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We’re excited to announce the launch of “Voices from the Hill” a podcast dedicated to showcasing the incredible talent right here in our literary backyard. As a proud member of this vibrant community, Telegraph Hill Arts & Literature believes our local authors deserve a platform to share not just their published works, but the stories behind them.
Welcome to Voices From the Hill, celebrating the vibrant literary voices of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Jennifer Barone, along with Joseph Carboni, owner of Telegraph Hill Books. Each episode, we sit down with a local author to explore their creative process, inspirations, and the unique stories that shape our community.
Jennifer:Today, I'm excited to be joined by Gary Kamiya, journalist, historian, and author of Cool Gray City of Love, 49 views of San Francisco, and Spirits of San Francisco, voyages through the unknown city with artist Paul Madonna. His portals of the past column appears in the examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. We'll talk about his journey as a writer, creative rituals, and what inspires him to live and write in the Bay Area. So let's dive in.
Jennifer:Gary Kamiya, welcome to Voices on the Hill. We're so excited to have you today. You're probably the most perfect person to kick off this podcast being that you're a local North Beacher. And you've spent so many years writing about the city as well as traveling and journeying down all the little corridors. So we can't wait to hear what you have in store for us. So, Gary, I invite you to please read, I think you've picked out a passage from your book, Cool Grey City of Love, and tell us why it holds special meaning for you as well.
Gary:Well, happy to and it's very nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me. This chapter is chapter 21 from Cool Grey City of Love. It's called the Puertozuela , which I will explain when I read it. But I just chose this as a very short chapter, and I love wandering around and exploring things in cities and elsewhere. And the more odd, obscure, sometimes ugly, utilitarian, offbeat, especially if they have a really interesting history, the better. And the the greater the juxtaposition is between the the banality or the ordinariness and the the deep history sometimes the more fascinating. And this place that I'm gonna talk about, the Puertozuela , was very close to where I used to live in this in the chat passage I described living there. I don't live in that area anymore, but I lived on Nob Hill for many years before moving back to North Beach where I live now. So this was right near where I raised my family and lived for close to twenty years.
Gary:This chapter is called the Puertozuela , and every chapter has an intersection and a little small illustration. This illustration shows a sign that says, New Russian Hill Market, Groceries and Liquors. And the intersection is Pacific Avenue and Jones Street. From my office on the western slope of Telegraph Hill, I can see the saddle, the low point where Knob and Russian Hills meet. It's a thousand yards away, marked by a fortuitously lurid crimson apartment building on Pacific Avenue just below Jones Street. I have lived near that pass through the hills for more than a quarter of a century. The very first day I met my wife's two year old son, I pushed him up Pacific in a stroller. I've sweated up that damn hill in my bike thousands of times. An Asian man who lives in a little bungalow set back from the street sits on the sidewalk in his wheelchair on sunny days, smoking a cigarette. He always says, you're halfway there, as I pedal past him.
Gary:One of the benefits of riding a bike in San Francisco is that you end up following in the footsteps of everyone who has ever lived here from the Yalamu to the Spanish to the Mexicans to the forty niners to the Beats. Your leg muscles are an infallible guide to the past. People have been avoiding the hills since time began.
Gary:Every low point in San Francisco's terrain collects history the way a fence in the desert collects tumbleweeds and the saddle at Pacific And Jones has probably collected the most of all. According to Zoeff Eldridge, a leading historian of early San Francisco, the Spanish called it the puerto suelo, or Low Pass. Puertozuela for short. The llamo must have traveled it. When Anza took his cryptic for first tour of the Eastern Hills, he probably spurred his charger through the Puertozuela . San Francisco's first street, a muddy path angled up toward the pass. William Richardson may have ridden over it on his way to the Presidio. Anyone on the Northern Side of the cove who wanted to get the other side of Knob or Russian Hills would have taken it. The crowds that came to see San Francisco's first legal hanging in 1852, somewhere around Vallejo and Leavenworth, would have walked up it.
