It has been said that all great cities of history have been built on bodies of water – Rome on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, London on the Thames, New York on the Hudson, Hamburg on the Elbe. If this is a criterion of a city’s greatness, surely San Francisco ranks in the first magnitude among cities of the world. For never was a metropolis more dominated by any natural feature than San Francisco
by its bay. In Rome, Paris, London, New York, Hamburg, once away from the water’s edge you quickly lose track of it in the buzzing swarm of the city’s interior. But San Francisco lies at the tip of a peninsula, and anywhere within the city’s forty-five square miles a view of the water is only a few steps away at most – to the head of the block or the roof of the building or the top of the hill. East of the peninsula’s central ridges the city slants toward the bay. All of the downtown district and the older residential areas lie within the valleys and hills of this eastward slope. The salt fragrance of the wind penetrates every neighborhood. The bass drones of the foghorn and the whistles of ships are as common as the sound of automobile horns in the streets. You can climb Twin Peaks and see several hundred square miles of bay spread around you like a glowing tapestry of light and color. More often the bay’s impact comes unexpectedly. Rounding a corner in the heart of the city, you come upon it suddenly in the distance between nearby houses, blue in the sun. Waiting for an elevator in a downtown building, you glance out the window and are startled to see a high swinging arc of the Bay Bridge and the white ferry passing the base of one of its towers. The bay seems always around you. It shines in the distance beyond the long rows of bulging bay windowed flats. It appears at the bottom of the streets that drop dizzily from from the city’s heights. It glows beyond the narrow, cluttered alleys of Chinatown. It hits you with a quick blow in the innards as you drive over a rise of Russian Hill and see its sudden gleam and sparkle between nearby trees. It comes to you as a series of brief, breath catching vignettes as you rise on the Powell cable car over Nob Hill and get successive glimpses of it at the ends of the cross streets – a shining shield of blue spanned by the giant bridge arching across the water to the cities and hills of the far shore. Read more at: http://www.fog-city.co (English)
and http://www.fog-city.de (German)
