San Francisco as it once was *UPDATED*
Bookworm on Jan 02 2010 at 12:08 am | Filed under: San Francisco
Here’s a great video from 1940, highlighting some of the wonders of the City of San Francisco as it once was:
I have a few comments:
[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Now that you've seen SF as it once was, you may find interesting my post about SF as it now is. In it, after describing the City of my own memories, I examine how the current Progressive City government tightly controls law abiding citizens and businesses, while allowing special interest groups to function without limitations. The result is a dangerous blend of totalitarian anarchy. And now back to my regularly scheduled post.]
Union Square is no longer a grass covered and palm treed oasis in the middle of the City. Because of the homeless, who saw the grass as a comfortable bed, the City removed all greenery. A good architect made the site rather elegant, but it’s still a cold, hard square compared to the lovely park it once was.
The grassy area and long fountain in front of City Hall are also gone — they too fell victim to the homeless. Rather than routing the homeless, the City routed the greenery.
Market Street too has changed. It’s definitely not a glittering, lovely thoroughfare, and hasn’t been in my remembered life. It’s worse now, though, then it was when I was growing up. For most of its length, it is filthy, with the corners manned by legions of homeless. I’d love to avoid it but, unfortunately, one of my carpools routinely takes me along a few unlovely blocks. My goal, always, is to avoid hitting the winos who weave through the streets, with no regard for street lights or cars.
The last shot of the western-most waterfront of San Francisco, at Ocean Beach, gives a hint of the vast, Coney Island-like park that was once there. When I was a child, all that remained was Playland at the Beach, an old fun house with wooden slides, rolling barrels and, of course, Laffing Sal. That’s all gone now too, with condos in place where fun once reigned.
The Legion of Honor and surrounding golf courses are as lovely now as they were then. The Museum has a really lovely, not quite first class, but almost first class, collection of European Art and objects, going back to the early Middle Ages. If you’re ever in the City, I highly recommend it. Then, walk around outside and admire the exquisite view looking north, over the bridge and into the Marin Headlands.
The Mint has long been closed. It sits there still, a silent, hulking shell.
The De Young Museum that I grew up with, and that appears in the video, has been torn down, and another one has taken its place. The new De Young is lovely on the inside, with flowing, well-designed galleries. On the outside it looks, I think, like a giant chicken coop. I have to admit to missing the old museum a lot, especially the Egyptian wing, which used to have mummies (very cool to a kid).
The guy narrating the video has the goofiest accent I’ve ever heard. He is not a San Franciscan.
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[...] Related:“San Francisco as it once was.” — a 1940 newsreel allows us to see how another city has not-so-paradoxically aesthetically moved backwards as a result of half century of progressivism. While Detroit looks to regreen itself, Bookworm Room notes that much of the landscaping in San Francisco’s public areas has been removed to make them less desirable real estate for its feral homeless population. Filed under: Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, Liberal Fascism, Muggeridge's Law, The Assault On Reason, The Return of the Primitive [...]
Loved this post. I grew up around SF too, in the ‘burbs, and while it’s been many years since I left, it’s hard to see how far the city has devolved.
“San Francisco, city of fond memories, and visions of progress for tomorrow”
Well, at least the first half remains correct.
San Francisco and New York sadly remind us that the “liberal-progressive” movement used to contain people who contributed to making America truly great. What a shining monument San Francisco used to be! The party of Truman and Kennedy used to be worthy of respect, regardless of whether you liked its politics or not. Now it is the party that is determined to pull the entire city of San Francisco into a cesspool of complete rot. New York was rescued from this in the 80′s and 90′s by Giuliani and others who were able to restore it. Sadly, San Francisco is in the clutches of a certain set of thoroughly corrupt liberals, so deeply in their clutches, that it cannot be redeemed, cannot be rescued. They lack all fiscal and moral restraint, have absolutely no fiscal nor moral accountability. The city is run by grafters and the completely unaccountable who have learned they need do nothing, and in fact they *do* do nothing. Nothing that elevates civilization, that is. Absolutely nothing.
For those who loved San Francisco, it must be a long, slow, sad lament, to watch it sink year by year into complete rot and decay.
[...] SAN FRANCISCO as it once was. [...]
Congrats, dear Book.
I remember most of this San Francisco from the 1950′s – we lived in Sonoma County and my grandfather lived in Pacific Heights. I loved the San Francisco I knew well. San Francisco began to really be a different place in the mid- to late-1960s, with the Summer of Love as the high point of the ’60s, and was transformed in the 1970′s to the excessively politically correct and gay haven it has become.
I suppose the low point for me was when my then late ’70s father was propositioned by gay men on Polk Street as he went to a shop where the family had traded since the beginning of the 20th century.