Gary:For decades, a little grocery called the New Russian Hill Market has stood in the Puertozuela on the Northeast Corner of Pacific And Jones. When I first moved on to Jackson Street in 1984 and for years thereafter, it was run by three elderly Italian brothers, one of whom lived in the apartment above it. The store must have been there essentially unchanged since the nineteen thirties or nineteen forties. The place was like something out of Dickens' old curiosity shop. It was absolutely crammed with odds and ends of homey merchandise. Great bunches of dried red peppers tied with string hanging above the counter, salamis and cheeses randomly piled up, bottles of wine lurking in recesses where they had been gathering dust for decades, yellowing posters for Sam Spade whiskeys like Four Roses and Kessler smooth as silk, pinned up on the ceiling. The store was so old it had no refrigeration. The brothers kept their produce, milk, and perishable goods and ancient built in wooden icebox units with heavy metal handles on their doors. Even though he knew they were Italians from Liguria, I think, like many San Francisco Italians, my cousin and I called the old geezers the Russians after the sign on the store. After a while, we actually started to think of them as Russians.
Gary:One day, we found one of the Russians, a skinny guy with a thin mustache and a nervous face, crying. We asked him what had happened. He told us his brother, was his name Sal, who had fat spatula fingers and always wore a wide tie that only went down his shirt about six inches, had passed away. We worked together twelve hours a day. Hell, I spent more time with him than I did with my wife, the old man told us shaking his head as he rang up a loaf of bread. The oldest of the brothers or maybe he was a cousin, a smiling 90 year old fellow who stood in the corner all day and spoke almost no English, died soon after, slipping gently down to the floor at a dance at the Italian American Athletic Club in North Beach. That's the way to go, said the skinny brother, talking to the girls with a glass of red wine in his hand. A year or two later, he sold the business to a Palestinian family who took out the ancient ice boxes and put in modern refrigerators. In a world class exam example of poor marketing, they briefly taped a postcard of a kefir wearing youth throwing a rock next to the cash register.
Gary:For years, a large painting of the corner of Pacific And Jones hung somewhere in the San Francisco Center, the weathered new Russian Hill market sign prominently visible. It was an odd painting because aside from the predator Zuela, which less than a dozen people have ever heard of, there was nothing particularly noteworthy about this intersection. It looks down on the Bay Bridge into Chinatown, but so does every other street on top of Knob Hill, and they're all a lot prettier than gray, utilitarian Pacific. Maybe someone realized that because I couldn't find the painting when I went looking for it the other day. As for the latest version of the new Russian Hill market, it went out of business a few months ago and was boarded up, but it's now reopened. The Puertozuela is still there, sparing San Franciscans legs and lungs as it has for five thousand years.
Jennifer:Wonderful. I get from your work that you really love to find these very unusual little nooks and crannies and factoids that you just come upon in your wanderings and your daily life. Do you have a special place in North Beach since that's where we are right now?
Gary:Oh boy.
Jennifer:That maybe I wanna say that maybe like a tourist guidebook is not gonna know and an average person who even lives here many years might not know.
Gary:Yes. Well, actually my good friend John Law, who's a legend of the underground, was one of the founders of Burning Man and has been involved with urban exploration and many other deep urban dives and various he was the one of the founders of the cacophony society was involved with the suicide club and knows an incredible amount of unusual things about San Francisco. So in my chapter on North Beach, I actually was saying things my chapter on Telegraph Hill in Culbers City of Love, I talk about a man who just decided to get away from it all by building a house in a hidden corner of Telegraph Hill where he successfully lived for years. So I was talking about that with John a couple months ago, and he took me up and showed me where it was. And it's think you you get it off.
Gary:I believe it was the Filbert Steps going down, heading east, of course, and off to the left there. I'm not gonna give away the exact location because I don't want to encourage people to trespass. And there's nothing really to see. There's no remnants of it. But this guy found a kind of a glitch in the city planning.
Gary:If I remember correctly, this piece of land maybe was owned by, like, PG and E or something, and it wasn't really under the control of the city. And he was able to build this structure that no one could see. And I can't remember what he did about power and whether I think he might have just used a pail to go to the bathroom or something. But he successfully lived up there for a number of years. It was kind of a role model in a way that I think we all the little child in all of us sort of dreams of being able to escape, not pay any rent, and just have this kind secret hidden existence.
