There was the feel of laboratory work to the enterprise and, strangely enough, this could be liberating. The upside of the pact was that the Examiner was allowed to build a far bigger staff and budget than its circulation, in a free market, would support. From city hall to Central America, armies of Examiner reporters were dispatched to dig and write. Only after I departed the Examiner in the early 1980s did I begin to reconsider the Chronicle, to suspect that maybe, like Caen, it did, in its own peculiar way, fit the city. This city was a major city, a headquarters city, and now it's turning into a tourist city.
Tourism is a sort of industrial pollution . . . .
The cable cars have become a Disneyland ride, carrying yahoos to Fisherman's Wharf, where the trucks back up, not to pick up fish, but to deliver it. And so on. Caen, too, had understood San Francisco was changing. He tended to write about the old money crowd, and long before he died there already was much new money seeping into the city. Economic power was shifting south, down the peninsula, to San Jose and Silicon Valley.