A sense of place

(This post will be one of several about writing about place)

All cities have their mysteries, but it takes a while to find them. In Philadelphia's Washington Square, I know there's a soldier's ghost; in Queens Village, I can feel the slave graveyard, underground. In San Francisco, I'm figuring it out, one day at a time-- in search of what writer call "atmosphere."   

I first bought my condo in Mission Bay during the real estate fall-out. 

I think what sold me was the tiny bay or canal a few steps away. Especially the houseboats, which, to me, evoke the boat-dwellers of Dickens in Our Mutual Friend. Not many, but they glow at night, their inhabitants eschew shades; I can see them eating dinner.  A miniature city with a city, or a trace of what existed before Silicon Valley, before the antiseptic high-rises, before the coffee bars and power yoga, even before the dog-mania that seems to infect all of San Francisco. Not far, there's the South Beach Yacht Club, with its charming harbor, hundred of white boats.  

But truth is, I am living on landfill. It is all artificial, every bit of it, man-made.

My neighborhood is part of San Francisco's complicated history of filling up what were bays and lakes, to make room for shipbuilding, commerce. Two hundred years ago, South Beach was a warehousing district. The "real" Mission Bay was a body of water extending from the narrow creek that I walk along to over to Folsom Street.  Fresh water, yes, fresh, descended from nearby Potrero Hill. By the 1970s, the area had fallen into typical urban decay, ruined warehouses, open storage yards, unused streets—and only "development" rescued it.    

So, San Francisco was a city of water; and men made it what they wanted. Near Civic Center, where there was once was a lake, the seagulls hover: only they sense what's beneath San Francisco's inscrutable sidewalks.