I am happy the author followed her curiosity. I remember feeling much the same “pull” when I moved to San Francisco in 2013.
Those of us who really vibe with the place seem to share a desire to get behind the city’s strange magic and discover the past souls and events that make San Francisco what it is - that make it feel this particular way that it does.
To the author and everyone else who has arrived here recently: welcome to San Francisco!
The pull of San Francisco never goes away!
It is indeed a Side Quest City
San Francisco is the amazing. Can’t beat the vibe and history of that city.
lol my local pub has more history than San Francisco
What pub?
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It’s the heart of Silicon Valley and the hippie movement. Essentially the entire US economy originates from the area, trillions of dollars. What slackjaw, red state, welfare queen town are you talking about?
The heart of Silicon Valley? Aren't you thinking of Palo Alto?
Not really but Palo Alto is a part of the SF metro region either ways.
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I read Ulysses Grant's memoirs awhile back, and loved his description of being in San Francisco in the 1850s. (Another tidbit I loved is that he imagined an alternate path for his life where he would have settled down in the Bay Area and become a math teacher):
"The immigrant, on arriving, found himself a stranger, in a strange land, far from friends. Time pressed, for the little means that could be realized from the sale of what was left of the outfit would not support a man long at California prices. Many became discouraged. Others would take off their coats and look for a job, no matter what it might be. These succeeded as a rule. There were many young men who had studied professions before they went to California, and who had never done a day's manual labor in their lives, who took in the situation at once and went to work to make a start at anything they could get to do. Some supplied carpenters and masons with material—carrying plank, brick, or mortar, as the case might be; others drove stages, drays, or baggage wagons, until they could do better. More became discouraged early and spent their time looking up people who would 'treat,' or lounging about restaurants and gambling houses where free lunches were furnished daily."
Same. Never lived there- though almost moved in the 1990s- and now feel a pull to learn/feel the history. Did also just finish Grant's memoirs- and would strongly recommend Sherman's if you haven't read those, not only for the SF parts. Some of his letters are incredible and dare I say relevant today.
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Right. A man makes an observation in the mid nineteenth century, and he’s spreading a 21st century myth
A worthwhile reminder that the enemy of the proletariat is everywhere and in all time.
Terrible, no good, upsetting, false class consciousness-derived take.
The point of the left is to bring prosperity into reach for everyone, not to stroke the hair of able young men in poker dens who refuse to work, and whisper "You're valid."
That's what capital wants the left to degrade into.
Capital doesn't want anything left or right. Capital also relies on accessible prosperity.
Capital relies on the absence of accessible prosperity (though it benefits, for control, on the illusion of it.)
How?
I have a great uncle that moved to Haight Ashbury to chase the whole spiritual open your mind idea. He said it was nothing like the media or nostalgia portrayed it. Lots of homeless drugged out kids who were completely lost. No jobs, panhandling for food and money, no direction, just spaced out druggies. Said it was fairly sad and he left within a year. He is an old hippy type as well, it was not what I was expecting to hear. I remember seeing an interview of George Harrison saying something similar.
George Harrison went to the Haight with his then-wife Pattie Boyd, and walked around, eventually finding people recognized him and followed him around. He played guitar in the park. He wrote a large check to fund the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic.
IIRC he said he had expected some kind of alternate hippie-economy based on genuine values and having ownership of the neighborhood, and was disappointed that he didn't see any evidence of that. Just a bunch of idle people.
Yep, pretty much. Found it - https://youtu.be/_I-ThafU1e4?si=dwZfCpNkDtnz2onb
My uncle had the same description. Disappointed that it was just stoned people and not a lot of real substance.
When was this? It's changed a lot (in both directions) over the years. For example, after Prop 64 legalized weed, the field in GGP by Haight and Stanyan that was previously staffed 24/7 by a morass of weed salespeople and their groupies (maybe 50-300 at any given time) emptied out overnight.
Then there's the fact that even the 18-20yo "Hippie Pilgrim" demo, which has held up pretty well for generations, is secretly stratified by the socioeconomic status of the parents. One's take on it depends on the specific cliques they're exposed to.
This brings back memories. I low key miss the drug market on hippie hill. We used to have the 'nugs' game where you had to try to sell the bums weed before they offered you drugs.