Gary:So that was a that was a very fun thing to see right in the heart of, you know, a place that I walk through, you know, sometimes five times a day, and just to think that there is this really amazing middle story that was attached to it.
Jennifer:Speaking of the inner child and the joys of adventure, when you first walked in, we started talking about this five day urban camping trek that you did across San Francisco where you were sleeping outdoors, not in hotels, not in hostels. What was the strangest or most magical moment from that experiment?
Gary:Yeah. That was really fun. That was a piece I did for Will Hurst's Alta Magazine and ran as a serial. So it was fairly long. It had to be long because there's so many stories to tell when you walk completely.
Gary:I walked totally almost the entire circumference of the city pretty much going starting from North Beach Coit Tower, and then going south and just going around the the city that way. We're going and ending up going through Candlestick Park and or what used to be Candlestick Park and down to the Southern Border and then all the way across up to Glen Canyon and then out to the beach up to Sutro The Park and then back along the Northern Waterfront which I decided to do it that way because I know it be coming home and I wanted the most spectacular part of the walk which is of course the Northern Waterfront to be the last part. Yeah. And there was just no end of odd adventures of probably the most memorable in some ways was the very first night, which I spent on a very obscure hill that another great urban explorer and expert in San Francisco, Chris Carlson, who was the founder of Critical Mass and a great guy and and knows a lot about San Francisco. And I was talking to him and kinda said, where should I spend my first night?
Gary:You know, because it was an interesting choice where I wanted to sleep because there was hedonism, creature comforts, as well as safety and beauty, all these factors I tried to factor in. And the creature comforts part was that I was not roughing it except sleeping out. I didn't have a tent. I was sleeping out under the stars on a on a sleeping pad. But I wanted to be able to go to a get a good dinner and have a drink.
Gary:So ideally, I was trying to find both a restaurant and a bar that was within walking distance wherever wherever I was going to sleep. And Chris suggested this wonderful little known vestigial hill called Irish Hill, which is over by Dogpatch by Twentieth in Illinois right next to the what is now Restoration Hardware and which is part of the old beautiful old Dickensian factories in that whole Pier 70 Forest City development, which is, you know, the most magnificent sort of Victorian era factories in San Francisco. And there's this odd little stump of a hill which has a deep rich history going all the way back to the Goldrush days. And it was in fact inhabited by many Irish and was this roistering drunken. They'd have fist fights and the winner would get a pail of beer.
Gary:And it was just and you'd have to walk up like 60 steps to this hill. And then they worked in the shipyards. And it fell. Everyone left. It just became this middle forgotten place, and then gradually it got cut down more and more, so it barely exists now.
Gary:Still about 60 feet high, maybe. And but it's obvious. It's only a hundred, two hundred yards long. It's a serpentinite, if I recall, of the rock that it's made out of. And it's kind of scraggly, and there's this little parking lot, and you have to kinda sneak into it.
Gary:But Chris suggested that turned out to be the absolutely perfect place. And I scouted each one of my sleeping places. I wasn't stupid enough to just wander out with my backpack and like sleep where I got tired because that would not have been wise. And so just waking up in the middle of the night and lying there and looking at these like little grasses blowing in front of my face and seeing the downtown in the distance and that restoration hardware building and you'd see sort of security guards coming and going and see people driving around in the distance and then in the middle of the night completely silent and just you know wondering if you know what was gonna happen and I didn't feel like I got any sleep at all. It was an oddest feeling.
Gary:Like, I sit and when you sleep out in the city, when you're none of this was exactly with permission. So, you know, I sort of didn't wanna know how legal any of this was. But the when I so you wake up early when the light that first light and you pretty much get dressed and pull get out of your sleeping bag and, you know, remove all the evidence of whatever it was you've done. And the I I didn't feel that I'd even slept one minute. And then I went down in in Dogpatch, there's a great little coffee shop there.