Visiting the City recently, it is a strange mix of the old and familiar – especially in Pacific Heights – and the new and jarring. The attitude of the inhabitants has only gotten worse since my father – a native – described the newer residents in the 1970s as a bunch of pretentious would-be sophisticates who would have been laughed out of town before the War. The pretentiousness only grows.
About 25 years ago, after a couple of weeks back in the City thoroughly exploring its nooks and crannies with my Dad that I hadn’t seen in many years, what struck me was how
Precious
the City had become. One word that summed up the preservation movement (and the anti-chain movement) that gives the city the character of being something of a fly in amber, and captures the essence of both the gay domination and political correctness of modern San Francisco.
And, of course, it’s reputation as the politically correct heart of the Left Coast, only ensures that the people who move there are more and more like the new people than like the natives of the 1950′s or before.
And, yet, I’d love to retire there….
That’s a remarkable video – I knew they had rail on the lower part of the bay bridge at one time but had never seen footage of it before. Lots of gems in there.
On the plus side it was nice to see some things that were nearly lost are still there – like the glass house and Lotta’s fountain. And the old library was preserved too, in the form of the Asian Art Museum. Shame we’re doing so much better with the structures than everything else…
Nuke it from orbit. That’s the only way to be sure…
Timeless video. Most of this video could be re-shot today with very little change. As to the comments above about the decline of the city etc. I don’t know what city they live in. As a 30 year resident this city has never been more beautiful. Market street below 7th is returning to its former glory. Union square and the surrounding blocks have never been more beautiful.
The residential neighborhoods have never been more beautifully kept in their entire history.
I defy anyone to find a city more incredibly painted than SF.
The water front and piers are second to none thanks to the 1989 earthquake–what a godsend!
Southbeach etc, I could go on and on……
“As a 30 year resident”
So you got here in 1980? Actually, you have a point. Many parts of the city WERE even worse than today around then. Certainly the waterfront is much improved SINCE THEN – but the ugly and useless Embarcadero freeway didn’t exist at the time of the video, now did it?
Many of your other statements, like the state of the residential neighborhoods are just nonsensical. Go to a museum and see how they looked when they were NEW, not when they were in total disrepair after people were fleeing the city in the 70s and nothing had been maintained in ten years.
Yes Patrick, thirty years is a long time, but not long enough. The decline of the once wonderful city began in 1967, the Summer of Love. The media killed Bagdad By the Bay.
As late as the 1960′s you could use the cable cars as transportation, now they are a carnival ride. One could eat lunch at the Wharf and watch fishermen unload their catch. There was no Ripley’s Museum or cotton candy.
San Francisco of today is cute. It’s a very lovely picture and for the most part very manicured but the character is gone, gone gone. No longshoremen at the bars in North Beach, just trendy’s dressed in J.Crew rugged wear. No bikers cruising up Market, just bears cruising each other. Instead of a George Christopher you get a Gavin Loathsome.
The past is past, but don’t confuse the current theme park city for the real city that stood on those hills.
This is my memory of San Francisco.
Here’s a tour of San Francisco through the front windshield of a 1968 Mustang– the car chase sequence from the movie ”Bullitt”.
It still ranks as the best sequences ever, IMO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-y1VUdnQXo&feature=related
Again to repeat myself the neighborhoods I’m very familiar with, Pac Heights, the Marina, Downtown, Nob Hill, Russian hill, the Mission, South Beach/Mission Bay, the Financial district, Golden gate park, Richmond/Sunset, the Presidio, Noe valley, the Castro, Harding park etc have never ever been more beautiful. I have talked to residents of 80 years who say the same. What has changed, as it has changed in every city is the culture etc. The old timers in my building miss the doorman! That is just history/economics moving forward.
But the city, the sheer beauty, has never been more beautiful.
Nice video. Here are some of the same scenes in a 1940 8mm Kodachrome color home movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3mM67BCvtc
patrickneid #9:
> As to the comments above about the decline of the city etc. I don’t know what city they live in.
Well, I’m not a resident, and I haven’t been there to visit in more than fifteen years. It wasn’t what I expected then, and from what I’ve read, things are much worse now.
My recent impressions have been drastically colored by this article last month about outrageous mismanagement by the current entrenched government. This is one deeply shocking article. By the time I finished it I was practically in shock. You wouldn’t think things could be that bad even in a country in collapse such as Haiti or Zimbabwe. Perhaps you could explain why the article is false.
http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-city-in-the-u-s/1
Books, that accent is “trained announcer in the 1930′s” — very precise enunciation of by-the-book English. My first grade teacher was old fashioned and tried very hard to teach us to speak properly, ie like that, instead of the Colorado cowboy mix of southern and mumbling. Listen carefully when he says “the Great White Way” and note that the “Wh” is distinct — “huh-wuh” — from a “w”‘s “wuh” sound.
