We have seen better days, San Francisco

San Francisco Chronicle​

4 days ago

It's the midpoint of a long, cold summer, and San Franciscans are restless. San Francisco seems to have lost its edge. Now is the summer of our discontent, as Shakespeare might say.
If Shakespeare were here, he'd be worried, too. The arts are in trouble, community theaters have lost their audiences, museums are closing or cutting staff, the Opera is having problems, and Esa-Pekka Salonen has left the S.F. Symphony. Even the venerable Mountain Play skipped a season on Mount Tamalpais this year for the first time in 80 years. The audience wasn't there.
San Francisco's formally fabled nightlife has gone dark. The gloom is widespread: D'Arcy Drollinger, the city's Drag Laureate, plans to close Oasis, a fabled drag club. 'We've been struggling, like a lot of other venues,' he said. 'Our margins are razor-thin.' Ben Bleiman reopened Harrington's, an old school bar in the Financial District, on the theory that the city was on the rebound. 'The fact that we are breaking even is a miracle,' he said. He should know. He's the president of the city's entertainment commission.
The main question now is to find someone, or some group, to blame for this situation. The current thinking is that it's the young people — Gen Z, those born starting in 1997 and mostly in their 20s now. They drink tap water and Red Bull instead of craft beer and martinis, according to experts. Or maybe it's Gen X who are to blame for ruining things. Or the millennials, born after 1980, the children of Baby Boomers. They are old enough now to know better.
One thing is clear: San Francisco is not what it was. It's those new people. They don't understand. My father used to talk that way, too. He used to say San Francisco was a lot better years ago — it was a golden age, he said. It was only later that I realized it wasn't a golden age for San Francisco so much as it was a golden age for him. It was like what they said about Lefty O'Doul: He was here at a good time, and he had a good time when he was here. You don't know Lefty O'Doul? You must be new in town.
I was thinking of those times one day last week when I rode the 1-California bus from an appointment out in the Richmond heading downtown. Through the Western Addition, down California Street, switched to Sacramento Street, over Nob Hill, through Chinatown to Portsmouth Square, through the oldest part of the city. It was remarkably unchanged; the buildings looked the same, and the city had that hard-to-define San Francisco feel, as if something interesting might happen at any time.
The city is full of high tech and AI is next, but on Kearny Street near Sacramento, two women were making dumplings by hand in a restaurant window.
Enough of the familiar San Francisco. I thought. So I headed south, south of Market, south of the ballpark, to Mission Bay. It's a new city down there, all square glass buildings, not a breath of the old city. I am reminded again of the story Herb Caen told about the San Franciscan who died and went to heaven. 'It's nice,' he said. 'But it's not San Francisco.'
I had lunch at Thrive City and watched a lunch hour exercise class, men and women stretching, bending, reaching for the sky outdoors in the plaza. Not the graceful tai chi programs you see at Washington Square in North Beach. Something new.
Crowds of people, much younger than the usual city crowd, streamed by. The area around Chase Center is full of new restaurants, new parks and new people. Only a few years ago, this area on the edge of the bay was derelict, like the seacoast of nowhere — the railroad yard was empty, the ships had sailed, and weeds grew wild. A few remnants remain, including a dock where barges carrying freight cars tied up, like an artifact from the industrial past. Next to that is the clubhouse of the Bay View Boat Club, where salty San Franciscans come to drink beer and tell stories about the good times.
Lady Gaga played Chase Center that night. A sold-out crowd. She had a show people wanted to see. Maybe all is not lost.
So maybe this is the future of San Francisco, a mix of an older city and the new one. All glass and clean living mixed in with the city and a lifestyle we all came to admire.
That's the way of cities: Tastes change. The best of the past survives, but something better usually comes along. Old-timers remember the scent of roasting coffee on the Embarcadero, but Hills Bros. could not compete with Starbucks.
Maybe Gen Alpha — the only generation to live entirely in the 21st century — will adopt the philosophy of Marine Gen. O.P. Smith, a graduate of UC Berkeley. When asked whether his troops were retreating, he said: 'Retreat, hell! We're just attacking in another direction.'