Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
One of the points was the cold weather?! Are you kidding me? As a person who moved from the Bay Area to Boston, I have felt the difference between San Francisco cold and Boston cold! It's not even close.
For the life of me, I can't imagine anyone hating San Francisco. But some of the observations I have read here (and in the original article) do ring true (as such criticism could be found about any city). San Francisco is much more an object of love than hate, but it doesn't hurt it, or any city, to look itself in the mirror).
***************************
America's cities were once about manufacturing jobs and were loaded with people who were rooted to their communities for generations.
Our cities shifted radically in the post-WWII years. Manufacturing died. Suburbs drained population. The shift was on to the Sun Belt.
Some major cities withered and came close to dying in the Rust Belt. Certainly places like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo come to mind.
Larger, more powerful cities that had a strong white collar component as well as culturally strong institutions, withstood the decline better than the others. They also became part of the concept of "cities as lifestyle", places where critical mass, interesting people, cultural and entertainment possibilities, great restaurants, public and private ammenities became the rule.
Life style became key in places like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.
But for San Francisco, like Boston, there was a down side that New York and Chicago experienced, but not nearly to as great of an extent.
New York and Chicago could absorb people coming into the city for life style, often the college grads seeking high end jobs. Neither Boston or San Francisco, due to size, could do the same.
Boston, for all its charms and resurgance...
(let's not forget that the first part of the 20th century, long before the Rust Belt decline, had been one of the worst periods of Boston's importance and role in the nation. Boston got its decline out of the way earlier than other major cities because it was in decline earlier. 20th centuryBoston with like St. Louis to a degree...but StL never bounced back)
...Boston comes across today as an overgrown college town. Not necessarily a bad thing, but limiting to a way.
San Francisco, like Boston, morphed in significatn ways. Both cities couldn't withstand the population changes that cities like NY, Chgo, and LA can...and still be themselves.
Small and with real estate at a premium, San Francisco, more so than any other city in the nation, transformed itself to a disneyfied version of its former self. New York managed to keep such bleeding more to a minimum despite Times Square and McDonald's spread rather thickly across the Manhattan street grid.
San Francisco stopped being San Francisco and became a parody of itself. San Francisco today is somewhat more like San Francisco, San Francisco...an invention of the Vegas strip. If SF were a nation, it could fit rather nicely, shrunk down, onto Epcot's world showcase.
I have heard the term "never so real" describe pre-1960 San Francisco, a place apart and a place of its own. Indeed the two great bridges were merely some 30 years old each at this point and they only partially eclipsed SF's delightful issolation.
The Giants came to town in 58 ushered in by the jet age. And SF was never the same. The problems of eastern cities never manifested itself to a great degree in San Francisco before that time. There never was an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, but San Francisco can arguably closer to that ideal than any place else.
SF was a place with its own culture. And own rules. And if it still plays with its own rules today, they are not the tradition rich variety of the city of yore. And those rules came with a chronicler of them, acutally a San Francisco Chronicler in the form of Herb Caen.
Old San Francisco, the one that I said sort of died (or transitioned to unrecognizability) was a city with a port and an Embarcadero that still owed up its names. Chinatown served the tourists who visited (great in number...but a fraction of what they are today) because it was serving itself as a true Chinese community. Fisherman's Wharf existed because Italian fishermen still plied the Pacific for fresh seafood; there was nothing fake about the scene through the windows of Grotto #9 or Tarrantino's; in the 1950s, Disneyland was still only in southern, not northern, California.
The Mission was the blue collar neighborhood of light industries, a kin to its counterparts in the East and Midwest, a time when going green in San Francisco meant attire on St. Patrick's Day. It, like other portions of blue collar SF, had their own feel of girt...and benefitted fromit. Telegraph Hill could sport real artists because price had no squeezed them out. North Beach was beat at a time when America was not, a mecca for a counter culture still far removed from being an American staple. Richmond and Sunset were pure middle class and purely American in the way that they were filled with families with children. Powell and Market didn't need to set up an "E ticket" line for cable car rides. North Beach restaurants were real Italian, not the sanitized version of today. When viewed from across the Golden Gate, from the Marin Headlands, or the Berkeley Hills, the core of San Francisco still had hills in the sense that the scaled skyline followed their contours and manhattanization hadn't compromised America's most fragile urban setting. Cliff House had real seals out there to warrant a view.
Everything changes. It is the only real constant. And that's fine. But San Francisco changed more so than elsewhere by replacing its roots and its reality through transitional into the ultimate life style city.
