Lyon - San Francisco Noir

Nion McEvoy Ernest Beyl Fred Lyon Hipsters and hackers flood the Mission, giant urbane towers of smoky glass compete as to which can be the tallest, and old dive bars spruce up and compete for Michelin stars. But these arrivistes arent what people love about San Francisco. What they love is what you see here in Fred Lyons valentine to the city. His images capture the town that was and that, underneath it all, remains. Sailors, reporters, society dames at the opera; cop cars, cable cars, a well-turned ankle; the narrow alleys, gorgeous seascapes, and impossibly steep streets (later painted in glorious color by Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud): its all there. And that glamorous, scrappy, and sometimes down-and-out city he shows us, the city that Dashiell Hammett, Herb Caen, and the Beats portrayed in words, is eternal.

Working in black and white, which is all about lighting and composition, Lyon shows us the enduring bones of the city. As a San Franciscan whose family arrived during the gold rush, I know of no photographer who has done a better job of preserving what Caen, the legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist, called the cool grey city of love. As a collector, I am always charmed to have Lyons images around me. And now we all have this book to fall into, as if falling into an irresistibly transporting dream filled with the vistas, characters, and romantic aura of our foggy, tough, and elegant coastal town. Nion McEvoy Photographer Fred Lyon is a San Francisco flaneur a flaneur with a purpose, if I may modify the definition of the word and this freewheeling, Western metropolis is Freds muse, his artists canvas, his passion, his obsession. He has a zeal for San Francisco that has no bounds.

He wanders the city streets, back alleys, and up and down its steep hills with his ever-present third eye: his camera, usually with a standard, midrange lens. He feels that a long telescopic lens takes him too far away from his subjects. Fred has had this third eye since he was a youth when he began shooting pictures with a Brownie box camera. And now the results are on the pages of this striking new book, San Francisco Noir. When I first looked at Freds images for this book, it became clear to me that his concept of noir was an attitude, a state of mind that he has been internalizing for more than seven decades. As a fellow San Franciscan who has reported and written on the city and its characters (including Fred) for just as long, I could understand how this lengthy timeline brought him to this idea.

To him, noir is what you get when you combine a yearning for the dark, the moody, and the edgy street life at times with a perceived whiff of tension. But Fred, rather than being a dark, moody, edgy San Francisco character like Dashiell Hammetts Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, might have been modeled on Nick Charles, the suave, nightlife-lover of Hammetts The Thin Man series. In one of the Hammett films After the Thin Man William Powell, who plays Nick Charles, says to actor Jimmy Stewart, We want to go someplace and get the taste of respectability out of our mouths. I can almost hear Fred saying that as we hurry off into the night on some improbable San Francisco adventure. Hes cheerful at times impish but a noir character himself. Fred, a fourth generation San Franciscan, believes that his citys noir sheen is a sentimental myth.

In my city we like to think of ourselves as risk-taking, edge-of-the-continent explorers, rakish and louche. For example, we go from sleaze to elegance and find that logical. San Francisco is a city noted for its liberal attitudes where anything goes, he says. Its a given that San Franciscans have nostalgia for another time for the good old days. This is a city in a dream, a dream where old legends and legacies seldom are forgotten; old restaurants and saloons, old sports stars, politicians, artists, and poets remain in the collective memory. A city where socialites with brittle smiles dressed and still dress for dinner, for the opera, the symphony, and for fancy cotillion balls in classic, turn-of-the-century hotels.

I am reminded that in those longed-for times, which Fred has documented in San Francisco Noir, every day seemed to be a special occasion. There were the loopy pleasures of North Beach and Broadway with their pulsing neon signs, topless nightclubs, swank restaurants, psychic readers, and gypsy fortune-tellers on the sidewalk. The swells from Nob Hill comingled with working stiffs crowding the saloons and after-hours joints, off-duty cops and firefighters, garbage men, all-night cab drivers on a break, bakers, and stevedores from the docks. Beat poets, intellectuals, and wannabes muttered their verses in coffee-houses and walk-up apartments. Italian kids in short pants and Keds, outside on summer evenings with their bikes and scooters, climbed backyard fences where laundry billowed on the clotheslines. Downtown shoppers dressed up in nylons and heels, and burlesque and two-a-day vaudeville with comics and big bands performed a few blocks away.

There were the dockside dive bars where happy hour seemed to go on forever; the Tenderloin teeming with rough street life; South of Market cheap cafes, army navy stores, and tattoo parlors open seven days a week. There was Chinatown, with dark alleys, outdoor food stalls, and shops selling strange nostrums, echoing Arnold Genthes photos of over a century ago. The boozy, jazzy atmospherics; the wet, foggy nights that was life on the edge of San Francisco Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge lights barely seen through the dark mist. Thats the way San Francisco was. And now here it all is for us to see these strong images reminding us of another more salubrious time. While discussing Freds many images for this book, he and I reached back in time to the 1849 California gold rush to consider the beginnings of the myth of San Francisco noir.

It was a strange but exciting life in San Francisco then, and its still a strange but exciting life here now, he says. We both agree that right from its early days this raw-boned, fog-bound town had a sophistication that belied its isolation on the edge of the continent. The gold rush in 1849, the discovery of Nevadas Comstock Lode of silver in 1857, and the completion of the Trans-continental Railroad in 1869 turned the tiny village into an instant city. Suddenly San Francisco became a teeming Western metropolis with worldly tastes and enthusiasms. Early San Francisco was rambunctious and disorderly. It was overrun with a motley crowd of adventurers both men and women from all over the world.

But along with the gold seekers, get-rich-quick ruffians, and con artists came merchants, farmers, clerks, clergy, bankers, doctors, poets, prostitutes, lawyers, sailors, salesmen, speculators, and just plain seekers of the good life. Some liked the climate and wanted to live in the European-styled city by the Golden Gate. Others sought the nighttime pleasures the noir pleasures offered in its saloons, theaters, dance halls, bordellos, and opium dens. Through the years, Fred has explored this historic tapestry of his city. San Francisco Noir, as his magnificent photos reveal, is about tension and the romantic illusions of the night. But they are also about resolution in the harsh light of morning.

Tension and resolution are what these powerful images by Fred Lyon convey. They stimulate our imaginations. They captivate us and leave us enriched.