Varennes Street: A universe in two blocks

The little street on Telegraph Hill I lived on for 12 years has a history as wild and rollicking as San Francisco’s.

From 2011 until August of 2023, I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment on a two-block long street in San Francisco called Varennes. Varennes Street runs between Green and Union, then Union and Filbert. The first block is flat. The second block runs uphill to Filbert, which is one of the steepest and most spectacular streets in the city. I lived on that block, in a funky 1906 2-story wooden building near the upper end of the street. The small front yard of my building is notable for a big tree, which until it was trimmed a couple of years ago stretched almost entirely across the street.

Looking north on Varennes towards Filbert.

That tree, although much smaller, is clearly visible in the climactic scene of the 1952 film noir The Sniper, in which a disturbed, misogynistic delivery driver who has been murdering women in the neighborhood runs up Varennes.

Both blocks of Varennes can be seen as the crazed sniper, played by Arthur Franz, runs up my old block…

­…and passes the tree in the front yard of my apartment, which would grow luxuriantly in the next 70 years.

The first woman he shoots actually lives in the apartment I just moved into, so I seem to be following in his insane footsteps. Some people who live in buildings featured in movies revel in that fact: Someone living in the spectacular Streamline Moderne Malloch building on Montgomery, where Humphrey Bogart hides out in Lauren Bacall’s apartment in Dark Passage, has placed a black-and-white photo of Bogie in a window. Much as I love the movie poster of Arthur Franz aiming his carbine from two directions at once at poor Marie Windsor (was Franz on the grassy knoll in Dallas?), I don’t think I’ll be displaying it in my window.

­­­A poster for Edward Dmytryk’s 1952 film noir The Sniper.

The two blocks of Varennes have the distinction of lying in two different neighborhoods. If you live on the first block of Varennes, you’re in North Beach. If you live on the second block, you can legitimately say you live on Telegraph Hill.

Of course, these distinctions are fuzzy. Like most of San Francisco’s hills, there is no hard and fast definition of Telegraph Hill. Theoretically, the venerable Saloon at Fresno and Grant, which beats out the Mission’s Elixir for the coveted title of San Francisco’s oldest surviving watering-hole, could be said to be on Telegraph Hill, since upper Grant starts climbing after Columbus. But that would be almost as egregious a case of hill-claiming overreach as saying that McAllister and Jones is on Nob Hill.

Making things fuzzier still is that North Beach is the master neighborhood, which kind of, sort of includes Telegraph Hill, except perhaps for its upper reaches. As someone who lived halfway up Filbert, I could legitimately claim membership in both legendary neighborhoods, which made me happy.

Actually, everything about living on Varennes made me happy. For 12 years, it was my sanctuary, a safe and hallowed hideaway, a floating balloon from whose suspended wicker basket (and it wasn’t much bigger than a basket) I could look out at the city and the world behind it.

Finding Varennes was a stroke of good luck at a hard time in my life. I had split up with my wife and had moved out of the house we owned on Jackson and Hyde streets on Nob Hill. (In another example of hill-nomenclature shenanigans, the realtor’s original listing claimed the house was on Russian Hill. This was good marketing—Russian Hill is much swankier than no-longer-patrician Nob—but blatantly false. The boundary between Nob and Russian hills is Pacific, known in Spanish days as the puertozuela or low pass, a block north of Jackson.) I was couch-surfing and not sure of my next move. I even half-seriously considered buying some kind of car you could sleep in and living in it, rolling around the Bay Area in a little house on wheels like Mr. Toad in his canary-colored wagon in “The Wind in the Willows.”

One day I was sitting in my cousin Jon and his wife Anki’s kitchen, holding forth about this brilliant scheme. Anki was less than enthusiastic. “You don’t want to be living out of a car,” she said. “You’ve just got to look for apartments every day on Craigs List,” she said. She opened her laptop, typed a few strokes and handed it to me. “Like this one.”

The listing was for a one-bedroom apartment on Telegraph Hill. The main image was of a big window, 10 feet across, with a huge, unobstructed view across the valley of North Beach to Russian and Nob Hills. The apartment was tiny, 450 square feet, but it was bigger than a Honda Element, and it had the advantage of having a kitchen and a bathroom. It also had a fireplace and a wall of built-in bookcases and it was on the top floor of an old two-unit building with a yard and a tree. The rent was $1995.

