San Francisco Intersections
When visiting San Francisco, one mindset thinks of grand excursions in, over and around the city’s historic bridges, bays, harbors, hills, and culturally diverse neighborhoods. It is a region of magnificent vistas, diverse communities that have grown up around a shared bay. The result is a rich world of cultural and culinary offerings. For me, it is a city filled with intersections rooted in memory as well and the possibility of new encounters. Travel there is always an adventure where the two often meet unexpectedly.
In early August 2019, Kit and I flew to San Francisco to celebrate his 81st birthday with our daughter Heidi, her wife Sugie, and our granddaughter Ines. Over the years we’ve explored the city’s sites and sights on foot, trolley, bicycle, bus, and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). This time, Kit and I looked forward to spending our time with family on focused outings taken at a more leisurely mosey. We love visiting neighborhoods with coffee shops, indie bookstores, vintage clothing shops, and local food markets where one can gather up ingredients for homemade dinners.
Heidi had cautioned that during the work week getting into and out of downtown San Francisco is a traffic nightmare. Therefore, we chose to explore the local scene in the East Bay area near Berkeley and Richmond where Heidi lives. On Saturday we’d BART into the city for a little shopping, a theater matinee performance of “Hamilton,’ and dinner with a friend of mine from decades past. Sunday we’d return to the city and spend the morning in the Embarcadero farmers market neighborhood, and then wander wherever else struck our fancy. Whichever side of the Bay we explored, I knew there would be chance encounters around every corner because that has long been my history with this wonderful city.
As Kit’s birthday trip was being planned, I was reminded of a trip we made to San Francisco back in 2007. I’d just read “Beauty in the Streets,” a piece in The New Yorker (July 8 & 15, 2019) by Hua Hsu, about how posters became art. In 1894, actress Sarah Bernhardt had hired an illustrator named Alphonse Mucha, a Czech émigré, to produce a poster for her play “Gismonda,” which was soon opening in Paris. The poster was so stunning that it instantly made Bernhardt iconic and Mucha famous. When Parisians saw the poster of the actress in shops and on the streets, they began cutting them down to keep as art. A poster art craze of advertisements for theater, cabarets, circuses, books, cookies and soaps then swept through Europe and the United States in the 1890s.
On that trip a dozen years ago, I’d stopped by the Christopher-Clark Fine Art gallery located near our hotel. Zovig Garabedian, the gallery’s associate director approached me and slipped comfortably into the role of museum docent, providing historical commentary on the gallery’s works by 19th and early 20th century masters. Before long, I spotted a framed poster of Sarah Bernhardt with the illustrator’s mark, “A. M.” in one corner. Like Parisians in 1894, I loved the rendering by Alphonse Mucha of the actress and bought it. I then asked Zovig the origin of her name. “Armenian,” she replied.
When the poster arrived shortly after we returned to Boomerang Creek, I mailed Zovig a 1944 cookbook/memoir that my mother had found at an estate sale in San Antonio and subsequently given to me. On our flight home, I remembered that the book had been written by George Mardikian, a Turkish-born American restauranteur, chef, author, and philanthropist of Armenian heritage. He’d owned Omar Khayyam’s—a famous San Francisco restaurant at 200 Powell Streetthat was a favorite of writer William Saroyan half a century ago.
Zovig—herself an Armenian American—immediately sent a thank you note. “Dear Cathy,” she wrote, “Your mother buys the book in Texas, sends it to you in Missouri, you then visit San Francisco and meet me who knows all about the Armenian restaurant which used to be just around the corner from the gallery where we met. What a small world.”
She then shared a saying of her Armenian grandmother. “Mountains don’t meet, but people do.” That is part of the beauty in the streets of San Francisco—a city where the world comes together and memories are both born and revisited across time.