Image-Makers Can’t Heal a Shaken City

Take a walk through downtown San Francisco these days and you will see the change from Christmases past. The buzz of the streets has dimmed. Store crowds are thin, the restaurants partially filled. The city is not dead, exactly. Just subdued.

It’s the earthquake and its aftermath. San Francisco has not bounced back the way the city fathers had predicted. The situation has so alarmed the downtown business establishment that Mayor Art Agnos spent most of last week on a tour of eastern cities trying to get the tourists back in their wide-bodies and headed west once again.

This trip was interesting because it made two assumptions. First, that the collective decision by thousands of tourists to stay away from San Francisco was irrational. And second, that their return would solve the city’s problems.

On the local news each evening, Agnos and his entourage were shown making slide presentations to travel executives. There were happy shots of cable cars climbing to the stars and the Fairmont Hotel standing undamaged atop Nob Hill. This presentation was engineered to correct the image of a city in ruins, an image that Agnos believes was erroneously stamped into the memories of television viewers during the quake coverage.

Whether or not press coverage unfairly sullied the city, that issue did not seem paramount in the minds of the travel officials. In news reports of the tour, the executives repeatedly raised another fear, one that was not so easily dismissed. They said their customers were afraid of the next earthquake.

It was an issue that seemed to irritate the mayor, perhaps because it could not be waved away with a slide presentation. At one point an industry official asked Agnos just what assessment geologists were making about the possibility of another quake.

“Geologists talk too much,” Agnos snapped.

Notwithstanding the gabbiness of geologists, the travel executives were probably correct in their sense of the real issue. San Francisco has remained stunned because Oct. 17 stripped away the pretense that earthquakes are remote dangers. What’s remarkable is that people outside California--”tourists”--seemed to have absorbed this lesson more fully than we who live here.

On second thought, maybe it’s not so remarkable. People always diminish the beast that lives next door. Once I was being carted up Sicily’s Mt. Etna on a tour bus, and we passed a town built on the volcanic ash of past eruptions. The guide said the residents chose to regard the volcano as “their friend,” and she meant to imply they were brave people. Two years later the town was burned away in a new eruption.

And so with us in California. We see the earthquake strike, we see the pictures of a freeway clamped shut like a tomb, and then we go back to our lives as if the earthquake was our friend. For most of us, in truth, there’s little choice in the matter, and denial of the danger is as good a device as any.

But let’s not mistake who’s being rational, and who’s not. The good people of Iowa and Pennsylvania don’t have to diminish this danger; they can afford to see it clearly. And until enough time passes for them to conveniently forget about Oct. 17, a certain percentage will probably choose to visit cities where they can sit in a revolving restaurant, sip a mai tai and not worry about taking the big dive to the sidewalk.

Even more interesting was the second assumption of the Agnos tour, namely that the missing tourists were the sum total of the problem. In fact, the city’s air of quiet is more widespread than that, and more mysterious. It seems that San Franciscans themselves are staying home. You can go to the local joints and see the same empty chairs that you see in the tourist haunts.

I have a friend here who was standing in her kitchen when the earthquake struck. Like most people she was not hurt and does not even know anyone who suffered an injury. But the shaking, the intensity of it, did something to her. Now, six weeks later, she finds herself going straight home after work, putting on an old pair of flannel pajamas and crawling into bed by 8:30. She cannot explain her behavior except to say that somehow it makes her feel safe.

She is not gloomy in reporting this. She intends to continue the flannel pajamas routine until she feels like going out again.

And the truth is the city does not feel gloomy either. More than anything it seems like a San Francisco from a slightly earlier time. Say, 1962. After Dashiell Hammett, before Ken Kesey. People are a little more polite, seem to have a little more time. It won’t last, of course. So if you liked 1962, make Mayor Agnos happy and get up here quick.