Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Dare We Dream in Concrete?
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
“Dare we dream in concrete?” asks the poem chiseled into a concrete wall near a cement sidewalk at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens. A city, after all, is not much more than its citizenry cemented together by circumstance and reinforced concrete.
My name is Noah. When I’m not walking the streets of San Francisco. I’m a high school civics teacher. I teach the hard realities of history mixed with dreamy idealism.
This city is my concrete academia. On its fractured pavements, and in the cracks of its sidewalks, the gap between the city beautiful and its ugly underbelly is never far away.
Today by way of Van Ness Avenue, Civic Center and the Tenderloin, I’m headed to John’s Grill. I have the weekend to finish a lesson plan for Monday’s class. Walking helps me think, well, at least it does sometimes.
During the big 1906 earthquake, to save the rest of the city, buildings on Van Ness were dynamited to make a firebreak. For my students, not a half-bad example of private property rights stepping aside for the larger public good.
Across honking Van Ness Avenue, City Hall overlooks a cement Civic Center Plaza—half park, half parking lot. Standing at a crosswalk with a cluster of fellow San Franciscans, waiting to be released from a red light, everyone—regardless of social or economic status, well-dressed or not—is the equal of everyone else. Hmmm, perhaps a classroom teachable moment. A straightforward example of everyone being equal before the law.
The light turns green. I step forward into the smell of urine and garbage-filled gutters. The Tenderloin is an open-air casino where the life chips of the disconnected, the dejected, the dissolute and the denied are gambled away. Here the law appears helpless at promoting good behavior.
On taxpayer-financed sidewalks the private sector buys and sells illicit drugs. An addictive lesson in how capitalism depends on government. Another bullet point for my classroom lectures.
A few blocks later, the signage of John’s Grill materializes. With the subtly of a sex shop window, the red neon hints at the voluptuous, fleshy meat waiting for me inside. As if haunted by hungry ghosts, the walls are bedecked with nostalgic photos of pols and powerbrokers, mayors and governors, business tycoons, judges and famous lawyers, madams and movie stars, union bosses, wheeler-dealers and—not to be forgotten—the well-regarded crooks and criminals who populated this port city.
John’s Grill (“steak and seafood since 1908”) is as iconic as Coit Tower or Fisherman’s Wharf. Harkening back to San Francisco’s famed Barbary Coast, the bistro décor recalls “pretty waiter girls” who drugged and robbed sailors before they were kidnapped on to sailing ships, causing San Franciscans to invent the word "shanghaied."
“I’ll have the Sam Spade Special and an Anchor Steam,” I tell my waiter. Sizzling lamb chops with a golden baked potato and a side of juicy thick-sliced tomatoes, and the local beer, are served up. The protein- and calorie-rich meal I need after a day on the streets of San Francisco.
Without sidewalks, San Francisco would be as strange as a city without people. As strange as a city without strangers—or a city without lost souls. As strange as a city without storied restaurants—or concrete dreams to teach.