Kind of ironic when you think about it: the city that did the best job of keeping buildings and neighborhoods in place in a freeway revolt unlike any in the nation, did the worst job of keeping its rooted residents in those homes and neighborhoods, removing the cast, but leaving the stage set in place. With a few bread and circuses like Pier 37 to draw the tourists in to a city that became a characture of itself to serve them.
There may be no freeway barreling down the 19th Avenue corridor or connecting DT SF with the GG, but truth be known, there aren't all that many kids in the neighborhoods surrounding the proposed routes, nor the families they once belonged to either.
^sorry, but i don't buy that SF is the most "Disneyfied" of any city...i find that viewpoint to be an exaggeration. Some tiny parts of SF are tacky tourist traps, most specifically fisherman's wharf, but that's about it for the most part.
Also, Chinatown is still a real community despite it's increased tourism (Grant is the tourist street, everything else is normal Chinatown), but there is another main Chinatown in SF, in the Richmond District, along Clement street (this did not exist in the past), and SF's Asian population is now much larger than it was in the past, with concentrations of Asians and Asian business in many other parts of the city (especially in the south, such as Ingleside, Portola, Excelsior, Visitacion Valley).
The sunset is still a mostly middle class area,l like it was back then, it's only 50% Asian now, instead of mostly white, and there are a good amount of kids around there as well as many other neighborhoods. Any middle or working class hood in SF is going to have a good amount of kids. It's mostly the heavily yuppified (and usually touristy) hoods that are noticeably kidless.
Also, the mission is still very blue collar despite the invasion of yuppies and hipsters in parts, and there is still light industry operating there (lots of warehouses and other industrial buildings still stand in the northern and eastern parts of the hood).
Also i feel San francisco started to decline, but it was averted. Back in the 50's, 60's and 70's SF experienced white flight (a few years ago, SF's white population rose just slightly for the first time in decades) and the growth of it's Asian and Latino population, along with the slight and still today continuous drop of it's black population. Much of SF's manufacturing and military jobs were gone by then too. By 1980, SF had around 650,000 people, or 100,000 or so less than 20 years before. Crime was at an all time high in the 70's (and it remains as the record), with other crime spikes in the early and late 80's and the early to mid 90's (by this time the population had rose back up to he +700k range). Then we had the dotcom boom and all this new interest in cities by well of people (you could call it reverse white flight, i guess), and the population jumped to the record levels we have today.
^wow, talk about spelling errors and grammar mistakes in that last post i made. That'll teach me to rush a post before i go to work ...which reminds me once again: why is the edit function on city-data limited to only the first 90 minutes after your post?
anyways here's the last paragraph of that post, edited so that it's in actual English:
Quote:
Also i feel San Francisco started to decline much like other cities, but it was thankfully averted (tourism undoubtedly played a big part in that). Back in the 50's, 60's and 70's SF experienced white flight like many other places (a few years ago SF's white population actually started to rise slightly for the first time in decades...probably since the 60's or 50's) as well as the growth of it's Asian and Latino population. Starting in the 70's SF's black population started to drop slowly but surely as well, a trend that continues today. Much of SF's manufacturing and military jobs were gone by the 70's too, just like many other cities that saw such decline in the post war years. By 1980, SF had around 650,000 people, or 100,000 or so less residents than 20 years before. Crime was at an all time high in the 70's (and it remains as the record), with other crime spikes in the early and late 80's and the early to mid 90's (by this time the population had rose back up to he +700k range). Then we had the dotcom boom and all this new interest in cities by well-off people (you could call it reverse white flight, i guess), combined with continuing immigration, and SF's population jumped to the record levels we have today.
I lived in San Francisco. I was one of those typical kids that thinks SF is SOOO cool and my life will be SOOO cool if I move there. I was SOOOO wrong.
I was miserable every day in SF. There are good things about the city. If you are into hip trendy anything, it's a great place to be, but that crap gets so shallow and pointless after a while. Not to mention if you want to do all of these hip trendy things you need loads of money. SF has great parties if you want to pay a $75 cover charge.
I made the mistake of moving out there when the economy is horrible. That's not SF's fault, but it didn't help my experience any. I ended up waitressing at a restaurant in Pac Heights and experiencing the full glory of the snobby, shallow ******* that inhabit SF. I have NEVER been treated like such a piece of crap in my life. I didn't want to believe that SF is full of snobby, smug A-holes, but unfortunately it is.
