Exploring some of the Catacombs of San Francisco

I am inquisitive by nature, my parents imbued me with the urge to quest.  My father also trained me to be a leader and a technician, which my college tutors reframed into being a scientist.

I was mostly living in San Francisco during my mid-life crisis thirties.  Single, secure in employment, earning too much money compared to the prior two years of graduate school in Tucson.  I ran across a once in a lifetime deal for living quarters.



The Stanford Court Apartments had had changed hands and the new owners were phasing out existing tenants over a 2-year period.

In the meantime they were offering one-year rentals at reasonable rates.  It was still steep – for me.  I enlisted my parents, who were visiting San Francisco once a month anyway and had been thinking about having an apartment in SF.  We agreed to share the place – we rented furniture, huge amounts that still rattled around in the place.

Probably 3,000 square feet.  Multiple bedrooms, living room, dining room, pantry, kitchen, maid’s quarters, multiple bathrooms.  An elevator entry area that we shared with only one other apartment on our floor.  A box-shaped, 4-sided building, 8-stories, two apartments to a side per floor.

After a few months of taking care of furniture and utility hook-ups and acquainting myself with the neighborhood, I became a regular at Blum’s at 11:00 pm when the Chronicle early morning edition hit the streets.  I did family dinners at Alexis.

It was when I tried to employ someone to be the maid, that it occurred to me to examine the maid’s quarters.  What I found was that they had their own kitchen and bathroom and an anteroom, which led to a back staircase.

I went down – I was third floor.  All the keys were made just after the ’06 quake, way better than skeleton keys, but still, old brass.  There was a key to get out and back to this stairway, and I couldn’t get into any other apartment.  There was an amazing openness when one arrived “below ground”.

There were two levels: B1 was the laundry and other machinery level, B2 was the storage level, where each apartment had several storage rooms for seasonal changes of furniture and the normal detritus of living an acquisitive life.

B1, to my great surprise, was alive with the hum of activity, people doing laundry, but also just congregating, fixing things, making dates for events, prepping for departures.  The corridors were completely open between the various upper apartment levels, that is I walked from my “entry point” all the way around a four-block corridor, with my side and corner labeled so I could find my way back up.  There were no elevators for maids, which included service men.  Stairs on the four corners.

I only wish I knew then what I know now.  It was an historical moment, and I was lapping up sundaes at Blum’s.  I actually went up once, to the roof top.  Boring to me at the time.  Fantastic views of the City.  Oh that I knew about photography then.  Why does it take a lifetime to acquire all such knowledge?

Steinhart Marine Aquarium

I had a bout with cancer in this era; Steinhart was one of the therapies in the end.

I was no longer a part of the lingerie store, but I needed a secondary outlet for my “post” mid-life crisis besides computers.

I opened a book store, ”Fiddler’s Green”, at 24^th and Noe.  My partner was a classic book seller, disheveled, disjointed, and with a dog that was the carrier of all fleas – mother flea dog, appropriately named, “DOG”. Douglas brought 8,000 arcane books about Nazi conspiracies and WW-II weapons.  His books never sold – not online – not off the shelf – not by secret letters.  I last visited him in Fort Bragg on my way back from Hayfork.  I was a novel reader and not planning to go into competition with the big guys.

I started playing chess at the coffee house next door.  I would invite people back to the store, and eventually set up a few tables for people to play chess.  I added some chess books, then a few more tables.  Then I started subscribing to Russian and Latvian chess periodicals, and stocked more chess books, from all over the world.

Then I started a weekly prize money Speed Chess tournament and since many players from the Bay Area had come to know this place, it got to be a big thing.  World famous USCF rated players attending.  I became a legitimate tournament director and held frowned-on tournaments: women masters, fledgling masters, and youth masters.  USCF invited me to be the regional USCF director, next step national.

My Friday night Speed Chess tournaments had become legendary across the country and the world.  I formed a team – we challenged the New York City, Marshall Chess Club to a telephone match. .  It was a draw.  But soon thereafter Leonid Shamkovitch and Anatoly Lein, two of the top ten rated players in the world, who had defected to the USA, joined us. 

