Over the past 10 or so years, San Francisco seems to have become more about Big Tech and LGBTQ+ than almost anything else
Good thing I've never posted my picture here, or you might be throwing darts at it.
People seem to be largely forgetting that before the Tech Invasion of 2010 (as I tend to call the beginnings of the city's current self), SF had a very interesting history beyond the major bullet points (the hippie scene over at Haight-Ashbury, the 1967 Summer of Love, the 1906 earthquake, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, to name a few). This KFRC story is a good example of the behind-the-scenes minutiae that time tends to forget about.
I've experienced three booms in San Francisco: 1999, 2003 (approximate), and 2010. I've experienced the busts, too: pets.com, the Global Financial Crisis, and the pandemic. (To be clear, I didn't work at pets.com and, in fact, had the same San Francisco employer for 15 years, starting in 1999.)
An example: During and after the Global Financial Crisis, I was working for a while at Kearny & Post, taking an AC Transit bus in from Oakland to the old Transbay Terminal every day until a BART parking space opened up. On my way to work, I would walk on Mission Street past a hole in the ground, covered with gravel. A building was planned there. Construction stopped early in 2009 and the contractor poured the gravel on. Construction finally restarted in 2011. It's now the 555 Mission building. Deloitte's San Francisco offices are there.
The point: San Francisco is notorious for boom-and-bust cycles. Its modern history started with a boom and has gone on from there. It's also prone to natural disasters. Then it has to rebuild and reinvent itself.
I've often walked around areas such as north of Market, North Beach, and other places where the most recent building boom hasn't really reached, and wondered, "what would it have been like to live here in the 1950s" (or the 1960s)...really, the last time San Francisco had many middle-class and working-class neighborhoods. Retired Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer grew up in the city then. I'd love to ask him what it was like.
But then again, we don't get to choose our time. Instead we get to make the most of our time. I wish I had moved to San Francisco sooner, but the stars didn't align for that until the end of the last century. I appreciate history, enjoy history, and love to do historical research, but I don't want to live in the past. Every time has its awfulness...which people tend to forget. It's probably a survival mechanism that hard-wires us to think the present is worse than the past.
I will say that the area along Bush atop the Stockton tunnel is one of my favorite areas of the city, because it has changed very little other than the city parking garage. Just being there feels like San Francisco. Based on what I saw last week, the Waymo cars seem to like it a lot, too.
I get the point about the tech boom in the city. It's been a bastion of tolerance for different sexual identities since the beginning of the 1900s and it really solidified after World War II.
That said, there were nasty police raids in the 1950s that left a legacy of distrust that may still not be fully dispelled, even today, despite SFPD's best efforts.
The only relevant question to ask in San Francisco is "What's next and when's it gonna get here?"
And "how much is it going to cost?"
Radio stations are transient by nature...at least the big city ones that aren't in buildings at the transmitter site. I'm doing some volunteer work for the California Historical Radio Society and one of the things that keeps coming up in research and artifacts is that while some stations had long-ish stays in a given building, there's nothing about the building to hint at that today.
Of the commercial stations I've worked for (none in the Bay Area):
First one: still at its original 1949 transmitter site.
Second one: a vacant lot. Before that, a used appliance store.
Third one: an auto repair shop.
Fourth and last one: condos.
Radio is an ephemeral business.
Even better...digging through the newspaper.com archive, I discovered that my apartment in the Castro had once been the temporary home of a dry-cleaning establishment displaced by the 1906 earthquake and fire.
KCBS has been in four buildings in my lifetime---the Palace Hotel, Embarcadero Center, 855 Battery and now 88 Kearney.
I didn't know KCBS was at 88 Kearny now. That's pretty darn close to the Palace Hotel!
In 1999, I had to take over some paperwork to my new employer to get payroll started. So I walked over from my work location, then south of Market, to the payroll department. At 88 Kearny.
Moreover, when I ended up with an office at 120 Kearny...by that time, I was a managing director and had an office, not a cubicle...I was on the south side of the building and could look directly into the windows at 88. In those days, Citibank had most of the building. I could look right across and see someone who I think was a trader. He was the first person I saw who had three computer monitors going at once. That's why I thought he was a trader.
If you don't like San Francisco now, wait a few years. There's an essential part of it that won't change much but a lot of other things that will.
artandarchitecture-sf.com
