The Creative Life Adventure

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I’ve written before about the years I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the city itself, San Francisco, will always hold a special place in my heart. I visited the Bay Area recently, and I thought I would share a few images from my time walking and exploring San Francisco. The best way to explore a city is by foot.

I first saw San Francisco way back in 1981 on a road trip through the southwestern U.S. At that point, I had never been farther west than St. Louis. The mountains, the desert, the Pacific coast, every new sight was a revelation. San Francisco was like another planet to me. After I left, I couldn’t wait to return. Thankfully, once I lived in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, San Francisco was a simple Caltrain ride away. For several years, it didn’t even occur to me to take a vacation, because I was already in my favorite vacation destination.

This year I stayed in Oakland but BART made it easy to take several day trips in to San Francisco. SF seems like one of the few cities in the U.S. where it’s practical to live without a car. This time I mostly walked around the Mission, parts of Valencia Street, and a long section of Geary Boulevard.

Everywhere I went, I saw plenty of activity on sidewalks and in businesses. Whenever I’m in San Francisco, what I observe bears little resemblance to the doom-and-gloom headlines predicting San Francisco’s imminent demise. Yes, retail and office vacancies have been an issue, but some of those “crises” are really about failed businesses passing the buck. The biggest problem is San Francisco’s lack of affordable housing for ordinary folks. It’s hard to know how to even define “affordable” in a market like San Francisco. (And this SF Chronicle article indicates that unemployment resulting from the corporate AI movement might make things much worse for all of us.)

Some of my favorite used bookstores and music stores are in San Francisco: Green Apple Books, Dog Eared Books, and Amoeba Music still has a SF store. Non-chain restaurants and cafes are a welcome sight – this time around I found Sisters Coffee Shop, La Taqueria (they may serve the best burritos I’ve ever had), and Earth’s Coffee.

No matter how many cities I travel to, San Francisco still has a special quality. I think the climate is one reason for that. And SF’s unique geography makes it more compact and accessible than many cities of a similar population.

This recent 99% Invisible episode offers a short but fun walking tour of San Francisco. (And in general I recommend 99% Invisible as a fascinating podcast.)

During a family vacation to SF many years ago, we visited tourist hot spots like the section of Lombard Street known as “the crookedest street in the world.” Walking along the sidewalk, we were passed by a man in a business suit and carrying a briefcase. He told us there was an even more crooked street in San Francisco, Montgomery Street. We rubes from the midwest couldn’t imagine an even more crooked street. Later, when we looked it up, we got the joke: Montgomery Street is the heart of the city’s financial district. Where the banks are, that’s the crookedest street in the world.

One of my favorite aspects of San Francisco history is the time Mark Twain spent there. These articles from FoundSF and American Heritage have some nice background on Twain’s experience in the City. “My visit to San F[rancisco] is gradually drawing to a close,” Twain wrote, “and it seems like going back to prison…after living in this paradise.” And plenty of times, that’s about how I felt when the time inevitably arrived to depart San Francisco.