Spending the day in San Francisco, I am struck by the difference in the general feeling between this place and New York City. NY has a reputation (mostly left over, I suspect, from the wild days of the seventies and early eighties) of being an edgy place, a city of danger. And yet NYC these days is rather staid and predictable. Even the once dangerous strip on 42nd Street, at one time the province of thieves, prostitutes and drug dealers, has become an extension of the Walt Disney Company. Where Ratso Rizzo once stalked the naked streets, parents now take their kids to see “The Lion King”.
But San Francisco, despite its upbeat image of a place out of a Tony Bennett song, retains an edgy sense of danger. Walking down these streets at night, you feel the desperation of people hanging on to reality by their fingernails, of street bums and druggies and shadowy figures who long ago stopped taking their meds.
By day this is simply a lovely place, but by night there is a side to this city that emerges with the darkness. San Francisco, beneath the beauty of its rolling hills and ocean views and lovely houses painted in pastels, can be a dark and even terrifying place. I love to visit this city, but I am not sure I could bear to live in a place where so many people wander the night who seem to be so terribly lost.
Interesting, many years ago… after I had become pretty much entrenched as a New Yorker, I flew to San Francisco for a conference… This, for point of reference, was a pre-Giulliani New York… Before the graffiti had been lifted from the subways, before the Times Square conversion… Before all of the positive things that happened in NY over the last 15 years or so.
My first impression, walking the streets of San Francisco was how clean and safe it seemed. It wasn’t the dingy, dark, and dank mess that I was used to. I was amazed that the bridges were painted and not the constantly worked on, rusting Manhattan, or Williamsburg bridges that I saw every day… Covered with non-working union “workers” staring at each other year after year…
Clearly, things have changed.
Actually San Francisco is still just as beautiful — and for the most part it is quite clean. Unlike Manhattan, San Francisco has architecture that looks very cheerful and pleasant.
What I observed was a fairly large population of sad and desperate seeming people roaming the streets. They were also there during the day, but they were much more noticeable at night, when the general crowd had thinned out.