Dear San Francisco: I Love You. Goodbye.
The Indie Rock Fag is taking the week off. In its stead, Michael submits this post on San Francisco.
I’m currently sitting in a pie shop on the corner of Mission and 25th streets in San Francisco, California. I’m here on a short vacation centered around the wedding of a good friend. It’s interesting being back in this city, where I lived for 18 months or so during my time doing graduate work at UC Berkeley. I’m enjoying getting reacquainted with this city, remembering how to get from one neighborhood to another, discovering all the things that are the same, and those that have changed. I’m having a great time hanging out with fun people and eating lots of good food. So one might wonder if I’m asking myself why I had ever left.
When I came to the bay area at the age of 30 for grad school, I thought I should live in Berkeley. I heard that I would love it, as Berkeley and I share hippie-dippie tendencies, and it would be nice to be close to school. Our love affair was short lived. After a year of living in Berkeley proper, I moved into “the city” to get away from the undergrads and surround myself with adults in a more urban environment. Being single, 30 and gay in Berkeley without a car is no fun. While moving into SF definitely was a step in the right direction for me, I chose to leave the bay area when I finished my degree program. The reasons for this are three-fold: the weather, the people and the urban form.
The weather in San Francisco can be summed up in one word: cold. Unless the sun is shining directly on you, you’re cold. 365 days out of the year. The air coming in off the ocean is dry and frigid, and only the sunshine can counteract it. For me, no amount of fleece, wool or Gore-tex could keep the cold from cutting through my many layers and chilling me to the bone. On the east coast, I sleep with my feet poking out of my blankets, even in winter. They just get too warm. In San Francisco, I sleep with my feet under multiple layers of warmth, including socks. I joke that San Francisco has three seasons, and they all happen in one day: spring in the morning, summer in mid-day and autumn each evening and night. Oh, and it rains a lot from November to March. So, for 5 months out of the year, it’s cold and wet.
I like having 4 seasons that span the year. I like hot summer nights walking around in t-shirts and shorts. I like cold winters, snuggling with friends or lovers under blankets watching movies. I love the smell of plants pushing up through the sod, and of falling leaves gently decaying acros the landscape. I don’t get any of that in the bay area.
I’m sure I’ll get a lot of shit for this, but it’s been my experience that the people in San Francisco tend to live up to the stereotypes people have about them. I had a really hard time connecting with people in the bay area. The funny thing is that I actually met a lot of people and ended up with a lot of plans pretty early on. The problem was that these plans were very activity-based. I met people to cycle with, run with, play tennis with, hike with, hackey-sack with, throw disk with. But amongst all these people, I couldn’t cultivate one genuine friendship. They were all too busy with their wacky San Francisco lives to want to simply hang out. It wasn’t until I met some other annoyed east-coasters that I started to really connect with people.
Another facet of the San Francisco stereotype is that people here tend to be somewhat listless. Their attention spans wander from one creative project to another, interrupting their latest passion for a new passion, which invariably gets dropped when their friend comes up with a killer idea for their Burning Man installation. Ethan Watters does a great job of describing these types of people and the relationships the have with one another in his book Urban Tribes. Having spent most of my life in DC, I’m used to people who are driven and passionate about things, and have the follow-through to make things happen. DC might very well be THE place where ambitious smart people go to make a name for themselves, in the same way that ambitious creative types go to NYC or LA. I might go so far as to say that San Francisco is the place where creative ambitious people go to hang around and start a thousand projects, most of which don’t come to fruition.
The final reason that San Francisco is not the town for me is the urban form. What I mean by this is the way the city is laid out and the feeling of the streets. While the city is laid out in a walkable grid, the experience of walking is often less than pleasant. Part of this can be attributed to the really steep hills all over the place. San Franciscans all have nice calves I suppose. Additionally, so many of the houses and apartment buildings have their first floors dedicated to parking. That means that the exterior of each building is dominated by one or more garage doors. It’s probably a dumb thing to get annoyed by, but the experience of walking down a street with nothing but garage doors to look at is really onerous. Walking down a side street in DC, you get a wide variety of things to look at: each house has a little yard at time no more than a few square feet, filled with stuff, from trees and flowers to patchy grass and litter. All of which is more interesting to walk past than large blank rectangles.
