Looking Beyond Pier 39

He rises each Monday before the sun, gulps down some vitamins, grabs a suit bag and hurries off to catch the first flight to Los Angeles. He goes to Los Angeles because that is where the money is or, more precisely, because San Francisco is where the money is not.

“San Francisco has wealth,” he says, “ . . . but Los Angeles has cash.”

He is a friend--we’ll call him Wally--and he belongs to that vague subspecies of entrepreneur known as The Consultant. His current client is an L.A. aerospace giant, which has hired him to find ways to help it pollute less.

The flights down are filled with fellow travelers--consultants, lawyers, accountants, soldiers of the so-called service industry. Jet-age Willy Lomans, they look alike, travel alike. No one boards early, no one checks baggage, and the briefcases snap open before the wheels leave the runway. Often, many of the faces will seem familiar, but not this day.

“Just a bunch of white shirts,” Wally said, scanning the aircraft.

This was a couple of Mondays ago. I had invited myself along because Wally has a theory, and I buy it, that these flights illustrate something more than commuting in the extreme. They speak to a new niche that San Francisco is creating for itself, now that so much of California’s big business literally has gone south.

The San Francisco-Los Angeles battle raged for a long time. But as San Francisco lost shipping and half its Fortune 500 firms, and as Los Angeles kept expanding and expanding, it became obvious to even the most ardent San Francisco stalwarts that the game was up.

By almost all of the standard measurements, Los Angeles has eclipsed San Francisco as the state’s dominant city. For a time, there seemed nothing left for San Francisco but Bank of America and tourists. Even corporations that maintained headquarters in the financial district moved the bulk of their operations out to the suburban counties. The conversion of once-thriving piers to tourist amusements became the preferred metaphor for the city’s decline into triviality.

It was Wally who first suggested to me that something different was happening in San Francisco. He had noticed those flights south filling with people like him--people attracted to the city’s clean air, vibrant street life and other charms, but people with something to peddle to industries in Los Angeles and other cities.

He believed that the city, surrounded by great universities and with a liberal tradition that fostered free thinking, had begun to reinvent itself as an exporter of ideas and expertise. Behind the exodus of big firms had come a legion of consultants, researchers, writers, lawyers, deal-makers, accountants--any enterprise requiring only a computer, telephone, modem and occasional plane ticket.

“The product,” he said, “is brainpower, as opposed to material goods.”

If Los Angeles was to be the next New York, than San Francisco would settle for Boston. A modest vision, perhaps, for a city that once reigned as the economic center of California, but one that at least offers options beyond working for B of A or hawking T-shirts on Pier 39.

Now there is a danger in all such theories. They require painting with the broadest of brushes. Still, there’s no shortage of statistics and economic reports to support the notion that San Francisco is becoming, as one economist put, “an exporter of brainy people.” In fact, it’s something of an issue. There’s concern that, as a service-industry economy pushes out the middle class, the new Boston of the West will become a city of only the rich and the poor. Consulting firms don’t tend to require foremen on the night assembly line.

But they also don’t require smokestacks, and a lot of the other baggage that goes along with industrial might.

As the flight descended into Los Angeles, Wally looked out the window and began to point out tankers sitting off the harbors, oil wells pumping in the fields off La Cienega, the plants, the jammed freeways and yes, of course, the smog.

“There’s your big economy,” he said. “There’s your success.”

He let it go at that, but the point was made. To measure cities by productivity and political power, by their importance--to rate them according to all the standard measurements of economic success--is to overlook the fact that they also must be lived in. Wally has no plans for moving.

The airplane was still rolling when the briefcases were snapped shut, the suit bags yanked down from the overhead bins. There were meetings to attend, money to make. The exit was a footrace, although a few passengers did seem to linger for just a moment, patting shirt pockets, rifling briefcases--making sure that return ticket was still there.