But I guess I have to add, there *must* be a lot of people quite happy with the way things are. You couldn’t have a city with, say, 80% of the people deeply unhappy about the direction of their city. That would eventually have to prompt massive change in those voted in, and that’s not happening.
So there must be a *lot * of patrickneids and dougs in SF, quite happy with the way things are.
“So there must be a *lot * of patrickneids and dougs in SF, quite happy with the way things are.”
Please don’t attribute things to me that I didn’t say. It sounds like you read one line of one of my comments and didn’t get past the ‘but’.
And the answer to the questions about unhappy people is that they moved. There’s been massive flight out of Berkeley and San Francisco – which is why so many of the big houses have been broken up into six apartments. The new people are very different than the ones before.
Apologies, Doug. I misread your #10 to mean that the 80′s were the nadir and that you were quite happy with an apparent renaissance since.
#18:
>The new people are very different than the ones before.
I can accept new ways and new people, if the new ways and people *succeed*. That doesn’t appear to be the case. I *like* the values of my parents’ generation; they were closer to the earth and they were much more independent and responsible (on the average) than what I see around me these days.
Or you could say the “new ways and new people” are just like the rest of America, skating along on the successes and stored-up prosperity of the past, but now running out of time. But again San Francisco seems to be worse even than that, headed for the crash faster than the rest of us, and just as willfully blind to what is looming due to the mismanagement, short-term thinking, massive debts, out of control spending, and lack of any standards, accountability and responsibility.
Alas only the Embarcadero waterfront area, Mike, and a few other high profile gems (all of which took way too long and way more money than they should have). The city’s still pretty much a nightmare of a place to live, even if it does have some wonderful places worth visiting.
” There’s been massive flight out of Berkeley and San Francisco ”
Sadly the population of San Francisco just hit 808,000 a new high. A nightmare to live in? We live in alternative universes. It is no accident that SF has been voted year in year out as one of the most beautiful cities in the world and has always rated as the number one walkable city.
I could care less what the politics of the city are.
I read your earlier post on San Francisco as it now is and thought it was outstanding. I have a few minor comments, though:
The more I think about it, the more I think the tone for the decline was set with the beats in the ’50s.
The artistic ferment in San Francisco through the early 1960s stands in marked contrast to its cultural life today. As early as the 1970s, there was more true cultural experimentation and innovation in LA than in San Francisco. San Francisco became a place where things played after they’d arrived elsewhere. The Symphony was enjoyable under Krips, but has been hit or miss since. The Opera was the only real world class cultural institution in the City (I’m biased here, my grandfather was a patron from its founding….).
Real society in San Francisco is very small, and very closed. It’s one of the three most tightly closed society towns in the country: only Charleston, South Carolina is more closed, and SF is pretty closely tied with Boston. Even real New York society is more open. Interesting tidbit: San Francisco was the last major town to abandon it’s own society list for the national Social Register. 95% of the people who’ve moved to San Francisco in the last 30 years don’t even know this society exists, and of those who do, the only ones who have a snowball’s chance in hell are already in the book.
San Francisco has long been a union town – remember Boss Ruef!
The old San Francisco was an exceptionally tolerant place, at least since the disbanding of the Committees of Vigilance. It was a rough place – think the Barbary Coast – but it was also a ‘live and let live’ place in many respects, and one that was vital.
To me, it’s ironic that the very tolerance that made San Francisco hospitable to beats and hippies and gays (among all sorts of others….) has filled the city with people who, over time (and rather like liberalism generally) have turned in exactly the sort of intolerant bigots – but now bigots from the left – that they fled the rest of the country to avoid.
“I could care less what the politics of the city are.”
Interesting. I’m assuming, then, that if a conservative government were to begin prosecuting public sodomy at the Folsom Street Fair, rousting the bums and thugs on Market and Haight streets, firing featherbedding municipal government workers, telling the city’s professional black/brown/yellow racialist whiners to go to hell, rescinding the minimum wage ordinance, or calling for an end to rent control, you wouldn’t complain.
Charles, as I said I could care less.
What I would tell you is a conservative city government would not start rescinding minimum wages or ending rent control. As for the other even the liberals claim to be trying to do the those. I have never seen or heard of public sodomy at the Folsom street fair. I have seen a lot of everything else but not sodomy!
I never ever let the politics of the day ruin the scenic beauty around me. I don’t let the misled policies of the Parks department ruin Yosemite. I never think about it when I’m there. When I’m in SF I never think about my Rep–Ms Pelosi.