The city of San Francisco has an odd layout, as well. The downtown area is in the northeast corner of the city, and all roads and transit lead there. This is fine if you’re going to work. However, trying to get from one neighborhood to another on transit, bike or foot can be really difficult. There are few bus lines that connect the outer neighborhoods, and all the rail lines go downtown. My favorite Burmese restaurant is in a neighborhood called The Richmond and I’ve only ever been there by car because it would simply take too long to get there otherwise. The city’s neighborhoods have a lot to offer, but I felt it was really difficult to get around by transit, and things are just too far away to walk. Bike is a great option, but remember the hills and those 5 months of rain?
I’m having a great visit to San Francisco. It’s sunny and warm (indoors or in the sun), I have some great friends here and it’s wonderful to catch up with them, and there is so much good food here. But the things I’m doing now wouldn’t be the things I’d be doing if I lived in SF. If I lived here, I’d be going about my business, all the while struggling to stay warm, strugging to make new friends, and struggling to get around. San Francisco is a wonderful city, just not for me. Luckily, I’m heading back to DC on Sunday, just as my short-term crush on SF begins to wear off.
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I grew up just a little bit south of SF in Santa Cruz. I miss it dearly =(
You’re right though, you don’t really feel the “mystique” when you live there. It’s just a place to be, and it starts feeling mundane after a little while just like things back here on the east coast. I think a lot of my love for Cali didn’t really develop until I had left.
I’ve had that experience with many of the places I’ve lived, in whatever country I’ve lived in. It always sounds cool to say you’ve lived in a certain place but there is always a down side to it. People talk about soulmates. I believe there are soul places to live. Places that you go where your heart (and toes – I’m so with you on that) are just happy. I’m forced to live in Florida right now and my heart ain’t happy. But I’ve lived all over the globe and I haven’t found my happy place yet. It’s always glad I went there but glad I don’t live here kind of thing. So many places yet to go to find my happy place :)
San Francisco has always been one of my favorite cities, and after leaving New York and traveling for a few years, I decided to move there and settle. I was there for a couple years and finally left after it rained for a month and a half. Literally every day for a month and a half. I thought I was going to lose my mind. And not only are people listless, they’re self-righteous, provincial, and they complain about everything. (Of course I’m making a huge generalization here — I also met some wonderful people there.)
There are things I miss a lot, like the Hole in the Wall and the relaxed attitude about recreational drugs and sex. And I liked walking there, but only in the central neighborhoods, the Haight, downtown, the Castro. I live in Austin now, which is sort of the San Francisco of Texas, but you have to have a car to get around here, which is a drag. For public transit, New York is really the only mature city in the U.S.
(I was lucky — I lived just a few blocks from Burma Star.)
This is a very well crafted argument for DC.
Thanks for reminding me why I’ve chosen to live in DC. It can be very frustrating here – many of the ‘driven’ folks here have no interest in you if you aren’t someone who can further their interests – and I sometimes long for open spaces with few humans. But I love the fact that I can do all my errands without ever having to drive, and the buildings aren’t so tall they don’t completely block the sun.
Sounds a lot like the year I spent in Seattle, especially regarding the people. Like you, I had no problem meeting people to hang out with or do things with (between sports, volunteering, and even becoming a regular at a game night), but it was very hard to really get to know people. I was never able to find a regular coffee buddy, which shocked me considering Seattle is the coffee capital of the country.
There’s a word for the listlessness and lack of attention span you describe. It’s called flakiness. And it was every bit as evident in Seattle as you write it is in SF. I’d hazard to say it’s a West Coast thing.
