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Ten years later, time has continued its labors. What San Fransisco
meant to me is quickly disappearing, the spiral of time never ceasing
to devour the present and to enlarge the contours of the past, like the
Saul Bass’s spiral in the eye of the credits screen, like Madeleine’s hair
rolled into a bun, or Carlotta’s in the portrait. The Empire Hotel is now
called the York and has lost its green neon, so propitious for apparitions.
The Victorian house, the McKittick Hotel where Madeleine vanishes like a
phantom, has been replaced by a school in concrete cubes. Emie’s restaurant
has just disappeared (1997), but at Podesta Baldocchi Plants and Flowers, the
place with the mosaic floor, they still proudly remember Kim Novak choosing
a bouquet. The redwood round is still at the entry to Muir Woods on the other
side of the bay, it has more luck than its sister at the Jardin des Plantes, now r
elegated to a basement. (Vertigo could almost be shot in the same decors
today, unlike its remake in Paris.) And the museum of the Legion of Honor is
still there, along with the cemetery of Mission Dolores, and to the south, the
other mission, San Juan Bautista, where Hitchcock had added a higher tower
(by means of special effects), since a fall from the real one would hardly allow
you to break a toenail -but where the stable, the carts and the stuffed horse
were used in the film just as they are in reality.