This past Sunday, Mother’s Day for us folks here Stateside (I don’t know about other countries, but every one SHOULD celebrate mothers!), our daughter cooked up a little Mother’s Day adventure for us and treated the Mrs. and I to a “Brunch on the Bay” cruise up in San Francisco.
Now, my initial reaction to this news (internally of course, you don’t want to be a wet blanket, especially on Mother’s Day!) was ewww. As mentioned in several other posts on this blog, I’ve come to loathe San Francisco over the last several years. But, I’m a fan of boats, I LOVE the water, and it was a day out of the house with the Mrs. and our kid, so I put on a happy face and decided to just roll with it.
As a kid and well into my 20s, I loved San Francisco. I spent a lot of time there as a youth with my family and have a lot of fond memories of those days. In high school when I was doing my best to be a ne’er-do-well, I used to ditch school and head up to the city just to hang out. When my band started getting gigs up there, we thought we were on top of the world – it was a vastly different scene to the one in San Jose we came up in. We had a number of friends that lived up there and visited often. At one point I even wanted to move there.
Then, sometime around the early 00’s, most likely after the Dot-com Bubble burst, the city went into decline. After the financial crisis of ’06-’08, it got worse. By the time the Plague rolled around in 2020, the city was unrecognizable. And it just kept getting worse from there. To the point of my family deciding a year or so back, that unless there were very critical reasons for traveling to SF, we just weren’t going to anymore. It was vile. All the stories you see about the rampant homeless population, the feces strewn sidewalks, the full throttle degenerate behavior out in the open, the crime, the shockingly crazy people screaming at nothing in the middle of the street… ALL of it was true. Heartbreaking, but true. I remember thinking, they just need to burn this entire city to the ground, it’s beyond hope.
So you can imagine my surprise, my utter SHOCK, when we rolled into the city and it was as if the clock had been rolled back 20 years. Now, granted we were down at the water’s edge in a very tourist-centric area, but a year ago that wouldn’t have made a difference. We had to walk maybe 6 blocks from where we parked to the pier, and I didn’t see a single person sleeping on the sidewalk, much less any shantytowns along the way. I didn’t have to dodge any poop on the sidewalk. I didn’t see a single needle. Nobody asked us for money. I was in utter shock to be honest.
Even after the event on our way back to the highway, there was a noticeable lack of blight. Yes, many, many vacant storefronts – business is still very clearly down – but overall I was very pleasantly surprised at how different the city looked overall. Between the ousting of the loathsome District Attorney, Chesa Boudin a few years ago and that clown of a mayor, London Breed, getting kicked to the curb last year, San Francisco seems to have turned a corner, and I’m really glad to see it.
Of course, there are a lot of areas in the city we didn’t see that day. Some neighborhoods were extremely dingy and dangerous long before the decline that started 20 years ago, and I’m sure they are still as bad if not worse. But a year ago I couldn’t go ANYWHERE in San Francisco without seeing the despair and the filth and the decrepit nature of the place, so I consider it a win for the city.
Now the next time a great band or comic comes through San Francisco I won’t be so reluctant to make the trip. Whatever you’re doing San Francisco, keep up the good work!
Thanks for stopping by!
The Boring Old Man 