Wow, Mike and Aris… I think you’re absolutely right about this. I’ve lived all over the country now and there’s a distinctly strange thing that happens on the West Coast once you go north of the Central Coast… A friend who grew up in Colorado told me, “everyone in Seattle has a friend quota thing going. Everyone has their 3 or 4 good friends and until someone dies or leaves, they’re unwilling to have more than a superficial relationship.” I didn’t fully realize how true this was until I lived in Vancouver, BC, which is culturally very similar to Seattle. Between my college years, I lived in DC and in BC for equal amounts of time… By the time I left DC I knew about a dozen people with whom I still keep in touch to this day (five years later). When I lived in DC recently, I lived with one of them. I made no more than a casual acquaintance while living in Vancouver.
As for West Coast flakiness… There’s something to be said for that as well. On one hand it produces a lot of risk-takers and entrepreneurial people… There are some great works by economists like Annalee Saxanian who argue that it creates the conditions necessary to have a dynamic creative-culture economy (high tech, arts) that require failure after failure after failure. That said, it is a pain in the ass to keep track of what people are doing. In my Seattle crowd, it’s not unusual for me to hear of people quitting one job for a start up, going broke, going back to a regular job back to quitting all over again. Speaking of flakiness, I have a little side project that I need to get working on for Michael.
One thing that wasn’t mentioned, but is quite true about West Coasters that I’ve noted living in DC, is that nobody does _anything on time_. I’m living in Salt Lake City right now, and it’s just the same. It doesn’t matter if you have an important conference call with people on the other side of the country… Let’s start 10, 15 minutes late! Oh, shit, we have a meeting at 10 am. Let’s leave for it at 10 or 10:05. Or, if you have a doctor’s appointment at 3:30, you’ll see someone about 4:45. Ridiculous.
it’s totally true! i grew up near vancouver (which i would argue is actually shockingly, unexpectedly different from seattle), and consequently have a lot of friends there, but most of them are people i grew up WITH. i have only a handful of good friends there that i met past the age of 15. i KNOW lots of people, but i don’t even have most of their phone numbers. it’s a very aloof city. then i moved to toronto and met loads of people who like, wanted to hang out and do shit and invite me places. it was a really weird east/west thing.
that said, having grown up with stoners and slackers and dreamers, the “drive and ambition” you find so appealing in DC is incredibly off-putting to me. DC has this really inflated sense of importance that totally drives me nuts. well that, and the fact that everyone dresses like they’re going to a job interview all the goddamned time.
Actually, that’s very true. Vancouver is far more diverse and international city these days. I’m not sure how much more recent immigrants have assimilated to or changed the existing culture, but I always thought of Vancouver as Seattle’s Canadian counterpart.
Re: ambition, etc… That is one thing that turns me off about DC. It’s what I like to call big fish in a small pond syndrome. Too many people go about as if they’re somebody important, whereas in a place like New York it seems, everybody’s a nobody, nobody cares, and you’re a nobody too.
Feel free to come back and whine anytime.
i’ve lived in different cities in the states and i have to say san francisco is my favorite one. i still live in the city and share some of your opinions about the city, but not all. still happpy to be here though i’d love to meet solid, reliable friends. btw, i lived i new england for 5 years and only made 1 friends. i really think our lack of making friends is due to our short attention span and our rush-to-nowhere mentality. i’m proud of my adopted city and won’t change anything except maybe the weather and the homeless on the streets.
@ben You are being sarcastic? Right? Or just being stupid? A “well crafted argument” pro or con DC is almost non-existant here and DC could be interchangeable with Miami, Peoria, Ill or Fallujah. It examines SFO, versus a home city where one grew up. Dumbell!
Aaaaaaaaahhhhh for real? You prefer DC to SF? WOW, that’s surprising… DC seems so boring to me, so button-down. I’m so glad I left the shithole called New York for this little gay Mecca.
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