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Memoir of an Elderly Enfant Terrible The former architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle--a beloved figure in the Bay Area--reflects on four decades of activist journalism. "I rejoice to concur with the common reader," intoned Dr. Johnson in the eighteenth century; and Virginia Woolf concurred with him in the twentieth. Not me. When I became architecture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle 40 years ago, my assignment from the legendary editor Scott Newhall was to make our common readers as uncommon as possible. That meant 
rousing them from a pleasant environmental torpor--a complacency
bred of living in one of the loveliest places on Earth--and enlisting
them in a battle to protect San Francisco, and indeed all of northern
California, from a variety of villains: real estate sharks, the
construction industry and its unions, venal politicians, bureaucrats,
brutal highway engineers, the automobile lobby, and--in some ways
worst of all--incompetent architects and invertebrate planners who
were wrecking the Bay Area before our eyes.So my job was to raise hell. For this there is no finer instrument than a daily metropolitan newspaper. A. J. Liebling said that a free press is a fine thing if you happen to own one; and so far as architecture and natural environment were concerned, I owned one for a third of a century. I answered only to Newhall, and later to Bill German, although other editors also read my copy, partly to stave off libel suits. In spite of a plethora of lawyers' letters from hapless architects and developers, only one suit ever came to court, over a paltry two million bucks sought by the perpetrator of a pseudo-historic waterfront on Pier 39, a prime site below Telegraph Hill that I mildly described as "Corn. Kitsch. Schlock. Honky-tonk. Dreck. Schmaltz. Merde." The last especially nettled him, because he understood French. "Don't worry, Allan," German deadpanned. "If we lose the trial, the Chronicle will pay half." Of course we won on First Amendment grounds; and I incidentally learned from the judge's ruling that even the harshest architecture criticism can't surpass the ferocity of restaurant reviews that denounce dishes as "Trout à la Green Death" and "Chicken Bubonic Plague." The larger lesson is that outraged criticism, especially when leavened by humorous scorn, is very good for the newspaper business. For that reason my work almost always appeared in the main news section--often on page one--and very rarely in the so-called "arts" section, whose editor (who should've been a buyer at Macy's) once queried the name Bernini with the laconic phrase "Who he?" But the top editors never believed in dumbing-down my prose to assuage common readers. Rather, the aim was to elevate them--more precisely, to educate them--to an inspired level of environmental awareness worthy of Yosemite or the Golden Gate Bridge. In this way activist criticism provided a political base for the Chronicle's successful campaigns to redesign major projects such as the two-mile-long spans of the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge across the lower bay, the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco, and reductions in height and bulk of a downtown shopping center at Fifth and Market Streets. Still more significant, perhaps, was the discarding of projects so ugly and stupid that they were beyond improvement and could only be killed. The greatest of those victories was the halting of freeway construction throughout the city. Among other things, it saved Golden Gate Park from a six-laner--a veritable monoxide alley--that would have destroyed 300 century-old trees. Sometimes, by today's ethical standards, we acted high-handedly. The hack engineers of the Golden Gate Bridge District (not the superb designers of the original span, but a bunch of real palookas) proposed to spoil its lines with rectangular "arches" carrying traffic signals that supposedly would have made it easier to reverse lanes at rush hour. I told Newhall I would write a piece condemning this folly, but he thought it wasn't worth the effort. "Go down to the bridge commission tomorrow," he said, "and tell them we don't like it." So I sauntered into the commission meeting and signed up to speak like any citizen. When my turn came, I said, "I am here on behalf of the editors of the Chronicle, and we tell you not to do this thing. And if you do it, we shall not rest until you undo it." The chairman threw down his pencil and asked, "Anyone else wish to testify? I guess we aren't going to build the arches." Intimidation in any guise is hard to forgive. It was one of the practices of the old Hearst newspapers, including the Chronicle's mortal enemy, the San Francisco Examiner. Looking backward, my chagrin is tempered with irony, for the Hearst Corporation has now swallowed the Chronicle, and the newspaper for many reasons will never be the same again. But a lively episode in journalism has ended, perhaps not altogether for the worse, because the Chronicle had already lost much of its spirit before it was sold to Hearst. In any event, I never again behaved so imperiously, even in the name of the "public good." Yet to the end I retained what younger people at the Chronicle today call an "aristocratic" or "patrician" approach to newspapering. That hasn't been helped by a few cavalier remarks for which I am still chided by friends in the City Room. Back in the 1980s, before there was much talk about "edge cities," I proposed to write a big series on what was happening to Contra Costa County across the bay, where sprawl had devastated some of the finest landscape in the country, beneath Mount Diablo. But the powers that be at the Chronicle, who wanted to run the piece before years had passed (I was always insouciant about deadlines), suggested that I do only the lead articles and that a team of writers should attack various problems of uncontrolled growth, such as air pollution and overcrowded schools. Some of the paper's best reporters--including Carl Nolte, who hit upon the title "Contra Costopolis" for the whole series--assumed much of the burden and did an excellent job. When someone asked how I felt about collaborating with confreres since I never had done that before, I wickedly said, "It's like hitching Secretariat with dray horses." No one speaks that way anymore. Nowadays, when I slip into the Chronicle offices as a wraith of a bygone era, young men and women--so earnest, ambitious, badly dressed, and inept at writing--ask me how to snag a Pulitzer, as if it were a brass ring on a merry-go-round. Naturally these graduates of journalism schools (and not liberal arts colleges) wish to be free to express their great thoughts and perfect their inimitable styles so that their writing will be unique. Try being excellent, I say, then you'll be in a class by yourself. |
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