The view of Nob Hill (left) and Russian Hill from my former apartment on Varennes Street.

I called the number. A guy said he could show me the apartment the next day. I went, walked in, looked at the view, took 15 seconds to walk around the apartment, and said, “I’ll take it.”

I still had to be approved by the property manager. I was an unemployed 58-year-old writer with no visible means of support except for a couple of thousand dollars a month in freelance money and the income from my first book, which was zero. What could go wrong? I filled out the application and was about to hand it to the property manager when it occurred to me that I should include the $5000 rent my wife and I received from the three-unit apartment building on our house lot. After glancing at my application, the manager asked, “How much of the income from the back building goes to pay your mortgage?” In a rare moment of financial acumen, it dawned on me that saying, “All of it,” although it was the truth, would not be wise and would result in my taking up residence in the aforementioned Honda Element. I said, “Half of it.” She said, “You’ve got the apartment.”

That lucky break kicked off a lucky 12 years at Varennes. I was grateful every day I lived there. I never took for granted being in the heart of the greatest neighborhood in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I never took for granted being four minutes’ walk from Coit Tower and four minutes’ walk from the Caffe Trieste. I never took for granted looking out at the huge natural amphitheater formed by the concave eastern slopes of Nob and Russian hills, punctuated at one end by the big hotels atop Nob Hill and the brick chimney of the cable car barn, and at the other by the crooked block of Lombard Street and distant reddish-orange circle of the clock above the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza. I never took for granted that behind that always-mesmerizing view of the city, the ever-changing sky and clouds offered a permanent, 24-hour-a-day movie of the world rushing towards me. After the Scottish poet Robin Robertson and I spent a heavily Tanqueray-fueled evening at Varennes (which resulted in the joint making a cameo appearance in Robertson’s wonderfully sui generis noir-inflected poetic novel The Long Take), he dubbed it “The Cockpit,” because it felt like you were piloting a plane coming in for a landing. I never wanted the flight to end.

Russian Hill at dusk.

My years at Varennes coincided with a major turn in my writing career. I had always been a generalist, from my first professional writing gig as a columnist at the Berkeley Monthly, through my five years as an editor and critic at the San Francisco Examiner, and then my 12 years at Salon.com, which I co-founded with my great friend David Talbot and a handful of others, mostly fellow former staffers from the Examiner. At Salon I wrote about everything: I reported from the Middle East, covered three Olympics, and wrote about world and U.S. politics, jazz, literature, TV, race, personal essays, you name it. I wrote one or two pieces about San Francisco, but that was it.

That all changed while I was living at Varennes. In 2013 I published Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, which became a best seller. That same year I started writing a San Francisco history column for the San Francisco Chronicle called “Portals of the Past.” A few months later I got a job as executive editor of San Francisco Magazine.

Those three events transformed me from a writer about everything to a writer about everything about San Francisco.

This was obviously a radical narrowing of subject matter, but it didn’t feel that way. For once I started focusing on it, San Francisco became a universe unto itself. William Blake wrote of seeing a “World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”: San Francisco became my grain of sand, my wild flower. Its finitude turned out to be bottomless, and that paradoxical double reality was intoxicating. As I wrote in the preface to Cool Gray City of Love, “To be interesting, my little universe had to have borders. I made the arbitrary decision that the 46 square miles bounded by Ocean Beach on the west, the waterfront on the north and east, and Daly City on the south were sacred space. Everything inside those lines was interesting by definition.”

Since I was constantly researching and writing about San Francisco, it was only natural that sooner or later I would turn my attention to Varennes Street. If all of San Francisco was interesting by definition, Varennes was the most interesting place of all. Some of the fascination my street held for me was just the result of good old-fashioned solipsism, the kind that Mark Twain hilariously skewers in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” when every garden-variety sinner who converts to Christianity is convinced that God the Father, the angels, the prophets and all the heavenly hosts have been thinking about nothing except the salvation of his soul, and will turn out en masse when he walks through the Pearly Gates. But there’s a lot to be said for solipsism: without thinking that the world revolves around them, writers and artists would probably never have the chutzpah to create anything. Hell, you have to have an outsized sense of your place in the universe just to get out of bed in the morning. And in the end, it doesn’t matter what motivates an obsession—all that matters is what you do with it.

