere else in America.

Nowhere else welcomes liberal politics quite like San Francisco. As the New Yorker, in an article on the suicides off the Golden Gate bridge, wrote last year, in San Francisco "you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist".

The city's centrepiece, Union Square, is encircled by monuments to wealth: A giant Levi's store, Saks Fifth Avenue and Macy's. But in San Francisco, the thousands of homeless are a very public underclass and a front page problem. Here, poverty does not discriminate by race: the streets are home to Americans of African, European and Asian decent.

There's a pregnant woman, with head down and legs encircling her rounded belly, a man with Aids, another clutching a bag of dog biscuits to feed his faithful black pup - "Very willing to work" his sign pleads. But I see him day after day, dog at his side.

There's a moment of tragic humour. The old man on the bus, toothless, drunk, rambling, exclaims: "I might smoke crack, I might smoke crack ... but at least I don't shoot heroin!" Then he cackles, stumbles off the bus and into Union Square's crowds.

On my last day in San Francisco I see Fahrenheit 9/11, the Michael Moore documentary storming the United States. The screen is almost as large as Auckland's Imax - everything is served super size in the United States - and it flashes up pictures of happy couples, two heterosexual, two homosexual. With arms around each other, they're all mainstream San Franciscans looking for a nice family home.

This is, of course, a simple economic reaction to a rainbow-flag market, in a city where high-brow champagne talk turns to the wonderful spectacle of the gay pride parade.

Earlier I'd watched a television show on which a rabidly pro-republican talk-show host welcomed the anti-Moore Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens with open arms, to harmonise on the wrongs of the film and its author.

But in this city the message is reflected in the protests in Union Square and in the graffiti decrying Bush's presidency. On the sidewalks John Kerry stickers are everywhere, slapped on to buildings, stuck to the hats of the beggars.

It's a unique and special corner of the United States as it was yesterday, and may be tomorrow.

THINGS TO SEE

* Walk over the Golden Gate Bridge. Buses go to a lookout from which you can reach the bridge's footpath.

* Take a boat trip to Alcatraz. The former federal prison housed inmates such as Al Capone and George Kelly, also known as Machine Gun Kelly.

* Visit Chinatown, between North Beach and the central city.

* Go to Golden Gate Park and walk its scented pathways.

* Take a tram over the hills. Listen as the tram driver chatters and hassles in an American drawl.

Getting there

Air New Zealand's new direct service to San Francisco travels three times a week.

Currently there is a special for $1599 return for a direct flight from Auckland, travelling during July and August.

Standard fares will be around $1899 from Auckland, with an extra $100 ex-Wellington or Christchurch. A route via Los Angeles will add another $200. See an Air NZ travel centre or www.airnz.co.nz
for more details.

A flight departing New Zealand at 6.50 pm arrives in San Francisco at 11.50am the same day.

Travel options from the airport to the central city are by train for US$5, shuttle for around US$14 or taxi for around US$40.

Once in the city, trams, buses and trains makes getting around easy.

What to do

A week long CityPass, which gives unlimited access to transport within the municipal areas, can be bought for US$40 for adults and $31 youth. It includes free entry to city attractions such as the Museum of Modern Art, a boat cruise around Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Exploratorium.

A walking tour around the Haight-Ashbury area can be booked through Hippy Gourmet
and City Lights Booksellers is 261 Columbus Ave, North Beach.

More information

The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, a valuable site for visitor information, can be accessed through Only in San Francisco.

* Irene Chapple travelled courtesy of Air New Zealand and was a guest of the Handlery Hotel and the Westin St Francis.