I lived in San Francisco and the Bay Area for 13 years, much of it spent chronicling the rise of the internet. I was still in love with the city when I left to return home to New York in 2006. Now when I visit, I try not to die from heartbreak.
Yet it’s been more than a decade of change that is to blame. The modern-day San Francisco was years in the making, as Lincoln Mitchell shows in his fascinating new book, San Francisco Year Zero. Mitchell even pinpoints the year this new, less-improved SF was born: 1978.
That was the year the city absorbed the twin horrors of the murder-suicide of more than 900 people at Jonestown and then, twelve days later, the assassination of its mayor and a key member of the Board of Supervisors.
It’s Harvey Milk, the slain supervisor, whom the wider world remembers, but the impact of the murder of George Moscone, the mayor, on local politics was also profound and immediate. The city had elected a big-hearted progressive who won by promising to fight for the city’s neighborhoods.
His replacement was the moderate, business-friendly Diane Feinstein who, during her nine-year tenure as mayor, rubber-stamped practically every development project and proposed condo tower that made its way to her desk.
The book’s cast of characters is incredible, ranging from the charismatic Milk and the equally compelling Moscone, who puffs on a cigarette between pitches during a City Hall softball game, to the evil and awful.
Dan White was also a supervisor, elected at the same time as Milk, but resigned less than a year into the job. When Moscone wouldn’t let him change his mind about quitting, White snuck into City Hall through an open basement window to gun down both Moscone and Milk.
Sicker still was the “deranged” Jim Jones, as Mitchell describes him, a San Francisco transplant who founded the Peoples Temple and, in short order, used its largely African American membership to establish himself as a local political player.
The murder-suicide in Jonestown, the name that Jones immodestly had given the jungle dystopia he was establishing in Guyana, was a world tragedy but a decidedly local one. An area congressman who had traveled to Guyana on a fact-finding mission was among those murdered and, as Mitchell repeatedly reminds us, Black San Franciscans especially were likely to know people who died in what he describes as the “biggest murder-suicide in history.” Most of the victims were urged to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, or more accurately, Flavor Aid, a Kool-Aid knockoff.
Another strength of the book is the fuller picture of San Francisco that Mitchell, a historian who grew up in the city’s Cow Hollow neighborhood, paints. Its economy was in lousy shape in the 1970s and its population falling.
The city was home to nearly 100,000 fewer people than in 1950 and facing existential threats, from a murder rate two-and-one-half times higher than today to the loss of its baseball team. These were also the early days of punk which, Mitchell argues, was in no small part a fuck you to the city’s fading hippie scene. As Mitchell points out, the punk scene always remained on the fringes, but they were an important cultural signal. (And certainly one that now feels as nostalgic as the Summer of Love — in this new gilded age, is there any city less punk-rock than San Francisco?)
The parts of the book that chronicle the rise of punk are well reported; among those he interviews are Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedys, the city’s best-known and most enduring punk band. (In the early 1980s, they recorded a still-relevant counterpunch to the city’s Nazi and skinhead movement.)
The punk sections perhaps don’t feel substantial enough to merit inclusion in the book’s title, but they add context to the other subjects Mitchell tackles. Through the lens of politics, baseball, and music, it’s clear that the city was changing. The 21st-century San Francisco was beginning to emerge.
Murder shapes a city
San Francisco Year Zero is a work of history but also part memoir. Raised by a single mother, Mitchell was a seventh grader in 1978, a Jewish kid attending Catholic school. San Francisco was still a heavily Irish and Italian city then, but changing fast, and a large number of its residents didn’t like it. His science teacher broke the news about Moscone and Milk, prompting nasty comments by classmates glad that “the f*g” was dead. Mitchell the historian, who now lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University, also uncovers reports of police officers saying more or less the same.
The divisions splintering San Francisco went well beyond a hatred of gays. So politically polarized was the city throughout the 1970s that at least one person we meet in the book compares it to the tribal warfare that defines today’s national politics. The business and political elite and other straight white men recognized that diversity threatened their power.