Gary:And it's a very hip neighborhood now And having my coffee, I had this great burst of euphoria and realized somehow mysteriously I actually somehow managed to get enough sleep somehow to function. So that was a great that whole night and then the subsequent morning. And then that next day was an unbelievable like 16 or 17 mile walk. So I think the first night you do something like that is probably the most memorable.
Jennifer:Did you get more sleep like in the day?
Gary:No, mean actually oddly enough I functioned fine. It was one of those odd things every now and then you don't feel like you slept and there's different stages of sleep and if you fall into deep sleep even for a relatively brief time you could actually get enough sleep so that must have been what happened to me.
Jennifer:Did you see any unusual animals because like San Francisco as urban as it is a lot of wild animals.
Gary:Yeah. Well, where I live now just you know right up the hill from this from this wonderful bookstore. I live up on Calhoun Terrace up near the top of Union and Montgomery. There's coyotes just so many coyotes around there. I was walking with my daughter's little tiny chihuahua like dog on on a leash and up near right right near the corner of Union.
Gary:I looked up, saw a big coyote walking right down the street as bold as you please. I didn't think too much of it. Then I looked over and then there was a second coyote. And then looked over then there was a third coyote and the third coyote kind of went past us and then began to come back and this little chihuahua dog is the type of dog that that's a nice tidbit for a coyote.
Jennifer:It's a star.
Gary:So grabbed her and picked her up and sort of advanced towards the coyote and then they ran off. But they were definitely like, there was a bit of reckless eyeballing going
Jennifer:They're wild.
Gary:Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot. But I didn't see so much on that The Urban Backpack was I'm not You know, I heard them in Glen Canyon, which was my second night. That's full of wildlife that has coyotes and owls and foxes all kinds of animals like that. I was aware that there was wild animals there, but they didn't bother me.
Gary:And then the third night at the beach, just lots of seagulls. Yeah. And so the final night, only wildlife were like a bunch of teenage girls that were having a little get together at like eleven at night. They like 10 feet above me at that parapet wall at Sutro's old castle up there, Sutro Heights Park. And so I heard them giggling and laughing as I was trying to go to sleep so that it was a it a great adventure was a lot of fun
Jennifer:well I read that you said that you wanted to accept all of San Francisco when you were writing Cool Gray City of Love, even its rough edges and forgotten places. We talked a lot about some beautiful spots and some unusual spots, but what part of the city most that most people dismiss or ignore or find you know are afraid to go into that you find deeply beautiful in some way?
Gary:Yeah. Yeah. Well, obviously I'm a journalist and I've been reporting on San Francisco as well as celebrating it for my whole journalistic career or much of it when I was executive editor of San Francisco Magazine. So and as a historian, you know, if you don't include everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, you're not doing your job. So, yeah, I've absolutely wanted to include all of it.
Gary:You know, the not just the triumph triumphant success stories, but the the miserable failures, the Western edition debacle that resulted in the displacement of a large percentage of San Franciscans African American community. Certainly, area, the neighborhood that even to this day is the most notorious, feared, despised, used by Fox News and and right wing media outlets as a cautionary tale of the calabitous failures of San Francisco's liberal approach to governance and social issues is The Tenderloin, of course. And and, you know, it's not that all of those criticisms are wrong in every way. The Tenderloin is a severely troubled area and has enormous problems. But it also has incredible fascination.
Gary:And without wishing to sugarcoat, know, some of the problems there and a lot of the really troubled people there, There's also some very deep humanity community and feeling of of kind of camaraderie. I wrote a piece about the Tenderloin for San Francisco Magazine when I went into a now sadly vanished bar which was actually listed by Esquire Magazine as the greatest bar in either the world or or San Francisco. The Twenty One Club which used to stand right on the corner of Turk And Taylor, which is kinda like Ground zero of the Tenderloin. And I went in there a few times and I think I described it in the San Francisco Magazine piece as the people in that bar seemed like a bunch of old worn out stuffed animals that they were just like they were they had each other's backs and it was a it there was this feeling there was a little shelter from the storm. There was this great bartender named Frankie.
Gary:I think he was a Filipino guy. And it was really a special unique atmosphere. And then I'm sure some bad stuff probably happened with the twenty one club too. But yeah, the Tenderloin has this incredibly rich history. So of course, above that added to my fascination with it because it was actually it's been up and down and up and down.
