City of High Spirits

The delegates, too, may leave their hearts in San Francisco

Many Americans say they hate New York City, and New Yorkers love to loathe Los Angeles. Most people could find something unflattering to say about Boston, Washington or Chicago. But San Francisco is charmed. Just mention the city, and ordinary folks turn weak-kneed, as if recalling some perfect spring or long-lost romance.

San Francisco is beautiful, vivacious. San Francisco is physically dramatic. San Francisco is funky but clean, elegant but spunky. San Francisco is tolerant of crazes (beatniks, hippies, microchip venture capitalists), yet preserves the old (cable cars, Victorian follies). If an out-of-town churl dares suggest that the city may be too cute for its own good, he is politely ignored. But disparagement by outsiders is uncommon: ever since the Democrats announced last year that they would hold their convention in San Francisco, politicians and journalists have savored the prospect. The city's high spirits are contagious and self-justifying.

It has always been so. San Francisco was gay when that meant merry and blithe, back when its 49ers were gold prospectors, not football players. The city began as a boom town and never quite lost the founding giddiness. "San Francisco was zero in 1848, a Mexican village," says Kevin Starr, author of Americans and the California Dream. "And in 1870 it was the tenth-largest city in the United States." Ne'er-do-wells found themselves making fortunes on minerals or dry goods or prostitution. Young Yankees rode into town by the thousands, looking for adventure and gold. "It was never your average American city," Starr says. "San Francisco, right from the start, was a second chance, a new beginning."

Like America itself, in other words, but more urban, more hopped up, less buttoned down. San Francisco's mild but flighty climate must nurture eccentrics. In 1849, the city's commissioner of deeds resigned to become a singer-songwriter. Some years later, a circus geek called Oofty Goofty became a sidewalk S-M entrepreneur: he let passers-by cane him for a quarter or hit him with a baseball bat for four bits. When another local loon, the self-appointed Norton I, Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, died in 1880, 30,000 people (out of a population of 234,000) went to the funeral. A century later, a punk rocker named Jello Biafra ran for mayor and finished fourth among ten candidates. Rudyard Kipling wrote that San Francisco was "a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty." He liked it. Other American cities had their rambunctious phases, but San Francisco (pop. 706,000) never left its adolescence entirely behind.