People are just NOT NICE in SF. I got to the point where I hated stepping outside of my door because I knew I would have at least one encounter with someone rude, mean, or a homeless person assaulting me for money. Before I moved there I truly felt sympathy for homeless people (and I still do), but I got cynical very quickly when I'm struggling to make my rent ($1000 for a bedroom in a house shared with three other girls who didn't do their dishes) and I can't walk down the street without somebody asking me to give them the last few dollars I have to my name.
Everything the article says about parking and driving is true. I hated it. I remember driving around for an hour once looking for parking. An hour!! And I was going blocks from my house!
I moved away and I couldn't be happier. I miss the beach. That's about it. The weather is ok if you don't like seasons. Personally I prefer hot summers because I like swimming and tanning. Don't move to SF thinking you're going to swim at the beach all summer.
SF is a great place to visit. Don't live there unless you like struggling for money and pretending to be something you're not. My conclusion - coolness comes from within, not the city you live in.
I lived in San Francisco. I was one of those typical kids that thinks SF is SOOO cool and my life will be SOOO cool if I move there. I was SOOOO wrong.
I was miserable every day in SF. There are good things about the city. If you are into hip trendy anything, it's a great place to be, but that crap gets so shallow and pointless after a while. Not to mention if you want to do all of these hip trendy things you need loads of money. SF has great parties if you want to pay a $75 cover charge.
I made the mistake of moving out there when the economy is horrible. That's not SF's fault, but it didn't help my experience any. I ended up waitressing at a restaurant in Pac Heights and experiencing the full glory of the snobby, shallow ******* that inhabit SF. I have NEVER been treated like such a piece of crap in my life. I didn't want to believe that SF is full of snobby, smug A-holes, but unfortunately it is.
People are just NOT NICE in SF. I got to the point where I hated stepping outside of my door because I knew I would have at least one encounter with someone rude, mean, or a homeless person assaulting me for money. Before I moved there I truly felt sympathy for homeless people (and I still do), but I got cynical very quickly when I'm struggling to make my rent ($1000 for a bedroom in a house shared with three other girls who didn't do their dishes) and I can't walk down the street without somebody asking me to give them the last few dollars I have to my name.
Everything the article says about parking and driving is true. I hated it. I remember driving around for an hour once looking for parking. An hour!! And I was going blocks from my house!
I moved away and I couldn't be happier. I miss the beach. That's about it. The weather is ok if you don't like seasons. Personally I prefer hot summers because I like swimming and tanning. Don't move to SF thinking you're going to swim at the beach all summer.
SF is a great place to visit. Don't live there unless you like struggling for money and pretending to be something you're not. My conclusion - coolness comes from within, not the city you live in.
Hey Lizzie! Sorry to hear SF didn't crack up to be what you hoped for. I know SF can be real hell for those who don't have loads of cash. While I know not every SFer is like that, I believe you when you say about you encountering smug A-holes where you worked. I am sure with all the money in this town (which is essentially needed to actually keep living in SF) I am sure there is a fair share of stuck up snobby rich people. Anyway, true coolness does come from within. It was a good lesson learned, but don't give up on finding the right place for you if that is what you are seeking. Just curious, are you still here in SF or did you move away already? How long were you here?
For the life of me, I can't imagine anyone hating San Francisco. But some of the observations I have read here (and in the original article) do ring true (as such criticism could be found about any city). San Francisco is much more an object of love than hate, but it doesn't hurt it, or any city, to look itself in the mirror).
***************************
America's cities were once about manufacturing jobs and were loaded with people who were rooted to their communities for generations.
Our cities shifted radically in the post-WWII years. Manufacturing died. Suburbs drained population. The shift was on to the Sun Belt.
Some major cities withered and came close to dying in the Rust Belt. Certainly places like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo come to mind.
Larger, more powerful cities that had a strong white collar component as well as culturally strong institutions, withstood the decline better than the others. They also became part of the concept of "cities as lifestyle", places where critical mass, interesting people, cultural and entertainment possibilities, great restaurants, public and private ammenities became the rule.
Life style became key in places like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.
But for San Francisco, like Boston, there was a down side that New York and Chicago experienced, but not nearly to as great of an extent.
New York and Chicago could absorb people coming into the city for life style, often the college grads seeking high end jobs. Neither Boston or San Francisco, due to size, could do the same.
Boston, for all its charms and resurgance...
