How a City Gets You
Leslie Buck, the designer of New York City’s most iconic coffee cup, has died. The Times summarized the appeal of the cup – the Anthora, it was called – in today’s most-emailed article:
It was for decades the most enduring piece of ephemera in New York City and is still among the most recognizable. Trim, blue and white, it fits neatly in the hand, sized so its contents can be downed in a New York minute. It is as vivid an emblem of the city as the Statue of Liberty, beloved of property masters who need to evoke Gotham at a glance in films and on television.
A few years back I wrote here about that cup, explaining its effect on me in the years before I’d moved to New York:
I would see those little blue cups on the big screen and burn with quiet longing; a desire that I knew I’d eventually realize, if it didn’t kill me first. And now I’m here. And for the first month I’d catch sight of them, in a woman’s hand on the subway, laying near the top of a garbage can, and the sight would fill me with deep satisfaction. I wanted one for my apartment, so I could look at it everyday and remind myself of my accomplishment; if nothing else, I’d at least tried my luck in the greatest city on earth.
Afterwards a couple of very nice readers sent me porcelin versions of the Anthora, which I brought with me when I realized that New York was not for me, and moved back to San Francisco. They sit on my desk; I use them for pen holders and loose change. In the movies the Anthora symbolized to me my future in New York; now those cups on my desk represent my past, those two years I struggled to acclimate, two years I won’t ever regret.
San Francisco is home now; the place I’ve lived the longest. It fits me like an old flannel shirt. There’s disadvantages to such comfort, when a city stops challenging you. But for me they’re outweighed by the rewards. I can write here, for one. But mostly I can breathe, a basic necessity for life.
I tried to think today of another symbol, something that summed up San Francisco to me before I ever moved here.
My then-boyfriend and I visited San Francisco in the spring of 1995. We stayed with his ex, who lived in an apartment on Twin Peaks, with a view of the city so stupendous that it worked its way into my marrow. I thought everyone in this city must have such a view, the kind of faulty logic that overcomes you when you visit a place on vacation.
Those cool, easy mornings, the million varieties of foliage blooming in the narrow yards and cracks between the pale Victorians, the walk down the hill to the Castro. All those handsome men. I’d just emerged from another Minnesota winter, and I was susceptible to this new city’s charms. How could a place be so beautiful?
We stayed out all night dancing at the Universe, and that morning as dawn broke we stopped into a bakery just down from the Castro Theater. On impulse I picked out an apple fritter – it was, in that moment, the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.
We moved to San Francisco the next year. My boyfriend and I only lasted a couple more years together, and that bakery closed long ago, but I can still taste the apple fritter, I think of it and all the romance of that week comes rushing back, the way this place worked on me, and into me.
