Achieving Peace in Our Time With San Francisco

Frisco, Frisco, Frisco. (I know they hate that name; I’m just making sure they’re paying attention.)

San Francisco, that lovely bell jar of a city, has its hand out. It wants the entire state to spend $5.9 billion to build it a new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. No, wait -- that was the 2004 price. Now it’s $6 billion. Hold on, sorry -- I was getting a cup of coffee -- the price has just gone up to $6.2 billion.

The gap in San Francisco’s civic bridgework was occasioned by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Yes, it’s been 2.25 dog years since the earthquake pancaked part of the original bridge, which was no oil painting to begin with (Herb Caen called it the “Car-Strangled Spanner”).

Remember 1989? The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Ronald Reagan moved out of the White House in 1989. At this rate, people born in 1989 will be old enough to drive and drink before there’ll be a Bay Bridge for them to do it on.

Of course California will build them a bridge. What’s been cobbled together since the earthquake won’t do, and it won’t last. But there’s a fight over what kind of bridge.

Will it be a big-box bridge with all the charm of the Golden State Freeway, a bridge so ugly that even the terminally depressed couldn’t bring themselves to jump off it? Or the poem of a bridge that’s already in the works, a bridge that a website swoons over as a “lean, graceful design,” which sounds like something Karl Lagerfeld would send down a Paris catwalk. (Has someone already asked anxiously, “Does this bridge make my bay look big?”)

But lean and graceful will cost at least an extra $500 million, and that’s why the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and some of his co-regionalists from Southern California don’t think all Californians should pay for it. Why buy Karl Lagerfeld when Liz Claiborne will do?

Once upon a time there was something called the City Beautiful movement, a 1920s credo that fine civic architecture helps to make fine citizens. It’s why Los Angeles’ City Hall looks like a secular palace and not a shoebox with linoleum floors.

Now you hear Southern Californians noising off about architectural extortion, about paying for “frills.” I think there’s been just about enough of that kind of talk. Is someone south of the Tehachapis trying to revive the renowned L.A.-San Francisco rivalry? Like an old love affair, it’s been cold, dead ashes for years. Until this bridge business came along, the only party sometimes still blowing on the embers was San Francisco. Los Angeles now does the municipal tango with New York; for San Francisco it has only a fond, warm glow.

The battle for California primacy is over. L.A. won. In “The War Between the State,” a little book the color of California’s old yellow and blue license plates, I’m quoted on the contrasts between the two cities, one dreaming in a haze of incense, the other grown robust on exhaust fumes. “You get engaged in San Francisco,” I said. “You draft the pre-nup in Los Angeles.”

The man who edited that book is Jon Winokur, whom I consulted on this bridge business. As a devoted citizen of a united California, he doesn’t want to choose sides: “Northern California, Southern California, stop the madness! Instead of squabbling over state money, we should work together to figure out how to make the federal government pay for the damn bridge.”

He’s right, of course. We are a blue state, a federal net-donor state. Without California bucks, red states like Mississippi would stand bleating hungrily at the empty federal trough. Let us have a little of our own back, and spare us this snarky north-south cheese-paring. When the Northridge quake snapped the Santa Monica Freeway like a Kit-Kat bar, we had it repaired and reopened in 84 days -- thanks in part to money from the rest of California and a nice grubstake of federal dough.

As for high style at a higher price, I vote yes. Every day the bridge is delayed by skirmishing Californians, the price goes up by maybe $400,000. From a cost-benefit standpoint, let’s remember that tourists never go home with cherished photographs of the Golden State Freeway. In San Francisco, pretty is profitable.

Besides, they’ll owe us one. For a while, I thought they should send the money they’ll make on the new bridge tolls south; they could make out the checks to the MTA and the OCTA, our threadbare transit systems. But then I thought of a better swap: They knock off the cracks about L.A. as a brainless beach town, and we get to call them Frisco.