(let's not forget that the first part of the 20th century, long before the Rust Belt decline, had been one of the worst periods of Boston's importance and role in the nation. Boston got its decline out of the way earlier than other major cities because it was in decline earlier. 20th centuryBoston with like St. Louis to a degree...but StL never bounced back)
...Boston comes across today as an overgrown college town. Not necessarily a bad thing, but limiting to a way.
San Francisco, like Boston, morphed in significatn ways. Both cities couldn't withstand the population changes that cities like NY, Chgo, and LA can...and still be themselves.
Small and with real estate at a premium, San Francisco, more so than any other city in the nation, transformed itself to a disneyfied version of its former self. New York managed to keep such bleeding more to a minimum despite Times Square and McDonald's spread rather thickly across the Manhattan street grid.
San Francisco stopped being San Francisco and became a parody of itself. San Francisco today is somewhat more like San Francisco, San Francisco...an invention of the Vegas strip. If SF were a nation, it could fit rather nicely, shrunk down, onto Epcot's world showcase.
I have heard the term "never so real" describe pre-1960 San Francisco, a place apart and a place of its own. Indeed the two great bridges were merely some 30 years old each at this point and they only partially eclipsed SF's delightful issolation.
The Giants came to town in 58 ushered in by the jet age. And SF was never the same. The problems of eastern cities never manifested itself to a great degree in San Francisco before that time. There never was an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, but San Francisco can arguably closer to that ideal than any place else.
SF was a place with its own culture. And own rules. And if it still plays with its own rules today, they are not the tradition rich variety of the city of yore. And those rules came with a chronicler of them, acutally a San Francisco Chronicler in the form of Herb Caen.
Old San Francisco, the one that I said sort of died (or transitioned to unrecognizability) was a city with a port and an Embarcadero that still owed up its names. Chinatown served the tourists who visited (great in number...but a fraction of what they are today) because it was serving itself as a true Chinese community. Fisherman's Wharf existed because Italian fishermen still plied the Pacific for fresh seafood; there was nothing fake about the scene through the windows of Grotto #9 or Tarrantino's; in the 1950s, Disneyland was still only in southern, not northern, California.
The Mission was the blue collar neighborhood of light industries, a kin to its counterparts in the East and Midwest, a time when going green in San Francisco meant attire on St. Patrick's Day. It, like other portions of blue collar SF, had their own feel of girt...and benefitted fromit. Telegraph Hill could sport real artists because price had no squeezed them out. North Beach was beat at a time when America was not, a mecca for a counter culture still far removed from being an American staple. Richmond and Sunset were pure middle class and purely American in the way that they were filled with families with children. Powell and Market didn't need to set up an "E ticket" line for cable car rides. North Beach restaurants were real Italian, not the sanitized version of today. When viewed from across the Golden Gate, from the Marin Headlands, or the Berkeley Hills, the core of San Francisco still had hills in the sense that the scaled skyline followed their contours and manhattanization hadn't compromised America's most fragile urban setting. Cliff House had real seals out there to warrant a view.
Everything changes. It is the only real constant. And that's fine. But San Francisco changed more so than elsewhere by replacing its roots and its reality through transitional into the ultimate life style city.
Kind of ironic when you think about it: the city that did the best job of keeping buildings and neighborhoods in place in a freeway revolt unlike any in the nation, did the worst job of keeping its rooted residents in those homes and neighborhoods, removing the cast, but leaving the stage set in place. With a few bread and circuses like Pier 37 to draw the tourists in to a city that became a characture of itself to serve them.
There may be no freeway barreling down the 19th Avenue corridor or connecting DT SF with the GG, but truth be known, there aren't all that many kids in the neighborhoods surrounding the proposed routes, nor the families they once belonged to either.
Nice essay- enlightening and interesting. Just a few things I want to say: I don't think LA has escaped the changes from population growth either- elderly residents who have lived there throughout the decades often complain about how LA has gone severely downhill from what it used to be. I don't think the character of LA is the same anymore and its infrastructure hasn't been enough to keep up with the growth and subsequently quality of life has decreased greatly.
Interesting comparison of SF to Disneyland, it would be helpful if you could define Disneyland more.
The only thing thats good about SF is the nice geographical features of the surrounding area and scenery. Everything else about the city is inferior compared to most other US cities of similar population. The worst part of SF is weather! Very boring, cold, foggy weather with little variation. It is impossible to enjoy anything outdoors in the city because of the weather. The second worst thing is ugly, primitive housing and city infrastructure. I would say 75% of the city needs to be rebuilt in a modern way to make this place look civilized.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
...which reminds me once again: why is the edit function on city-data limited to only the first 90 minutes after your post? 