Gary:I mean, was actually large large parts of it were quite swanky believe it or not at at various times in San Francisco's history and then it went on this long downward trajectory. But yeah, the Tenderloin is continues to be a fascinating neighborhood. The Bayview as well. You know, have a chapter wandering around out in the old abandoned shipyards which I somehow got into. Mean, I don't think I could do it anymore.
Gary:And I got in there with my bike, drove in somehow and, you know, was exploring all these buildings much of which many of which are like filled with like radioactive waste and and they're kind of extraordinary, a lot of the buildings out there. And then that was of course, then you reflect on the shipyards, the the Hunters Point Shipyard, was this, you know, this brought African American people into San Francisco in large for the first time. So another fascinating area. But yeah, there's there's no no end of the you know the richness of both the black and white and dark and bright histories of the city.
Jennifer:San Francisco is a character in your work obviously, but for your personal writing practice and what keeps you inspired, do you have rituals, habits, or spaces, or places that you love to write that give that inspire you? Like, you have a favorite cafe or a favorite bench that you like to go to?
Gary:Or Mhmm.
Jennifer:Where do you connect with other writers too?
Gary:Yeah. No. I'm one of those writers, and every writer has their own practice and there's no right or wrong for any of it. I'm somebody that very contentedly sits at my dining room table in my apartment and I'm lucky enough to it has this, like, cosmically insane view out over the bay and Bay Bridge. Because Calhoun I actually write about Calhoun Terrace in my latest book, Spirits of San Francisco.
Gary:Weirdly enough, have the the cover of that book almost shows where I live now, and I wrote that book before I lived there. Now the weird thing is Cool Gray City of Love, that cover, it also shows the apartment I lived in before that, also before I lived there. So it's really odd. It's as if I was anticipating when I was writing these books, I didn't know, you know, Paul Madonna and I chose the the cover of Spirits. That's the view from Calhoun Terrace.
Gary:But anyway, to answer your question, I I would like to write at home. And I I have lots of writer friends and artists and musician friends and like to hang out with them, but I don't it's I don't have a regular kind of writing circle that I hang out in that has anything to do with my creative process. And I think I just in terms of inspiration, San Francisco is a I just love to walk it. And I'm not walking I walk usually about two and a half two to three hours a day, usually with my dog, mostly for health. Just to you know, I can't really run anymore because I have artificial knees, so I have to walk as an exercise.
Gary:And I don't do it to find inspiration. I just do it to walk. But the inspiration sort of seeps into you. And San Francisco is such a magnificent physical location. In particular, the the topography of it is really unique.
Gary:I mean, every city has so many aspects that make it different from every other city, good and bad. But San Francisco, I can having traveled a lot in the world, this is one of the great topographies of any city that there is. Up there with Rio and Istanbul. I haven't been to Cape Town, but you know there's this is a incredible place in the world. And my usual walk is I just go and drive down to Fort Mason where you can park and then you just can walk for hours after the Golden Gate Bridge without ever walking in traffic.
Gary:That's it's so easy and it's like a New Yorker would die for the ability to do something like that. And yeah. So that that just is a soul enriching thing to do. And and then But when I'm working specifically on a chapter or on I I know that I'm doing something specific about San Francisco. Yeah.
Gary:I'll go there and wander around when Paul Madonna and I were doing our last book together, Spirits of San Francisco, we would go on little explorations and go out and, you know, sneak into places and then we there's a great virtue of getting old. You can get away with a lot of things. And when I was walking by myself with my dog, an old man with a dog, what's wrong with that? I'm not trespassing, I'm just confused. Paul and I did get rather unceremoniously thrown out of the the Pier 70 area, which would have been closed down.
Gary:But we had we had a lot of fun doing that. So yeah. So it's it's really fun to to aim the exploration specifically at something and go out and, you know, soak in the ambiance and and, you know, do the specific research into a into a given area. I used to love doing that when I was writing my column portals of the past, which I'm not doing anymore. I think you said it is running there.
