Interview with Francine Prose on early-1970s San Francisco [audio]

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“On the Road” has many vivid depictions of San Francisco circa 1950. Most remarkably they spend almost all their time in the Mission, because this is where all the work is at docks and warehouses, and when they go out at night the jazz clubs and bars are always nearby. And as it is described there are so many of these nightclubs that they can hop to a new one every hour, and do this every night for weeks and never run out of places to go. It’s a city as a party, and seems to contrast with the current reputation as a bit suited up and stale.

What remained the same was the characters all living in precarious situations of housing, usually finding a flop house or sleeping on someone’s couch and so on. The transient nature of the city hasn’t changed much. But Dean Moriarty is able to rent a home for a family of 4 on Pacific Hill for two years while barely holding down odd jobs for more than a few weeks at a time. That’s different!

Kevin Starr’s magisterial history of California really revolves around San Francisco. It’s a beautiful story in five parts. The first is the Spanish Mission, then the Gold Rush boomtown, then wartime depot (this is what “On the Road” describes), then the hippie utopia, and now the tech center (I like to call it the “unicorn stable”). I wonder how we will reminisce about the San Francisco of today in 50 years.

The title is a bit misleading: the Interview is mostly just boomer rambling with very little talk of San Francisco. There is a brief digression about Hitchcock's Vertigo - which is a great movie and I enjoyed that section. The movie is all about nostalgia, memory and the imagination, and I suppose San Francisco is a good setting for that since there has always been a sentiment that it used to be better (1849 is universally acknowledge as being the city's prime - rampant syphilis and cholera notwithstanding). From the movie: https://youtu.be/udMms5FKyok?si=ruLJNWTDDgFQeH1W&t=47 Or this slightly punchier clip: https://clip.cafe/vertigo-1958/you-mean-gay-old-bohemian-day...

San Francisco was not associated with tech or Silicon Valley until the late 2000s-early-2010s, when companies like Twitter and Uber opened headquarters here because of tax incentives. Then startups started popping up everywhere and it transformed the entire city, to its detriment.

As a tech worker myself, I think San Francisco pre-tech boom was a great city that was a lot of fun to live in, but afterwards, there were simply too many rich young tech workers that filled every venue and every activity to the point where it's intolerable. Everyone was trying to complete the 8x8 list and become a Yelp Elite member, and getting into any decent restaurant meant waiting in line for 90+ minutes. The city became very unaffordable and the people were much angrier because of how much harder they had to work to afford living there.

I have several friends who were not in tech but rather different walks of life, from publishers to graphic designers, nurses, government workers, etc. They are all gone now to different cities because it was too expensive to live here, and by trading in the culture of the city to the tech mono-culture, the city is much worse for it.

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