Opinion: Myth and reality of the City by the Bay
On a visit up north last week, cornily, before going out to dinner, I put Tony Bennett on the Bluetooth speaker as I got dressed: “The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay/The glory that was Rome is of another day/I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan/I’m going home to my city by the Bay.”
While I’ve lived in Northern California, it was not in San Francisco, so it was never my home. But, just as my colleague Steven Greenhut did the other week and wrote about in these pages, I was curious for a visit, after years of reading in the national press about what a horrific cesspool it had become.It remains one of the most beautiful, civilized cities on the planet.
Strolling over to Market Street in search of the supposed hellhole, we had our one uncomfortable encounter with a street person causing a ruckus inside a See’s store. Tall, headphoned, clearly unwell, he picked a fight with the apparently Filipina clerks, claiming they wouldn’t give him free candy samples, and told them to go back to where they came from. One yelled, “Hey, I was born here, and I’m calling the cops. She called.
You can find trouble when you look for it. Disgusted former progressive Michael Shellenberger’s famous book “San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities” is all about that. The former gubernatorial candidate and nuclear power advocate cites the problem of human waste on the sidewalks in Baghdad by the Bay and how the city spends $100 million a year just to clean them. I consequently expected to see, well, crap everywhere.
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