I can’t tell if patrickneid *LIVES* in San Franscisco or only visits from nearby.
Everyone knows the tourist spots are magnificent. You certainly can visit and have absolutely wonderful evenings, week in and week out. Patrick is certainly more than just a tourist, but there’s a difference between visiting a city and living 24/7 within it, dealing every day with the city government itself and its rules.
One of the key things I took from the article I mentioned above is that the rising population in SF is composes of two parts: A wealthier gentrified class; and the underclass. The middle class and the young are in decline. The wealthier – who LIVE there – are seemingly willing to pay and pay and pay for a corrupt, unaccountable government. Perhaps the article is a glass-half-empty muckraker complaint piece – we have our muckraking tabloid in Dallas too, and you’d think the city was constantly on the verge of total collapse, if that’s all you read.
Time will tell about SF. If Patrick is right, the city is fine. If I’m right, all the things Patrick extols are just glittery surface facade glitz, and the rot is steadily undermining the infrastructure and the foundations. Time will tell.
“ If I’m right, all the things Patrick extols are just glittery surface facade glitz, and the rot is steadily undermining the infrastructure and the foundations. Time will tell.”
SF finances are not unlike most major cities in the US. All are most exclusively Dem lead and have been for 50 years. My statements above have nothing to do with politics but the raw naked beauty of SF and the current state of the physical beauty of the city, which as I have said repeatedly has never been better. Do I wish that city politics would be evenly split, of course. They are not. I got over that 25 years ago. I do not let it interfere with my living here. City politics have never interfered in my enjoying the city nor will they ever. In fact I would go so far as to say that perhaps 40% of the folks here are right leaning to conservative including thousands of gays. Most of us register as Independents.
Barring an economic collapse of the entire US, SF will continue to be one of the world’s finest cities. The point that has been made and continues is the wealth distribution of the residents. It will only get worse.
<B>but the raw naked beauty of SF and the current state of the physical beauty of the city</b>
Beauty is a standard of aesthetics, and in relation to human perception becomes an impossible standard to obtain, though much can be recognized through the senses.
The way human beings perceive beauty comes to a few fundamental building blocks: Epistemology plus Metaphysics equals Ethics and Ethics equals Aesthetics, with Politics hanging around.
The way that people perceive beautiful things in totalitarian societies is due to the fact that they don’t find such control ugly. And the reason why people have a very easy time finding what is beautiful in America is because they believe America embodies the right Ethics of behavior.
You can separate standards of beauty into works of art, architecture, culture, but inevitably this prioritizes things based upon a rank of metaphysical concepts. One divides what is real into several categories then apply an ethical priority to them, such that really bad ethics in one area do not affect the beauty of another area. This often comes to a logical contradiction, in that the beauty, or esthetic quality, of a Communist poster is inevitably tied to the political doctrine at work. That’s cause they’re not unrelated.
It’s pointless to have physical beauty when the people are oppressed or lacking in harmony. The more beautiful the ruler’s gold toilets and silver ware, the more the ugliness is produced between that decadence and the daily toil of the people that provide the taxes for such.
It is precisely because the followers of Obama followed a standard of beauty that was ugly to their opponents that this entire situation is the way it is. And that includes everybody working in the shadows.
<B>as I said I could care less</b>
As you can see, Charles. Apathy, the soul of brevity.
Nobody that had their standard of beauty, the utmost ideal leading to utopia/nirvanna, as the classical liberal principles would put such a low priority on politics.
People can go camp out and create their own idealized living style, such as the Amish, but we all know that is backed up by two things.
Ymar #28:
> People can go camp out and create their own idealized living style, such as the Amish, but we all know that is backed up by two things.
OK, Y, I’ll treat this as a challenging quiz. An idealized living style such as the Amish is backed up by two things which are:
A. National security, e.g. the military – paid for by taxes of all citizens
B. The civilization – and all of its material goods – that surrounds those living their idealized style. Without that civilization surrounding them, their idealized lifestyle would collapse into “nasty, brutish, and short lives”. (The same was true of hippie communes in the late 60′s and 70′s)
How’d I do?
I would change the B option into political security. Force is only a reservoir usable by good or evil, but politics has to head towards the Good from the Ethical and unEthical actions of humans.
Civilization by itself is no guarantee of anything for the individual, except something other than barbarism.
Speaking of the accent, I serendipitously happened across an article on that “trained no-accent accent”, what they call “mid-Atlantic English.” I don’t know that I agree Cary Grant spoke it — he always sounded pretty damn Brit to me — but it describes it well.
San Francisco…
Bookworm has an article about San Francisco and, unfortunately, some of her comments are too true. But the clip from the 1940′s is fun: San Francisco as it once was….