But George Moscone, an Italian-American politician also from Cow Hollow, broke ranks. As mayor, he forged alliances with the gay community (he and Milk were close allies) and with people of color. On the other side of the divide was their murderer. White, a former policeman, came to represent San Franciscans who resented what was happening to their city.
1978 had been shaping up as a watershed year even before the murderous shocks of November. The year began with the swearing-in not just of Milk as the country’s first openly gay elected official (an “avowed homosexual,” as a New York Times news article described him), but also of the city’s first Chinese-American and African-American woman as supervisors. A few months later, the board approved a landmark civil rights bill that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment or housing. White cast the sole dissenting vote. (Statewide, voters also rejected a noxious ballot measure that would have banned gays and lesbians from working in public schools.)
Although not one of the three pillars in the title of Mitchell’s book, real estate played an important role that year shaping the city’s future. In June, voters in California passed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes that municipalities could collect from homeowners, thereby limiting a main revenue source for the state’s counties, cities, and schools — a major reason for the current housing crisis. At the local level, the assassination of Moscone elevated Dianne Feinstein, the Board of Supervisors president, to the mayor’s office, where she stayed for nine years. While pushing downtown development, Feinstein also continued her support for “downzoning” most of the city’s neighborhoods, locking in low density that has contributed mightily to the city’s inability to build new housing. There are other reasons for the city’s twinned housing-and-homelessness crisis, but the development fights of the 1970s that Mitchell recounts in his book were critical.
Salvation in orange and black
Amid the confusion and tribal warfare, Mitchell and his brother sought refuge in the 1978 Giants, a lovable, gravity-defying team that somehow remained in first place much of the season. Looking back, Mitchell shows how the team proved to be more than a mere sports story that year. So pitiful was attendance (under 700,000 in both 1976 and 1977) for a mediocre team playing uninspiring ball at Candlestick Park, a cold and inhospitable stadium that should never have been built, that Major League Baseball was threatening to allow a new owner to buy the team and move it to another city.
Moscone stepped in and hammered out a deal: the city had one more year to prove itself worthy of a big-league franchise and reverse the attendance decline. Still, it might not have worked had the team not drastically improved. And, as Mitchell lovingly recounts, the Giants were in for a shift of fortune. Just prior to the start of the season, they picked up pitching star Vida Blue from the Oakland A’s. Blue, who would start in that year’s All-Star game, had a terrific year and added much-needed swagger, with his first name “VIDA” stitched on the back of his jersey. Other Giants also had a strong season, including young slugger Mike Ivie, who that May hit a pinch-hit grand slam against the hated Dodgers that long-time fans still talk about dreamily.
The black-and-orange held on to first place through early August before fading to third, but Moscone’s deal held. The Giants drew more than a million more fans than the year before, putting an end to serious talk about a move — for the moment. The city went through more drama in 1992, nearly losing the team to Tampa Bay. But new owners promised a new privately financed ballpark where once there were a warren of warehouses, which has proven a central cog in the city’s 21st-century transformation, especially in its South of Market neighborhoods.
Year Zero is relatively short at 249 pages (not including footnotes) yet reading it can sometimes feel like homework. Mitchell’s tendency to repeat facts and observations, sometimes on the same page, is maddening. Nonetheless, the book is essential reading for newcomers and old-timers alike.
Mitchell left San Francisco when he was 22, and now only occasionally visits. In that way, his life is the mirror image of so many San Franciscans who grew up elsewhere but moved to the city as adults. Since 1980, the city has added roughly 200,000 residents and, even as the city is once again home to a mediocre baseball team (third place next year would be a miracle), it barely resembles the San Francisco of Mitchell’s childhood. To understand today’s San Francisco, one needs to recognize the long shadow cast by 1978. And it’s Mitchell who serves as the ideal person to tell that tragically rich and heart-breaking tale.