San Francisco lives, the Wall Street Journal claimed in a traveler’s guide this week. I’ve been tempted before, perhaps by pure romanticism, to write the same thing; that the city is still well, despite fuss about its homelessness crisis and rising crime rate.
My birthday falls around July 4, so my family would visit San Francisco annually to watch fireworks at Crissy Field. San Francisco is where my sister learned about emergency parking brakes, on one of the city’s near-vertical streets. It’s where we saw Beach Blanket Babylon, the world’s longest-running musical. It’s where I believed in God for one of the first times, looking up at Grace Cathedral’s gothic majesty. Memories of San Francisco are some of my best, and I think people who experienced the city in its prime would say the same.
But Fisherman’s Wharf isn’t safe to walk through at night anymore. And San Francisco car thefts are up 42 percent. And the 45-year-old musical closed in 2019, because San Francisco is unaffordable, and the city’s nightlife was dying anyway. And Grace Cathedral projected a hologram of George Floyd on its doors a couple of summers ago.
There are parts of the city worth seeing, as the WSJ mentions. Beautiful places such as the Palace of Fine Arts (where people shoot up heroin) or thrift-store joints in Haight-Ashbury (if you’re willing to brave street encampments). You just have to know what you’re getting yourself into.
I want to adopt the same fighting spirit as the post’s author — that San Francisco with all its culture and beauty still lives. It might. But it exists best in memories, which are safer to revisit than the city itself.