24 Aug 2017 - Graham
previously: columbia river gorge, starvation ridge trail
Early this year, while still residing in DC, I tried to practice using “San Francisco Eyes.” In past trips to SF, I’ve tended to wander around appreciating all the little things. Like “Wow! Look at that hill!” “Wow! Look at how cute those houses are!” “Look at how amazing all these bikes are!” and “This huge park is right in the middle of the city; how lucky is everyone that lives here?!” And I realized that DC has plenty of hills and cute houses and bikes and parks, too. But they had become routine so I wasn’t really looking at them. Or, perhaps, it’s more accurate to say I wasn’t really appreciating them.
Traveling, especially to a highly anticipated and new place, is a great way to set myself up to pay deeper attention to my surroundings. It’s been one of my favorite parts of this trip.
I find that as I spend more time in a place, I tend to fit what I’m seeing into known patterns and thus to see it differently, almost to gloss over it. Even in Portland, after just a week, I developed patterns of seeing, visual shortcuts, that allowed me to move through busy city streets without being consumed by the details around me. To be fair, attention is limited. I can’t always be awed by my surroundings if I want to think about things other than city design.
The phenomena of “San Francisco eyes” isn’t limited to SF or the West Coast. For instance, I moved to Boston in my first summer of law school. At first, while biking around, I was almost shocked at the beauty of the old Harvard buildings and inventiveness of the MIT campus. I was thrilled crossing the Charles River or riding alongside it by the striking views of downtown skyscrapers. The bike trail to Jamaica Plain was a wonder of city planning full of interesting people from all walks of life. But as the weeks wore on, I began to fall into visual ruts. I began, for example, to feel the length of my commute by the cadence of the landmarks. Repeated daily, the intersections in Allston or Brookline gained emotional significance. The grocery store at the top of the first hill on the ride became associated with a sense of both accomplishment and anticipation/dread (of future hills). Thus, as I began to feel emotionally connected to Boston I also stopped seeing it freshly.
Similarly, I’ll never be able to neutrally see the Taco Bell at the intersections of West Street and Route 7 in Falls Church. That Taco Bell signifies too much: it was the rendezvous point for mostly fruitless late-night high-school scheming, the last big turn before getting home from most long drives, and the site of many dinners with Dad and Brennan. To see beyond my memories, to see what that Taco Bell really looks like, to appreciate its details, would demand an unusual (and for me, still, unnatural) degree of attention.
By trying to look at DC as if I was visiting SF, I was trying to cultivate a fresh sense of wonder for the place I lived. To rediscover the magic of the place I choose to live rather than pining for an idealized version of another place. To counter the whole grass-is-greener tendency.
But now, as I write from the Mission district in San Francisco, I find myself strangely unable to see San Francisco with “San Francisco eyes.” Some of the problem may be due to over-familiarity. I was perhaps awed by Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland because they were new. In contrast, I’ve spent plenty of time in San Francisco before this trip. Additionally, I may find myself underwhelmed because I arrived in this city after a glorious weekend in a park with dozens of new friends and just a few hours after coming down from a literal mountain peak. (I may be becoming a wilderness-loving vagabond after all.) But I suspect those explanations aren’t complete.
Friends have started to express dread about needing to move to the Bay Area for work. And friends already here are looking for a way out. Outrageous rent certainly plays a part in their dread. But rent is only a symptom. San Francisco has lost its soul.
The burrito I ate last night was surely better than any I could get on the East Coast. The place was well-lit, cheap, efficient, and overfull of wealthy and homogeneously dressed young people. It reminded me of Ben’s Chili Bowl. Ben’s is a DC institution that scaled up and cleaned up dramatically in the face of long lines of tourists and transplants striving for a taste of authentic local culture. (Oddly, the one thing Ben’s maintained for far too long was a mural of Bill Cosby.)
Like Ben’s or this burrito spot, DC and SF have become exceedingly clean. Seattle is following quickly behind and Portland is changing rapidly too. These places feel almost sanitized, stripped of what made them special and initially drew the developers with their boring boxes and yuppies with their boring clothes. Paradoxically, DC and SF share some of the worst and most restrictive zoning rules. In DC, for example, you can’t build a building taller than the U.S. Capitol. These rules are designed to preserve neighborhood feel, but also work to prevent developers from building more housing to satisfy increased demand, and thus contribute to outrageous housing costs and the corresponding displacement of poor brown and black people. But zoning laws aren’t the only factor to blame.
I am complicit in this sanitizing and displacement, or what you might call gentrification (though I think that’s a slippery word). I ate the burrito. I drank the pour-over coffee. I’m staying in the Mission with friends in the Tech Industry, and in DC I moved into a historically black neighborhood to save money on rent. I’m not exactly sure how to get out of this mess. I think we have to demand more of ourselves, but not in our capacity as individual consumers of housing or place. Rather we have to act politically to protect the reasons we care about where we live. For me, that’s about dense urban spaces full of public art and burritos and cheap and safe housing for the people making them. We have to pay deeper attention to where we are and what we care about.
next post: some reflections on burning man