FWIW, the parent's comment matches my dad's sentiments about the city in the 60s/70s, but I wouldn't start a bar fight to defend his honor on this point. I would be genuinely curious to hear you elaborate on the changes. I live around the corner from the Upper Haight and it has always been one of my favorite parts of the city, but it has always had a lot of loafers doing nothing but drugs as long as I can remember.
Rich-kid hippies houseshare, hang out indoors after dark, and don't panhandle or shoplift groceries. They do smoke weed and maybe more, but their safety net is functioning. In their case, this life stage can reasonably be described as a cultural experience. Other than aesthetics, there's not much crossover with poor-kid hippies, because mooching tension is a major bummer.
Before the citywide affordability crisis, I think you were more likely to end up outdoors because you hit bottom than the other way around. The outdoor segment and the weed-dealing segment have always been more visible, though.
1969, he was prob about 30.
Frank Zappa made his (similar) feelings pretty clear.
https://genius.com/The-mothers-of-invention-who-needs-the-pe...
Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, etc. were there, he just didn’t meet them.
The community of people that were actually serious about that stuff was as far as I can tell pretty small and exclusive.
kinda of the idea that I got from reading Phillip K Dick novels...
>If there is a lesson to this side quest, it’s certainly this: you can JUST go to the library (or do things, in general). The world is full of rooms like that sixth-floor reading room, and it’s up to you to walk into them. Work usually can wait, and you often come back more inspired to it when you’ve given yourself permission to wander. Just go on that quest!
People too often forget this.
I loved my time in SF. For those that remember Detour GPS guided audio tours in 2015 that Andrew Mason founded, the audio tours in SF were next level and so special and showed a side of the history of SF I hadn't seen. Luckily they're preserved on Spotify (although without the GPS guided part) - https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/detour-podcast/
Detour is one of a handful of apps whose demise really tears me up. A great idea with great execution.
Rick Steves had audio tours on his app, but without the GPS initiated cue. I had no idea the original Detour podcasts were preserved, thanks for sharing!
I took my family on one of those tours in 2016, and I think my kids know more about San Francisco than they know about our home town
A good friend of mine ran away to San Francisco in the mid 80s when he was 15. And his parents flew there and brought him back.
And the name of that good friend? Holden Caulfield.
Very cool. If you're interested in things like this you might wanna checkout CGP Grey's videos on tracking down various stories from books through archives.
> If you're interested in things like this you might wanna checkout CGP Grey's videos on tracking down various stories from books through archives. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ
The video is sort of funny and reminds me of the paranoiac absurd archival research of the Trystero in Thomas Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_.
Read a good book from a hippy about her experiences on a commune in Oregon. http://margaretgrundstein.com/index.php/naked-in-the-woods/
I know my mom ran away to SF as a teen in the 60s, but she will not say why or share the story. I’ve always been curious about it because she’s a very straight laced person, and I just cannot imagine her doing anything like that.
I feel like there is a secret there that she is afraid or ashamed of, but if she would tell me I could understand her better.
> Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
> History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
> My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
> There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
> And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
> So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
That passage has always felt a little heartbreaking for me. The early internet era felt like much the same kind of experience, though it's been much more than five years now, and it's hard to see many traces left of that wave.
Nice. I just rewatched Terry Gilliam's movie the other day. A good portion of your quote is voiced over by Depp. There's so much going on visually that the literary bits are easy to miss the first few times. Looking West from a steep hill is pretty magic.
I have frequently walked by the "OG Huckleberry House" depicted in the photo near the bottom, and knew its history. It's near the stairwell and garden that connects Broderick St with Buena Vista East. You can actually see, on the northern side of that incline that is a steep ramp with no stairs, that the house goes pretty far back, probably had lots of room for boarders.
Season of the Witch is honestly such a great book. Nice to see it mentioned here.
Bit of a disappointing article. I kept looking for a revelation or insight from the letters but it never came.
Don't rely on the author to hold your hand to an insight - what did you believe that this article challenged?
No I agree. The article seemed like it was going somewhere and then just sort of trailed off and never reached any sort of conclusion.
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I imagine a lot of queer kids were running away from abuse