Brechin likens cities to a vortex, pulling in the natural world around them. He tells the intriguing story of the transformation of a paradise of forests and wild life in only 150 years. The gold rush started it all.
Producer: Maria Gilardin tuc@tucradio.org Uploaded by: Maria Gilardin betweenthelines@snet.net
Self contained 29-minute radio program The mystique of San Francisco as one of the most beautiful cities in the world still endures beneath the growing urban blight of cheap and greedy development. But when we complain today that money drives the design of the city, voices, such as Gray Brechin ask: Was it ever different? How did this city come about where not a building stood only 170 years ago?
His book, Imperial San Francisco, must be one of the most intriguing and colorful dissertations ever written. Brechin likens all great cities of history to a vortex or maelstrom. As a city grows, so does both its reach and its power to transform the natural world. San Francisco was rightfully known as city of ideas, labor history, and art, but Brechin, showing the city to have been awesome destructive powers from her inception, delights in naming the names of those entrepreneurs and media men who ran the machinery.
Among the cataclysmic events San Francisco set in motion or accelerated, were the gold rush and the large water control projects of the 20th century. They are the topic of a conversation with the author. Gray Brechin worked as the first director of the Mono Lake Committee and as a journalist and TV producer. He returned to UC Berkeley as a Ph.D. candidate in the Geography Department. Imperial San Francisco is his dissertation.
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