Each of us, if we live long enough, is a part of history. Between the time I was born in 1960 and now, terrorist planes crashed into and toppled Manhattan’s Twin Towers. America landed on the moon and the world grappled with pandemics, one of which, HIV/AIDS, killed upwards of 20,000 San Franciscans. One U.S. President was assassinated, another shot and wounded, and a third arguably committed treason, but still may be reelected. The iPhone was released. Three television stations and the one that was never quite clear fractured into millions of YouTube and TikTok channels.
Communities have their own history. The View’s original publisher, Ruth Passen, passed what’s now a 53-year-old newspaper to me, and has since died. The Daily Scoop, on 18th Street, closed, replaced by Chez Papa, which morphed into Chez Maman East. Goat Hill Pizza’s all-you-can-eat Mondays stopped, and then restarted. Generations of children had their first day of kindergarten at Daniel Webster Elementary School, and their last day of fifth grade. Dogpatch and Mission Bay, a ragged former industrial belt and wetlands, emerged as amongst the City’s hippiest, most economically vibrant, neighborhoods.
What came before us influences who we are now. Without Ruth and her earnest colleagues – including Lester Zeidman, who co-created another bit of Potrero Hill history, The Good Life Grocery – the View would not exist, and you wouldn’t be reading this column. The paper’s founders were prompted to launch it by the citizen fervor created by the Civil Rights movement and campaigns against the Vietnam War, bits of the past that continue to reverberate today.
There’s irony in celebrating community history using a medium that itself has become a kind of ancient artifact. We’re largely living in a post-print, and possibly post-journalism, moment. Of those of us who care about current affairs, almost half keep track by watching television, a third rely on radio, a fifth – dominated by the next generation – scroll social media. Fewer than one out of six peruse news publications online or on-paper. The View is history.
Still, more than ten years ago, the last time we dedicated an issue to color maps and old photographs, people throughout the neighborhood could be seen poring over the images at cafes and eateries. There’s something special about the tactile experience of turning a page, hearing the soft rattle of newsprint, lingering over a picture or article that was pressed into a kind of physical form. A newspaper, tucked into a file cabinet or cut and pasted into an album is a talisman distinct from a digital record.
Children are fascinated by the 1930s-era typewriter I keep in my home office, drawn to the mechanical magnificence of its sticky keys and hammered out words. It speaks to a yesteryear when text had to be fairly chiseled into being. The maps in this issue, photographs of past events, articles about old buildings and famous films are tiny windows into what was, people and things that no longer exist.
Except they do. They’ve just taken a different form, shaped as old-timers’ thoughts and new timers’ experience of a place that was formed before they arrived, which they, in turn, will reform. They’re worth seeing and celebrating, with the knowledge that tomorrow what’s in your hand may have turned into air.
