Don Herron is good. Real good. He's been running the Dashiell Hammett walking tour for over 20 years, and he delivers. I planned to spend an hour or two and then bail out to go shopping. Instead, I stayed for the entire four hour tour.
We started in front of City Hall, made our way through the Tenderloin, up and over Nob Hill, down to Union Square, and wound up at John's Grill on Ellis. I know San Francisco pretty well, but I saw plenty of things I've never seen before, including gargoyles and Art Deco spiral fire escape ladders. One of the highlights was going into the actual apartment where Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, which doubled as Sam Spade's own apartment. The guy who lives there, a friend of Don's and a Hammett buff, is restoring the rooms to their original 20's style and has lots of period or good reproduction items mentioned as being in Sam's apartment which gives the place a wonderful verisimilitude. There are still long stretches of Post Street visible from the window which look much as Hammett would have seen it.
I particularly liked the plaque on the corner of Burrit and Bush which proclaims "On this spot Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaunessy." The best part is there's absolutely no indication that these are fictional characters. This seems fitting since Hammett's unique innovation with detective stories was to ground them in gritty, unromantic reality.
Walking the mean streets of the Tenderloin and then the posh hills near the Fairmont wore me out, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I've been wanting to walk around the way I used to when I lived there instead of just dropping in, shopping, and getting out like a tourist. It's very important to me that I not feel like a tourist there. I have a strong, emotional attachment to the city. It's where I went when I decided to leave Seattle for good. It's where I was transformed from a naive kid to a wisecracking city dweller. In our search for a house I have been firm about moving closer, not further away.
I haven't been able to work up any warm fuzzies for San Jose, a city much closer to where I live, although it does have some wonderful neighborhoods around the city center. But it's ... well, flat. And I could never give my heart to a place without hills, and an ocean breeze, and a big weird pointy thing for a landmark. Seattle has the Space Needle. SF has the Sutro Tower. San Jose just can't compete.
I left my heart in San Francisco. I don't want it back.
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