My City of Wires

San Francisco is, if nothing else, vain. 

Not that San Franciscans are vain, as a rule — compared to body-conscious Los Angeles or style-driven Manhattan, San Franciscans have a fleecy, funky, pierced-and-tatted, who-gives-a-fuck look. No, I mean the city itself. 

We preen and fuss over each of our precious 49 square miles. Every outré facade or blemish of blight is obsessed over. Outlandish structures like the Transamerica Pyramid or Villancourt Fountain take us decades to metabolize, and open construction sites or unfinished civic projects elicit howls of dismay.

It's understandable — we are made averse to radical change by the aforementioned space limitations (bound forever by the sea, the bay, and Daly City) and a dependence on tourists who expect Rice-A-Roni-perfect landmarks. 

So passionate civic debates very often center on design. Neighbors have manned the barricades over contextually-inappropriate Fisher Collection Museum plans in the Presidio, the New Mission Theater's 20-foot height-extension request, and the ugly windmill on that house in Miraloma Park.

Yet San Francisco's biggest aesthetic issue — measured by square miles affected, dollars at stake, and number of comments by visitors (those who've seen past the Tenderloin, anyway, or the panhandlers and empty Fritos packages carried aloft by the breeze) — is one we don't really talk about anymore. Generations of activists have died fighting the issue, and now, like our cold summers, it's more or less a given.

I'm talking about overhead wires.

The California Public Utilities Commission set Rule 20 to put those wires underground, and San Francisco's downtown utility and phone lines disappeared from view immediately. When it comes to the rest of the city, though, PG&E has been moving at a glacial, nay, tectonic pace.

With electric, phone and data lines, plus MUNI — single power wires for streetcars, double for buses — out in the Avenues you can barely see the sky. Not that it isn't entirely obscured already by fog and low clouds…but still.

Some may complain. Web bulletin boards from around the country are filled with snippy comments about the tangle of wires that clutter up the vistas and skylines in otherwise charming, quaint and picturesque districts like North Beach or the Castro.

For me, though, those lines criss-crossing the gray summer sky on quiet streets headed toward Ocean Beach are as San Francisco as sourdough; the electrical latticework hanging over North Beach evokes as many childhood memories as an overhead grapevine trellis would for someone from Chianti. It's also a defiant safety net against the encroaching Disneyfication of my home town.

This is one San Franciscan who hopes PG&E continues dragging its institutional behind about putting those wires underground.