Vignettes of San Francisco

This is a love letter to a city that no longer exists in quite the same form. Written in the early 1900s, these essays capture San Francisco before the earthquake rebuilt it, before the tech boom transformed it, when it was still a place of bohemian dreams and immigrant neighborhoods and trolley cars clanging up impossibly steep hills. Morey writes with the intimate knowledge of a local who has watched the fog roll in from the Golden Gate, who knows the particular smell of the Ferry Building at rush hour, who has sat in cafes where poets argued about form while fishermen argued about the weather. Her eye catches everything: the vendor calling out in Chinatown, the pensioners arguing over newspapers in North Beach, the way light hits the bay at certain hours and makes the whole city seem to glow from within. The essays function as both affectionate portrait and quiet social commentary, tracing the patterns of who passes through the city and who stays, who builds it and who serves them. Morey is never sentimental, but she is clearly besotted, and that devotion gives these vignettes their lasting power. They endure because cities change, and to read them is to glimpse a San Francisco that exists now only in memory, in certain angles of certain hills, in the persistence of fog.