On one night, the US champion, the Israeli champion, a NY Tal-like street fighter, and these two world class champions, and seven others fought not for the $100 prize, but for the privilege of playing in that ethereal crowd. 

Twelve people, double-round robin.

Everybody had to play and complete 22 [5-minute] games, six tables going concurrently.

For those tier-two players,

I was working too hard; a computer project manager full time in the Financial District, and a chess club and book store operator by evening and weekend.  My health snapped.  I developed a melanoma hidden away on my back.  I had recently started dating Gail and she insisted I have the mole biopsied.

Gail connected me with a holistic, Mill Valley health clinic run by Dr. Michael Gerber.  I spent a year under his care, doing every -ology there was.  Mediation therapy was essential, so Gail bought me a fish in a small bowl to watch during the day.  I visited the aquarium section of a local pet store and bought a few more fish and a bigger tank.  I did meditate with the fish, but the hobby of caring for fish also captivated me.  I started to visit Steinhart Aquarium and became familiar with all their displays.  By this point I had eight aquariums going; I kept getting larger and larger ones.  But they were all heated, fresh-water tanks.  I wanted to branch out into salt water tanks, ocean fish.  Steinhart had, as a  community service, a salt water pump outlet, around the back of the place.  Steinhart pumped in ocean water from 20-miles out for their own purposes.   In those days people saved those big 5-gallon Alhambra water jugs and I acquired a dozen of them.  I would go out to Steinhart once or twice a week to fill five or six.  One day, there was no pressure, nothing came out.  I went hunting around for someone to ask about this.  It hadn’t ever crossed my mind that this pump around back was a floor level under the public hallways.

I walked down this hallway and into a lab room.  There was a friendly young guy who said he was a grad student working there.  He told me the system was off for a while they were repairing something.  He didn’t know that I had come in from the unlocked loading platform door.  He said, “If you want to get upstairs, just go up any of the staircases.”  I did and when I got to the door and went through, I was in one of the viewing gallery rooms.  The lighting was dim, and when the door closed, it disappeared, to all appearances. Knowing now what to look for, I spotted many black on black, hairline crack doors.

A few days later, I said to my friend Bill, you’ve got to come with me to Steinhart soon.  We wandered the lab hallways, looking for Dr. Jones.

The Opera House

After the Stanford Court Apartments, I rented a little efficiency apartment in North Beach.  I hated it.  Rita talked me into buying places, two, on the GI Bill.  I did: 1615 Treat in Bernal Heights, and a 3-apartment building on Guererro at 18^th Street in the mission.  I moved into the basement of the Guererro place for a while, but it was depressing.  Nobody wanted to pay rent and being a landlord didn’t work for me; I fell for every story, took food stamps.  When one became vacant, I took it – “to fix it up” – but I wasn’t a contractor either.  This experiment failed miserably.  I let the bank take it over.  I had no money in it – no Down GI loan.  But the Treat Street place had become vacant.  I moved in.

Treat is one block long and uphill, great for keeping in shape.  It was just like my first apartment in San Francisco on Telegraph Place.  I was poor now, starting over, but finally happy.  Completely unattached and care free, I socialized with my work mates from American President Lines steamship company, as well as my new found neighbors – Patty Hearst was a big topic at that time.

One Saturday morning I got a strange telephone call, “Peter? This is Bill.  I fixed the Triumph and I’m bringing it up to you.  I’ll be there tomorrow.  How do I get there?”  “Who?”, I asked.  “Bill, Pattie’s brother.  You guaranteed my loan on the Triumph.  We worked together at the UofA.”  Yes, he was the young man, a computer operator, who I hung around with in the UofA computer facility, while I was at grad school.  I chased after his sister Pattie, who never bought my spiel, but I was handy and took her and her 4-year old out to dinner, and her younger brother thought I was cool, coming from San Francisco and all.  I did nerd-tricks on his business computers while waiting for my time slots on the supercomputer.  This impressed Bill.

“O.K.”, I said, “Take the North Beach exit off the freeway.  Stop immediately and ask for someone to point you to Vanessi’s.  It’s an open-air restaurant and I’ll be having lunch at noon.”  He showed up, we parked the bike next door and had lunch.   He wanted a job, in the computer field.  I said I’d help.  We parted that day.  Months later, I got him hired at Crown Zellerbach, where I then worked.  He eventually gave me the Triumph.

