City of High Spirits

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San Francisco is exceedingly pleased with its eclectic self. But worldliness, when it is crammed into the tip of a cramped peninsula, can take on a parochial cast.

Home-town pride produces a civic-mindedness that borders on the obsessive. In the Potrero Hill neighborhood, a builder wants to put up some stores on a pizza shop's back lot. A petition drive and local media brouhaha have deterred him. Why?

Because two goats live in the lot; because it is San Franscisco. "There are so many community watchdogs," says Robert Pritikin, an advertising executive and inn owner, "so many officious little rich ladies, so many intensely worried lawyers, that if some city official dares steal a postage stamp, it will be on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. " It is also true that beneath its mellow exterior, San Francisco has an edgy streak, an undercurrent of jitters. Perhaps it is because of the minor temblors that occasionally rattle the city, raising fears of a 1906 redux. Perhaps it is because many people come to San Francisco to flee their pasts. Whatever the reason, a great many San Franciscans are unable to go with the flow. "There's an inordinate number of people with serious mental-health problems," says Social Services Director Edwin Sarsfield. The Zodiac killer, who claims in letters that he murdered 37 people in the '60s and '70s, was never caught. Sara Jane Moore tried to shoot Gerald Ford in San Francisco. The Symbionese Liberation Army was nurtured there. Dan White, the baked-potato vendor and former city supervisor, shot and killed Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in city hall. Every couple of weeks or so, someone leaps off the Golden Gate Bridge into the deep blue sea. The city suicide rate is half again as high as the nation's.

But for every leaper, there are scores of San Franciscans who believe they have found the heavenly city. The reasons are unusually plain. There is the rich, Hopperesque sunlight. There is the cooling fog. And the sea breezes skittering up and down the hills. And the abounding good will. If San Francisco insists on delighting in itself, and even showing off — with the All-Star Game this week, the Democrats next and the Super Bowl come winter — 1984 is the year it deserves to be indulged.