In 2005, when I began research for my novel The Story of a Marriage, which takes place in the 1950s, I did not yet know in which part of San Francisco it would be set. I wanted a part of town obscure enough to the reader that it would feel fresh (and allow me my own inventions) yet still able to evoke the grandeur and beauty of my adopted city.
I picked the Sunset neighbourhood: the westernmost stretch of the city below Golden Gate Park. It seemed to me untouched either by “hipster” gentrification, the recent dotcom boom-and-bust or in fact the passage of history itself. I could walk the streets and still “see” what my characters once saw. I could travel in time with them.
It does not surprise me, therefore, that Joshua Amirthasingh’s photographic series Tales from the City, its name inspired by Armistead Maupin’s novels of 1970s San Francisco and onwards, shares nearly the same setting. The photos capture San Francisco’s old buildings and parks in sunlight and fog, both homes and palm trees, vintage cars and crashing waves, monuments and glittering wetlands — but hardly any people. You can make out a surfer in deep fog, a neon-lit walker on a rainy night, hikers and distant forms. But they are part of the scenery, and part of the romance Amirthasingh and I share with San Francisco: one can imagine being that person in the fog, by the shore, on the pier.
What is not on display is wealth. No tech bros in hoodies and expensive watches, or old mansions with newly gutted interiors, or venture capitalists holding bursting bottles of champagne, or robot taxis or signs of any of the companies that have brought change to the city — Apple, Facebook, Google, X — in the latest gold rush of start-up grandees and paper billionaires.
The media may cover them endlessly but Amirthasingh has ignored them. After all, head to a foggy midnight pier and you’ll find no tycoons there; they wouldn’t be able to get a signal. Waymo can’t reach Ocean Beach; the park is closed to auto traffic. Sunnyside isn’t on their radar, and they surely never restored a yellow 1960s Chevy Impala. Perhaps Amirthasingh loves in San Francisco what money cannot buy.
But I think, like me, he knowingly celebrates what was here before he arrived. His image of Pacifica pier is captioned “The Way Things Were”. More than easy nostalgia: a careful observation of the past still alive, still telling its stories. And many of these monuments to the past are, in fact, displays of wealth from much older generations — what we would call the old money of San Francisco.
In the background of one photo, for instance, we spot Coit Tower, built from a bequest by heiress Lillie Hitchcock Coit. Another features Crissy Field: a marshland filled in by the army in the 19th century, recently restored thanks to a generous donation from the Haas family — the old Levi Strauss jeans money. Even the Golden Gate bridge, prominent in Amirthasingh’s images, was only made possible through the financial assistance of Amadeo Giannini, founder of San Francisco’s Bank of America. All fortunes from 100 years ago or more, when being rich meant giving to the beauty of the city.
That sense of responsibility was passed on from philanthropists of the 19th century, such as Levi Strauss and Adolph Sutro, to Alma Spreckels and the Fleishhackers of the early 20th, who built museums and public swimming areas, to Rosalie Meyer Stern and her donation of Stern Grove, and on to the Fishers, Gettys and Miner Andersons of the new century.
Glimpses of these donations to the city are visible in Amirthasingh’s work not as foregrounded monuments but as a background we take for granted: rolling hills and cliffs by the sea and groves of redwood and museums and art deco towers in the distance. That is the wealth of the city — what the rich gave back. The tradition of donating a permanent addition to the city’s culture, however, stopped around the time Instagram appeared.
A lawyer told me that when she arrived in the 1980s, her law firm informed new employees they were to join the board of an arts or civic organisation; they were expected to be part of San Francisco, and they were expected to donate. But while early internet tycoons such as Yahoo’s Jerry Yang donated to the arts, tech billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have never made any significant contributions to the San Francisco cultural or natural world. Neither have less well-known titans. Nor have their well-paid employees.
They have, like all generations before, given to science, technology and medicine (after his donation, Zuckerberg’s name was added to the front of San Francisco General Hospital), but none has supported the city’s arts or nature in an enduring way.
Giving to the beauty of the city has either diminished in stature among the newly wealthy or else been dismissed entirely. Some have shown open disregard for the arts, such as Zuckerberg’s claim that artists and writers “overestimate the value” of their work. None has given parks or land. Perhaps it is simply out of style. Whatever the reason, those gifts have vanished.
That means Amirthasingh’s images are of a world that is passing away. “One More Look Back”, as one photo is labelled. A world we “transplants” took for granted on our arrival. But unless a later generation of wealth (perhaps the children of Thiel and Zuckerberg and Musk?) take up the mantle, there will be no more donations, as Lillie Hitchcock Coit’s bequest put it, “to be expended in an appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city which I have always loved”.
The views will be crowded by more start-up incubators and tinted-window tech buses. San Francisco will no longer be local journalist Herb Caen’s “Baghdad by the Bay”, a diverse and cosmopolitan city with a wild and bohemian spirit that has survived all the booms and busts.
And yet, looking at Amirthasingh’s photographs, one can still feel the romance of San Francisco. On mornings when a lone walker, like myself, might crest a foggy hill and think: nothing’s changed. It’s still the city I love.
One more look back.
‘Tales from the City’ by Joshua Amirthasingh is published by Nazraeli Press, nazraeli.com.
Andrew Sean Greer won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel ‘Less’. His most recent book is ‘Less is Lost’
