Theearthquake of 1989 was a seam in the urban history of San Francisco

A San Franciscan era ended for my family recently

The saeculum that shaped the current Bay Area started soon after the SecondWorld War and will end shortly.

ong before the founding of Rome,

It was midwinter—not long after the grim, cold two-week stretch of libraries andnothingness before nals

We left him there in the water in between two shores,but we also took something with us, one more story for the tribe. The bay wasunsettled then, but blue.

Pat died in 2011, when I wastwenty-seven and nding my life as a writer in the magazines she’d once taken asdispatches from somewhere far away.

A saeculum spanned from a given momentuntil the last people who lived through that moment had died. It was the extent ofrsthand memory for human events—the way it felt to be there then—and itreminds us of the shallowness of American history.

What these data do notcapture is the fortuity and betrayal even in the smooth progress we seek.

He wore bolos andannel shirts and polyester pants. “So,” he’d said timidly, knitting his brows. “Haveyou decided what kind of business you want to go into?

ew to San Francisco International for Joe’s funeral wearing an old, extremelymiscreased suit that Pat and Steve had bought me for youth orchestra

I don’t think it occurred to us—except maybe to one of us—that clannish group identity, the romance of peoplewho think that they have found one another against conspiring odds, was thegreat ordering force of the new global century, and an endlessly iterable one atthat.

. Kids born tomorrow in much of New YorkCity will grow up in an unbroken maze of multimillion-dollar homes atopmultimillion-dollar homes atop enlightened eateries.

This vision was reiterated in the port’s immense WaterfrontLand Use Plan, adopted in 1997, which aimed to create an “outdoor living room.”

ines were made at Kinko’s. Music, indeance of the polish of the eighties, met the airwaves with garage-bandroughness:

nside was a SamSpade labyrinth of bad linoleum, but the offices had giant windows and a swankmailing address (“World Trade Center”), and my father had what used to be thethrill of urban real estate:

“Why not just put a giant penis there?” mygrandfather Steve wondered aloud.

By 1998, the concept had begun, quietly, to change. Four developers submittedplans focussed on making the bottom oor what one reporter called a “globalmarketplace.” The winning proposal included high-end food shops, restaurants,and more than a hundred and fty thousand square feet of premium office space.

ower, as never before, restedwith people who had come of age after the atomization of American culture: theboomers, with their vapors of radical individualism, and the my-way-orientedGeneration X.

It’s to have seen how swiftly righteous dreams turn into cloister gates; to noticehow destructive it can be to shape a future on the premise of having found yourpeople, rather than nding people who aren’t yours. The city, today, is the seat ofan atomized new private order.

While the challenge inSan Francisco had been to weave a modernist plaza into an old waterfront, thetask at the Sea Ranch was to blend a modernist community into the moody bluffs

How this happens—how a place can breakopen to a new phase of social conuence and then re-sort itself, without everchanging its beliefs—is the real family story of the Bay Area over the past sixtyyears

Each contribution in thisera bought a stake in the imagination of what San Francisco ought to be.

omantic ideas of life, unlike pragmatic ones, concern the bridging of distanceto nd your tribe, your place, your private order.

Roth solicited ideas from real-estate brokers, landscape architects, and preservationists. He commissioned onearchitecture rm to draw up a plan for Ghirardelli Square, and then, like a movieproducer polishing a screenplay, called in others to do subsequent drafts ofbuildings.

My parents hadplanned a dinner party, but the phones were giving busy signals, and it was unclearwhether anyone would come. They did, though. Everybody came. We lit thedining room with candles, and the guests gripped the edge of the table throughthe aftershocks. Dinner was warm, intimate, vulnerable. It seemed to show that aprivate order among people you knew persisted, like a painting, in the absence ofcivic structure in the world.

My mother and I returned to San Francisco that night on Interstate 280.

ay Area dream. A decadeearlier, the local social project had been to break out of a shell of hardened classand power and, buoyed by private interests, to create a uid space that was at oncecivic, commercial, and social: the Ghirardelli model.

I was with Menchu in Redwood City in October, 1989,

This crowd preached love and—indeance of the old ways—unconstrained togetherness.

He and other prisoners were marched sixty-ve miles to camps,and eventually loaded shoulder to shoulder into a ship called Oryoku Maru, whosesewage-drenched holds could reach a hundred and ten degrees

She spoke in a briskSpanish accent, and was given to plucky exclamations. “Aïe! ” she’d say in surprise.In impatience, it became two syllables—“Ai-ïe!

On his release from prison camp,where he spent years writing down poems from memory, he married mygrandmother, whose family had been hiding in the hills and whose house hadbeen torched.

He rarelyspoke about the war, although he woke from time to time at 3 .. and roamed adark house

had to sit on both the San Francisco and the Marin CountyYellow Pages to reach the dining table, I loved to listen to what had already turnedinto a kind of social theatre.

Two friends of theirs, being pinker, sawan opportunity to shore up what might otherwise melt into air.

But Stauffacher came to hate the SeaRanch. Individual properties sold for up to forty thousand dollars per acre. Shebegan to worry that she’d participated in a proteering land grab under the pretextof environmental custodianship.

place touted as being for the public benet but actually conceived throughprivate development.

In California, the norm was to spend hourswandering in and out of doors, in and out of social spaces, in and out ofconversations, in and out of paradigms of thought.

The house facedbackward, with the front door hard to nd, so visitors drifted unannounced fromthe back lawn, and left the same way.

heir house became a hub for people who, a generation earlier, mightnot have mixed. Some were from the old labor circle or a new Unitarian

The living room was open,and two towering walls of books there told the story of one generation’s liberatedsecularism—Richard Feynman, Alfred Kinsey, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell,and the art of Native American tribes.

. What set the California life styleapart was what Life, in a paean, called “indoor-outdoor living.”

y grandfather, Steve, was the rst in his family to marry outside the tribe ofdrygoods Jews

This re-privatization of public life should tell us something about the future.

How much has changed since then?

My grandmother,

My grandparents had come towardCommunism in ight from different local pasts.