So I started researching the history of Varennes Street. I dug around here and there, but didn’t find much. Then I started going through online newspaper archives, and hit the jackpot.

For historians and history buffs, online newspaper archives are a gold mine. They take time, and you don’t know what you’re going to find, but the payoff is worth it. The most fun thing is that you often come upon stories or even events that no one has ever come upon (or at least referenced) before, which for a research nerd is as thrilling as an inveterate urban walker stumbling upon a new alley or an undiscovered vista. I made extensive use of newspaper archives in my last book, Spirits of San Francisco, in the last chapter, a history of South Park in crime. It’s easy to access three major San Francisco newspapers: the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner archives are available to anyone with a San Francisco library card, and The San Francisco Call is available through the California Digital Newspaper Collection. You simply type in whatever you want to research and go through the results paper by paper, entry by entry and year by year. 

In the course of those scores if not hundreds of hours of research, I had to winnow out two “Varennes” that had nothing to do with my research (although maybe one of them did, in an indirect way) and irritatingly popped up again and again. The first was a 1982 French-Italian movie titled La Nuit de Varennes, about an imagined encounter between Casanova, Thomas Paine, a lady in waiting to the queen and a very strange French novelist and pornographer named Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne. (In possibly the most tantalizing entry ever to appear in a reference tome, the legendary 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the latter thusly: “Restif de la Bretonne undoubtedly holds a remarkable place in French literature. He was inordinately vain, of extremely relaxed morals, and perhaps not entirely sane. His books were written with haste, and their licence of subject and language renders them quite unfit for general perusal.”) This literary and erotic role model, and his three odd seat-mates, find themselves riding together in a coach a few hours behind one carrying King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette in their ill-fated flight from Paris during the French Revolution, a journey known as the “Flight to Varennes” because it was in the small town of Varennes-en-Argonne that the king and queen were arrested before being returned under guard to Paris and ultimately guillotined. La Nuit de Varennes played various SF arthouse cinemas after its European release, which is why I kept stumbling upon it.

The second “Varennes” involved the same small French town, but came up in the archives 65 years earlier, during the great Meuse-Argonne offensive in World War I that was the deadliest campaign in the history of the U.S. Army, with 26,277 American troops killed. Varennes-en-Argonne was the scene of fierce fighting and was completely destroyed.

These entries had nothing to do with my street, except perhaps for one thing. It’s a distinct possibility, maybe even likely, that Varennes Street was named after the town where the king and queen of France were arrested. What else could it have been named after? But if it was named after that town, why? Was it to celebrate the royal downfall, or (less likely in San Francisco, a town that has had a pronounced Danton streak from the git-go) mourn it? Was there a closet Jacobin in the city planning department? A stealth royalist? Or was it simply a neutral acknowledgement of a historic event? There appeared to be some sort of French connection at play in the naming of both blocks of the street, since the first block of Varennes was originally named “Lafayette” until it was changed to Varennes in 1905. Beyond that, I had—and have—no idea.

Not only did I not know the origin of my street’s name, I didn’t even know how to pronounce it—and still don’t. In the end I settled on “Varens,” but for a while would sometimes say “Varen-ess.” To say it like a Frenchman I should have said “Vah-ren,” but that required a linguistic panache that, like one of those silk scarves worn by Parisian blades, I could not pull off. As we shall see, I wasn’t alone: City officials not only didn’t know how to pronounce Varennes, for 24 years they couldn’t even figure out how to spell it. 

Anyway, I threw myself into the archives with a vengeance—and what I found was beyond my wildest expectations. The history of Varennes (and Lafayette) Streets turns out to encapsulate, and illuminate, much of the history of San Francisco. It’s a wild and rollicking saga, by turns hilarious, tragic and mundane, filled with bizarre and inspiring characters, brutal murders, brave rescues, weird misers, pioneering African-Americans, outbreaks of the plague, ghastly suicides, juicy love affairs, assaults with wedding cakes, the first lesbian bar in San Francisco, heroic priests, toxic wine fumes, drug dealing, drunken shenanigans, poisoned bread, and pie-wagon larceny. My next piece will kick off the long, strange story of Varennes Street.