Monday, July 19, 2010
The Church
San Fran isn’t exactly a new town by our national standards, where 100 years is a long time and 100 miles is a short distance. The first white-man’s settlement hereabouts was a mile from my home, in the Presidio, starting from 1776. On his way to establish that fort, Juan Batista de Anza camped where Mountain Lake Park now stands, three blocks up from my front door and just across the old original Lincoln Highway (1913), the first transcontinental highway in the nation. Back when most of Frisco was concentrated up in the North-East corner of town, my putative hinterland of a neighborhood already modestly boasted a long heritage - relative, again, to the local norm. By which I mean, for example, my well-worn 1937 copy of Halliburton’s Book of Marvels (The Occident) begins with descriptions of two local landmarks - the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges - showing them in an arial shot that depicts both graceful spans converging on a city not fifty square miles in size and nearly 200 years old, yet still possessed of significant swaths of open, undeveloped land. My neighborhood, mature though it already was, remains distinguished in that photo by empty lots and sandy dunes among large cemeteries (subsequently relocated in the 1950s). Highways, boulevards, emplacements and institutions notwithstanding, it’s clear that, in the early ‘30s, the Central Richmond District was ripe for infill.
However, two major social institutions came with the territory, so to speak - they were seemingly plotted out with the city grid, and have been with us, pretty much since the start of things as we recognize them today. Some lots had been set aside for schools, some for parks; we got an official Carnegie library and the French Hospital was already a well-established institution; but the houses of worship on either side of Park Presidio Boulevard at Clement Street are - or were - too well-matched architecturally and geographically to be a quirk of zoning. They were planned, clearly, as sentinels to the entry to the city, welcoming the Godfearing visitors streaming off the new bridge that spanned the Golden Gate, and driving the sinners out of Eden. So it seemed to me, anyway. The presence of those two big imposing sacred spaces pretty much across the street from each other was demonstrably no coincidence. (I marked their location by an oval in the photo linked-in above. No, that’s not an actual black oval carved into the topgraphy. You are just being obstreperous.)
On the west was the synagogue, once boasting a sober facade of damp sandstone carved to resemble an unscrolled torah, with columns and stained glass. As I’ve written here before, the integrity of that architecture was insulted by a 1970s addition and up-do that added a false front, depersonalized the adjacent assembly hall, and generally stepped on everything of value in the original design. And then a few years ago it got revisioned, razed, and utterly reborn as a gleaming new edifice unlike any other in the city, a chalice raised heavenward, an ark ready to float away down 14th Avenue. The old synagogue is now the new synagogue, standing where it has stood since 1934, its message renewed and its presence emphatically reinstated.
Then there was the church over on the other side. I suspect that it started off as a more impressive building than the old original synagogue, and for sure it remained so. The Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist was a neoclassical structure with a colonnaded facade, uprights framing massive patinaed bronze doors capping a short set of steps that raised the whole building up like an altar. The sanctuary was a lofty room proportioned so as to be, improbably, both intimate and grand, with walls of leaded windows and a shallow dome of Tiffany glass overhead. It boasted gardens and lawns, and a classic old school x-tian science reading room with period typographic signage bolted letter by letter to the outside wall, in which room a dwindling cadre of increasingly-elderly believers apparated to peruse tracts and the church’s well-regarded newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor. Above the main portals the formal name of the edifice, FOVRTH CHVRCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST, was incised in clear classic Latinate lettering, flanked by massive yet graceful plaster amphorae.
As a child I’d found humor in the name of this sect ("They laughed at my experiments in the seminary - but who’ll have the last laugh now!") but over time I grew into a more nuanced appreciation of their ethic, which I considered admirable if misbegotten, and the architecture of their churches, which was frequently robust and inspirational. In this vein, I was glad to have the 4CofCS as a neighbor. It elevated the ambient tone and classed the place up. Even as I wondered how they kept the big old place looking good and pumping out the gospel, I always felt inspired by gazing up at their Parthenon-inspired lintel, surmounted by those huge urns that caught the sea-washed light of this district with almost sentient clarity. The 4CofCS: living proof that classy dowagers make good neighbors.