So, Bill and I became friends – I was still at Treat.  We both loved music, both loved Chess.  I got to know all the street chess patzers.  Bill and I built a Hi-Fi speaker system – a top performance quad-amplifier system – over two dozen speakers.  I collected records.  We didn’t do drugs or alcohol; coffee was our thing when we did get together.

We each had private lives in this era.  Both heterosexual men who loved women and tried to keep them private and apart.  This was self-preservative, since we often switched women over the broader spectrum of time.  This occurred half a dozen times.

So we only “checked base” with one another once a week, plus or minus.  Often this might be Saturday night – girls’ night out for our partners.  Our budgets at this point, no longer able to afford to buy a house, did allow us to have a take-out dinner and often listen to the KDFC-FM radio presentation of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.  In those days the premier presentation was Friday night, at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House – tickets only.  But the more popular performance was Saturday night, which was also broadcast on KDFC.

Bill and I both followed the Orchestra and their schedule.  Like I think Mary claimed last week, we could tell who was playing, as the virtuoso, by their unique styles.  I heard a critique many years later that claimed that what we all heard that was so different was their mistakes.  These old masters had been through so much, they hadn’t had the opportunity or time to continue to practice, so they all had their foibles, but everyone gave them a pass because they’d made it through the 30’s alive.

So we would buy tickets, and double-date, once or twice a season.  It was important for us, and the ideal was center lodge for best acoustics..  Time and schedules permitting, we would occasionally go down on Saturday morning and watch an open rehearsal.  If you know the music, mostly by heart, then these are a fine way to enjoy the symphony, especially to sauce out the guest conductor.  We each also tried ushering to get free seats.  One of my ploys when Bill couldn’t make it was to be the one to buy the two tickets, and then turn them in to the box office on the night.  Sometimes no one, sometimes a nerd, like me, and sometimes an interesting woman, which sometimes worked out for at least a dinner.

An equal number of times, however, we would be doing nothing, but listening to the radio, maybe wiring a circuit, maybe playing chess, and one would say, “Did you hear that?  “Ozawa is guest conducting tonight, and that was fabulous.!!”  And the other, “We’ve got 3-4 minutes until they hit intermission, can we get there by second call?” “No sweat, it all depends on parking”  “Let’s Go.”

And we went. We knew the spots that SF police officers didn’t tag, it was City Hall, lots of protected spots.  If we were early, there would be  crowds milling about – many people attend, often simply for others to see them attending.  The half-time break is an easy exit to still make dinner at a reasonable hour.  Forty percent of the crowd disappears on Saturday night, “for a more complete evening’s itinerary”.

Men threw their ticket stubs on the floor, into waste receptacles, or handed them to ushers.  They were of no value to them, at this point.  To Bill and me, they were liquid gold. Jascha Heifetz would still get 10% to 20% leaving after the intermission.   The seat #’s didn’t matter, once we were in.  We were legal, just maybe not in the right seats, we never argued – we moved.  We tried, though, for the best seats in the house.

On a whim, one Saturday after an open rehearsal concert, I said to Bill, “Let’s explore”.  I was his mentor at that stage.  And we went wandering, up higher to practice rooms and preparation rooms.  We went lower to set storage rooms for operas, so many of them.  How does the manager decide what goes and what stays?  My friend Alex used to paint sets for the NY Met. He adored Maria Callas.  I wonder if any of his sets still exist.

It was overwhelming – 2/3 of the space at the Opera House was not for performance, but for preparation and/or staging.  The movie “Moonstruck” always reminds me of the important focus on set arrivals and preparations for Madame Butterfly.

* * *

Twenty years ;later, some of these characters re-appeared for the Black & White Ball of 1991, held concurrently in several different City buildings including the Opera House .

That’s Bill & I and my daughter Patricia who is now retiring from being a professor at Notre Dame University in Belmont,  and a flight instructor at Palo Alto.

She has bought 200+ acres in Modoc County, where she is attempting to settle.  Bill made millions in computers and real estate and is now a Republican recluse.  I care for my cat and a few finches.