Imperial San Francisco

My old friend from high school, “OG” Max, emailed from Chicago to recommend Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin. With nothing but a lazy Sunday awaiting me, I called City Lights to check if they had a copy and headed on down. Of course, having just gotten a check in the mail from my Grandma (and maybe some tax money from the gubment), I couldn’t help myself and picked up Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg, Reclaiming San Francisco, an anthology put together by City Lights themselves and John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said.

I tried to make conversation with the helpful woman at City Lights, but after making a conspiratorial joke about Walter Shorenstein and when it fell flat having to explain that I’m a nerd, finally admitted that “I can’t go around accusing the mayor of being an intellectual lightweight if I’m not keeping up on my own research.” She suggested that I might take a look at submitting a thing or two to “Instant City” — making me feel guilty for not picking that off the “San Francisco, Left Coast” shelf, too.

Back to Imperial. It’s a fantasticly holisitic look at geography, history, politics and economy that takes California’s claims on new Arcadia, the 49ers’ appropriation of the title Argonauts and San Francisco’s own aspirations of becoming the Rome of the West and turns them on their heads, pointing to the earth scorching and colonial warfare that has surrounded megalopoli since the dawn of civilization. Of particular interest, which I haven’t gotten to, is the histories of the family dynasties enriched by mining and empowered by corruption that have shaped the myths and the landscape.

While I’m not sure I’m entirely on board with his central thesis, his style is surprisingly engaging for an academic tome, probably owing to his background as a reporter for print and television before getting a PhD from Berkeley in Geography. He’s also working on an Imperial Manhattan for that other city, but what I’m wondering is how he’s going to deal with the rise of Los Angeles after the second world war, eclipsing the light of San Francisco’s western star.