The thing is, dowagers appear timeless, but they’re really not. Eventually the frailties to which we all are heir will take them down, and thus it was as well for my dear old friend the 4CofCS. Though she unfailingly kept up her appearances, congregants increasingly failed to throng her, or even attend her perfunctorily. The free Children’s Sunday School seemed to languish unattended. As their vaunted newspaper, the Monitor, shrank in size and circulation, so did their reading room dwindle in usership and vitality. I began to wonder how they kept the place going, in this age of skeptical modernity. The synagogue had updated, architecturally, and in doing so, seemed to have renewed its lease on spiritual life. What was the plan for the church?
A brief diversion: I don’t buy a lot of music anymore. I go on-line and listen free through Pandora or I tune in KPIG, and when I hear something I like, if it’s at all contemporary, I’ll check for concert recordings on the Archive. Oh yes, the Archive - The Internet Archive - is a massive compendium of digital information - poetry and buddhism, historical children’s literature and kitschy midcentury video, and the Way Back Machine where you can see what the internet looked like at the beginning of time (circa 1998). And, of course, they’ve got tens of thousands of hours of live concert recordings. Punk, folk, funk, polk, and all imaginable interpermutations; 7,600 Grateful Dead recordings and about 3000 other artists from headliners to the Dirty Marmaduke Flute Band and Baghdad Scuba Review. The amount they’ve got ready at your cyberfingertips is mindboggling, and it’s all freefreefree. The Internet Archives: it’s everywhere and it’s everything. If there’s a new religion, this is probably it. Anglebracket slash diversion.
Let’s return to our regularly-scheduled blather, already in progress. We were (I was) going on about the 4CofCS, stately and noble, enduring but no longer particularly vibrant. I wondered as to its longevity, and then I saw the signs go up and I wondered no more: one day a cloth banner was draped over the modest lawn marquee at the corner of Funston and Clement, and print-out fliers were posted in the reading room windows: the old church was closing and the new church was moving in. Christ Scientist was vacating to make room for Dr Wayback’s cyberarchives.
One piece at a time, a transition was effected - huge servers were delivered and installed, with conduit and circuitry to serve them; the reading room’s musty carrels were upgraded with flatscreens and linux. It took a few months or more, all told, but for me the changeover was pretty seamless - from my desktop at home, I continued to enjoy uninterrupted access to Jackie Green concerts and Alan Ginsberg’s Naropa Institute lectures. But one day as I strolled the avenue I looked up and those timeless, 70-year-old letters over the portal of that graceful building were no longer there. Where once their dark lines and crisp serifs had looked down on me, suddenly there was only clean, smooth, unbroken tabula rasa whiteness. And those big metal letters bolted above the reading room window referred no longer to either Christianity nor science - only the generic “Reading Room” part of the signage remained. Instead of inspirational tracts, the window displayed a poster graphically depicting the range and scope of the internet in 2002. In the reading carrels, the Monitor had been replaced by monitors.
I have not yet been inside the new home of the Internet archives. I don’t notice that my concert downloads are faster now that the server is mere blocks from my home network (though, technically, since they only moved from a location in the Presidio, it’s not a very big difference, objectively, as you can see from the first-linked photo above), and I still have some trouble converting FLAC files on a Windows Vista platform (but I think I know who to blame for that). Still, I can’t help but feel that some progress has been made, while at the same time, certain verities have been preserved. An inspiring edifice dedicated to the power of insubstantial actions and entities continues to function as such. Its focus has shifted, however, from a messianic deity to individual opinion, unfettered and hubristic; the single text and truth is now an evolving compendium of multitudinous expression. And that’s all, I suppose, as it should be. The world may not have changed much since the 1930s, but our relationship to it has. It only stands to reason that the old church of divine mystery is now a library preserving the evanescent profundities of the profane. We seek new inspirations now, and I’m glad my neighborhood continues to provide them - on both sides of the boulevard, and for both my heart and my head.
this is a scan of a photo I took a long time ago, which was developed in four different hues for reasons of technical incapacity. The original looks a lot “smoother” than this one, but I sort of like the warholization of the image I have here now. Anyway, this is what the place looked like, when it had lettering up top. Those urns are still really gorgeous, though.
Up next: blogoversary recap. I know, you’re palpitating. Get over it already.