Gary:Stopped running a couple of years ago. But I'm happy not to have that damn deadline coming up again and again over my head. But I have to admit I miss sometimes. I miss the deadline and I miss the the knowledge and the, you know, the challenge of coming up with, you know, finding a middle corner of the city to write about. So it's it's it's a great thing to be forced to do something fun.
Jennifer:Well, what's next for you? What do you have on the horizon? What is your next project that you're excited about? Can you
Gary:share a little bit about that? Yeah. Well, I'm I'm a generalist as I say. So I've been working on a huge piece about actually the war in Gaza for my substack which is called KEMEA Unlimited. But I'll that may appear in another magazine so that I've been working in that for quite a long time now and it's actually taken me away from and the reason I'm interested in that among for many reasons, but I I was I headed our Middle East coverage when I was at salon.com.
Gary:Was one of the founders of Salon. So that's a subject I know a lot about and it's obviously a terrible, an awful, horrendous catastrophe. So that I've been working on. And but when I finally do manage to get that project done. And I've also been doing a lot of criticism of local arts and opera and music and art exhibitions and jazz and different things for my substack.
Gary:But I have two more San Francisco projects that are in the works. One is actually expanding that urban backpack piece which ran at fairly good length in Alta. It is five part serial. I think it was 11 or 12,000 words, but I'm gonna expand it significantly because it's, you know, really could become an even more fascinating tale as a short book. And then the the big San Francisco project will be what would be kind of a unique kind of history.
Gary:It would be a new history of San Francisco that where I would write a top through historical line like 30,000 feet. Here's you know, what happened with the ex discovery of of by the European discovery of of California, the native people, the Spanish, the Mexicans, the entire history of the city from a just an orthodox historical perspective. But that would only be like the metaphor I have for it is that would be the string and then there would be all these pearls that would be on the string. Those pearls would be some of the many many of the hundreds of deep dives I've done into specific areas of San Francisco history mostly in my column Portals of the Past, but also pieces I've did did for other magazines. And I'm excited about that because it's a new way of doing history because you you get both the overall perspective, the big story, but then you get really deep dives that a normal history book would not have.
Gary:They're not gonna necessarily say, oh, there were these peace riots after World War two. Or, you know, what about that mysterious blimp that disappeared, you know, and the crude vanished and were never found and bumped down and I know I probably wouldn't use that because it's you know it's so weird and wonderful but it doesn't necessarily tell a historical tale. But there's so many stories that that are that are great narrative stories that are also reveal so much about the city. You know, the fact that there used to be these regular ships that would sail with bands and buffets and, you know, fancy dining rooms from San Francisco to Los Angeles. You could take sunset cruises to spend the night.
Gary:And it was affordable. They competed with the railroads. There's just so many odd interesting Bring that back. I know.
Jennifer:That's good. I would go
Gary:on it. I know. Don't know if they could ever make it as affordable as it once was because it really was like not that expensive. There's just you know an endless plethora of these illuminating stories. So I'm really looking forward to getting to that that project and and hopefully we'll get that both of those projects done fairly soon I can't put up exact time on it but I'm I'm gonna turn my attention to those as soon as I can.
Jennifer:Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us. Thank you for sharing also the excerpt from your book, Cool Grey City of Love and Spirits of San Francisco with Tom Madonna. So amazing. It's been just a pleasure to listen to you, to get to know you, get to know your work, and to share that with everybody. So for listeners who'd like to learn more, even more about Gary Kamiya and his work, you can visit GaryKamiya.com and definitely go to his Substack Kamiya Unlimited and find his books over at Telegraph Hill Books.
Jennifer:Thank you so much, Gary.
Gary:Thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed it.
Jennifer:It's been a pleasure.
Jennifer:This podcast is brought to you by Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review. Visit tellhighlit.org to find out about our local events such as author talks, writing workshops, and more. Consider making a donation to support our public programs.
Jennifer:If you are a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out to us at submissions@tellhighlit.org. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm Jennifer Barone along with Joseph Carbone at Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. And this has been Voices from the Hill.
Jennifer:Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, stay inspired, and come visit us at Telegraph Hill Books in North Beach, San Francisco.