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This John King -- one of many -- is the author of "Portal: San Francisco's Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities." First published by W.W. Norton in 2023, "Portal" now is in paperback with an afterword that brings the saga up to date.
I'm also the San Francisco Chronicle's former urban design critic, retiring in October of 2024. The gig allowed me to take on the city's physical transformation in this unsettled century, trying to convey how the buildings and spaces around us reflect larger histories and cultures. That's the spark for "Portal," and why it ranges beyond architecture into the realm of vintage postcards, "Somebody Feed Phil" and the (literal) rise and fall of elevated freeways.
"Portal" received praise from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other publications while spending more than a dozen weeks on the bestseller list of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Alliance (Caliba). I also was thrilled to receive a Golden Poppy Award from Caliba this March as booksellers' top choice among five nominees for "California Lifestyle."
Among the career nods I'm particularly proud of? I'm the latest recipient of the San Francisco Press Club's Lifetime Achievement Award, and one of 20 writers honored this year at the Berkeley Public Library Foundation's annual author's dinner. On the national scale, I'm an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects and was the first recipient of the Gene Burd Urban Journalism Award from the Urban Communication Foundation, an honor since shared with Pulitzer Prize-winners Inga Saffron, Blair Kamin and Paul Goldberger. I've been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism myself, twice, and was a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C.
Basically, I'm an ink-stained wretch who entered the fray at the right time and had breaks aplenty along the way. With a great topic, the San Francisco Bay Area, that never grows old.