The sweet smell of San Francisco in 1961

From The New Yorker:

...Around 1962, when offers started coming for the land surrounding the former factories of the Ghirardelli chocolate company, a potential buyer proposed a design for a sleek high-rise complex. The proposal horrified some people, and the family of a local shipping scion, William M. Roth, was persuaded to buy the plot instead. Rather than simply hiring an architect, Roth solicited ideas from real-estate brokers, landscape architects, and preservationists. 

He commissioned one architecture firm to draw up a plan for Ghirardelli Square, and then, like a movie producer polishing a screenplay, called in others to do subsequent drafts of buildings. Everybody’s style became a little cramped. 

And yet the messy pluralism forced differently minded people to work through one another’s sensibilities. [Alison] Isenberg sees similar approaches in the Embarcadero Center (a multilevel commercial complex, monolithic at first but customized through collaboration with its tenants) and the Crown Zellerbach Building (the city’s first International Style tower, with a garden below)...Private Dreams and Public Ideals in San Francisco, Nathan Heller.

Rob's comment:

When I was 19, my first apartment in San Francisco in 1961 was on the northern end of Polk Street, near the still functioning Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. I was so pleased that my first neighborhood in the city smelled like chocolate!

The Constitution: Freedom of religion and freedom from religion

Power play

“Public prayer is not intended to promote religious values, but to enhance the authority of some churches and some political views over others. Similarly with the posting of the Ten Commandments. It is about power, not about religion. Government by Christian or Islamic or any other faith has rarely been progressive. And the Constitution clearly intends that there should be freedom from religion.”

Ellery Schempp, "A Champion of the First Amendment," in an acceptance speech to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Oct. 13, 2007

From Dick Cavett in the Digital Age:

Theirs[Cavett, Muhammad Ali] was a close if unlikely friendship that lasted five decades. “Dick Cavett was the whitest of white guys in America,” The Rev. Al Sharpton says in the film. “But he gave blacks that had been considered outside of the mainstream like Ali a chance to be heard, and a chance to say what they wanted to say unfiltered, which was rare.”

One night in the 1970s, Mr. Cavett recalled, the phone rang in his renowned summer house, Tick Hall. It was Mr. Cavett’s wife, the actress Carrie Nye, who was at their place in the city.

“Darling?” she said.

“This ain’t ‘darling,’” said Mr. Ali, who had been invited for an impromptu visit and given the master bedroom. “This is the three-time heavyweight champion of the world, and I’m lying in your bed, watching your TV.”

Trump is a racist idiot

.@KingJames is a great family man, incredible ballplayer, gives back to his community, and isn’t afraid to speak his mind. He’s a world class athlete and a class act. We need more like him in this world.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 4, 2018

Donald Trump’s Racist, Idiotic Attack on Sports Legend LeBron James