Infinite City A San Francisco Atlas

"At last a field book with the sense of San Franciscoand#151;the non sense, the real sense, the mysteries of the microclimates, gays and butterflies, gangs, boulevards and mysterious alleys. All here!"and#151;Michael McClure

"Downright near infinite, at any rate, the good fortune of a city blessed with such antic chroniclers as Rebecca Solnit, First Citizen of the Imagination, and her entire splendid crew. There's one map missing, though, from this marvelous little volume: the MRI of any reader lucky enough to wander into its myriad graven precinctsand#151;synapses firing, dendrites scintillating away, a whole mad happy carnival of fresh neuronal associations."and#151;Lawrence Weschler, author of Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences

"Solnit's writing is born of intense reverie and deep reading, passionate inquiry and political defiance; she is a lyric questor for the texture of everyday life, and she attends to places and to their variety and particularity with an exhilarating form of attention that illuminates and transforms her subjects. Infinite City is a marvellous atlas, a new approach to history-making and storytelling; it's also a highly original praise song to many San Franciscos, a multi-layered and polyphonic testament, alert to the play of detail and to the grand design, to the shadows of memory that fall, the restless shifts in the urban scene and the vital energy of overlooked subjectivities."and#151;Marina Warner

“A joyous book.” San Francisco Chronicle

"Inventive and affectionate."--New York Times Book Review

"Brilliantly disorients our native sense of place."--San Francisco Magazine

and#8220;A richly textured graphic book that no electronic format can master yet, Infinite City features Rebecca Solnit as cultural and historical tour guide through the city she calls home.and#8221;

and#8220;A fresh and intriguing spin on mapmaking.and#8221;

and#8220;This nicely designed book offers a collection of essays and subject specific maps anyone who loves San Francisco will enjoy poring over.and#8221;

"This is an amazing and thought-provoking book."--Geist

“Inventive and affectionate.” Lise Funderburg

“Brilliantly disorients our native sense of place.” Bob Walch - Bookloons.com

“This is an amazing and thought-provoking book.” Jonathon Keats - San Francisco Magazine

“A fresh and intriguing spin on mapmaking.” Bridget Kinsella - Shelf Awareness

“A thrilling new book.” Elizabeth Ryan - Utne

“A gorgeously produced collection of maps and essays.” Nicole Gluckstern - San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Breathtakingly original.” Nikil Saval - Los Angeles Review Of Books

“A treasure of intricate, intimate maps.” San Francisco Bay Guardian

and#8220;A joyous book.and#8221;

and#8220;Inventive and affectionate.and#8221;

and#8220;Brilliantly disorients our native sense of place.and#8221;

and#8220;This is an amazing and thought-provoking book.and#8221;

and#8220;A thrilling new book.and#8221;

and#8220;A gorgeously produced collection of maps and essays.and#8221;

and#8220;Breathtakingly original.and#8221;

and#8220;A treasure of intricate, intimate maps.and#8221;

What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnitand#8217;s brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematicallyand#151;connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridgeand#8217;s foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcockand#8217;s filming of Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasuresand#151;butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for usand#151;or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai.

What makes a place? "Infinite City," Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Includes 22 gorgeous color maps.

Rebecca Solnit is the best-selling author of many books, including River of Shadows, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award, A Paradise Built in Hell, Savage Dreams (UC Press), and Storming the Gates of Paradise (UC Press).

Introduction: On the Inexhaustibility of a City

Map 1. The Names before the Names: The Indigenous Bay Area, 1769

and#147;A Map the Size of the Land,and#8221; by Lisa Conrad

Map 2. Green Women: The Open Spaces and Some Who Saved Them

and#147;Great Women and Green Spaces,and#8221; by Richard Walker

Map 3. Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo

and#147;The Eyes of the Gods,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 4. Right Wing of the Dove: The Bay Area as Conservative/Military Brain Trust

and#147;The Sinews of War Are Boundless Money,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 5. Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces

and#147;Full Spectrum,and#8221; by Aaron Shurin

Map 6. Truth to Power: Race and Justice in the Cityand#8217;s Heart

and#147;The Cityand#8217;s Tangled Heart,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 7. Poison/Palate: The Bay Area in Your Body

and#147;What Doesnand#8217;t Kill You Makes You Gourmet,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 8. Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II

and#147;High Tide, Low Ebb,and#8221; by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Map 9. Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone

and#147;Little Pieces of Many Wars,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 10. Third Street Phantom Coast: A Map by Alison Pebworth

Map 11. Graveyard Shift: The Lost Industrial City of 1960 and the Remnant 6 AM Bars

The Smell of Ten Thousand Gallons of Mayonnaise and a Hundred Tons of Coffee, by Chris Carlsson

Map 12. The Lost World: South of Market, 1960, before Redevelopment

Piled Up, Scraped Away,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 13. The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe

and#147;The Geography of the Unseen,and#8221; by Adriana Camarena

Map 14. Tribes of San Francisco: Their Comings and Goings

and#147;Who Washed Up on These Shores and Who the Tides Took Away,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 15. Who Am I Where? and#191;Quiand#233;n soy dand#243;nde?: A Map of Contingent Identities

and#147;Who Am I Where? and#191;Quiand#233;n soy dand#243;nde?and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit and Guillermo Gand#243;mez-Peand#241;a

Map 16. Death and Beauty: A Year of Murders, a Noble Species of Tree

and#147;Red Sinking, Green Soaring,and#8221; by Summer Brenner

Map 17. Four Hundred Years and Five Hundred Evictions in the City

and#147;Dwellers and Drifters in the Shaky City,and#8221; by Heather Smith

Map 18. The World in a Cup: Coffee Economies and Ecologies

and#147;How to Get to Ethiopia from Ocean Beach,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 19. Phrenological San Francisco

and#147;City of Fourteen Bumps,and#8221; by Paul La Farge

Map 20. Dharma Wheels and Fish Ladders: Salmon Migrations, Soto Zen Arrivals

and#147;A Way Home,and#8221; by Genine Lentine

Map 21. Treasure Map: The Forty-Nine Jewels of San Francisco

and#147;From the Giant Camera Obscura to the Bayview Opera House,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit

Map 22. Once and Future Waters:Nineteenth-Century Bodies of Water, Twenty-Second-Century Shorelines

Acknowledgments

Contributors