Infinite City

1) "Every place deserves an atlas, an atlas is at least implicit in every place, and to say that is to ask first of all what a place is. Places are leaky containers. They always refer beyond themselves, whether island or mainland, and can be imagined in various scales, from the drama of a back alley to transcontinental geopolitical forces and global climate. What we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces that cannot be delineated either by fences on the ground or by boundaries in the imagination—or by the perimeter of the map. Something is always coming from elsewhere, whether it's wind, water, immigrants, trade goods, or ideas. The local exists—an endemic species may evolve out of those circumstances, or the human equivalent—but it exists in relation, whether symbiotic with or sanctuary from the larger world. Pocatello, Idaho, has had its inventions and tragedies: a heartbreak that can be mapped out in six blocks, with bars and slammed doors and a bedroom; the tale of what happened to the lands of the Shoshone and Bannock; a gold rush; the larger forces of geology and climate and animal migration and watersheds. Petaluma, California, has its radical chicken farmers and Coast Miwok name and its atlas waiting to happen, as do Flint and Buffalo, Yellowknife and Chimayo. The cup of coffee in your hand has origins reaching across the region and the world. A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church's sphere or a hospital's intersections. An atlas is a collection of versions of a place, a compendium of perspectives, a snatching out of the infinite ether of potential versions a few that will be made concrete and visible. Every place deserves an atlas, but San Francisco is my place, and therefore the subject of this atlas, which springs from my perspective, with all its limits."

2) "A book is an elegant technique for folding a lot of surface area into a compact, convenient volume; a library is likewise a compounding of such volumes, a temple of compression of many worlds. A city itself strikes me at times as a sort of library, folding many phenomena into one dense space—and San Francisco has the second densest concentration of people among American cities, trailing only New York, a folding together of cosmologies and riches and poverties and possibilities."

3) "Such [musical] figures made the bay's eastern shore the most crucial site for the birth of what came to be known as the West Coast blues. Joining the feel and structure of Texas blues to the propulsive harmonies of swing jazz, the groups who played this style employed full horn sections rather than a lone harmonica, forging a music that at once recalled the rural past of ancestors brought to America in wooden slave boats and spoke to the urbane lifeways of people building steel warships in modern cities. The West Coast blues became, during the 1940s and early 1950s, one of the key forerunners of rock 'n' roll."

4) "Some streets function like a core sample through their cities. Fillmore Street runs through San Francisco's wealthiest neighborhood, Pacific Heights; drops into the gritty, African American Western Addition, known as the Fillmore District or just the Fillmore in its heyday; and then continues onward through the lower Haight, to end not far from upper Market Street and the Castro. Pacific Heights is sometimes called Specific Whites, but the 22 Fillmore bus line that traverses the 2.5-mile street and then goes on to cut through the Mission on its way to the Bayview has been nicknamed the 22-to-Life. The war between the states left its traces here, as did the Second World War, and the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the stale and ancient war that is racism, and various forms of freelance violence. As did a lot of potent music and spirituality that mostly went right, though at the Peoples Temple at Fillmore and Geary, it went terribly wrong."

5) "If any city can be understood phrenologically, it must be San Francisco, city of fourteen big bumps and countless smaller irregularities."