Posted 2/9/2010 6:08 am
San Francisco was a staunchly Republican city up until about 1964. Then the Haight-Ashbury hippies moved in, then the Castro faggots moved in, and it was just all downhill from there.
Been going there for 50 years. It is a nighmare to drive in (almost Bostonian) and worse to park. There have always been bums and dirt. There have always been hoards of tourists, too.
We docked our boat at Pier 39 every year since it opened for about 3 months annually and lived on it most weekends + other days.
San Francisco is a city of great restaurants, horrible drivers, fair shopping, and weather that most cities would sell their soul for.
Interesting shit about SF:
---at 3:30am, the streets are deserted....you can literally drive the wrong way on a one way street. Also, there are only 7 cop cars on patrol in the whole city at that hour. It is mystical.
---tourists get fucked over in SF. Cabs are expensive and unreliable. The famous tourist traps are shit. (Fisherman's warf??? FUCK ME! Chinatown?? FUCK YOU!)
---The best parts of the city are on the north and west.
didn't some gangsta drive down and plow the street with machine gun fire one night in the early 90's??
I played in a band that practiced in this shitty Turk Street Studio location. One night I was waiting just outside the
studios to pick up some equipment.
BANG BANG BANG BANG
somebody got blown away. one of the crackheads hanging out I figured. couldn't see under the sheet the cops put on him
when I was leaving...
Posted 2/9/2010 7:10 am
I've lived in SF since 1974.
Great weather, views.
Been in the same flat since 1982.
Ground floor in-law apartment in a beautiful original Victorian from 1901.
In Cole Valley.
Landlord paid 30K for it in '72, when Cole Valley was solid working class and Haight st. was a boarded up disaster area, the summer of love fallout you don't hear much about.
Recenty appraised at 1.6 mil.
Posted 2/9/2010 7:14 am
You couldn't pay me to live in a ground floor apartment there. That's the level that'll get squashed during the next big earthquake.
Also, the Haight was a boarded up disaster area before the summer of love. That's why the hippies moved there. It was cheap and they could squat.
Posted 2/9/2010 7:17 am
Naw, it was solid working class.
TONS of cheap places for rent back then---in 74 I was paying 125. for a studio apartment south of market.
Fantastically cheap rent for----well, still for me.
People here don't much live in fears of earthquakes.
Weather is good. Food is good. Public transportation is the best in California. Women....well....the are lame by LA standards, but tops by most city's standards.
Posted 2/9/2010 7:22 am
I like city living. 1 black away from the N judah streetcar line---in the heart of downtown in 15 minutes.
The burbs would drive me fucking crazy.
Only thing is, being here since 74, I've done everything there is to do a million times already.
Still, I get out and about, date pretty girls, have a wide circle of interesting friends and many freelance job contacts.
A good, interesting life.
Posted 2/9/2010 7:23 am
I lived there and not a day went by that I didn't wonder what would happen if there was a big earthquake, especially since there are still unreinforced masonry buildings all over the place and uninsulated power lines overhead for the buses.
Posted 2/9/2010 7:23 am
Growing up in LA all I ever heard was this hippy dippy bullshit bout how SF was so much cleaner and nicer than LA. Then when I went I took the BART from Oakland to Union Square. It was every bit as fucked up and dirty as LA, with as many niggers and homeless gay crackheads asking me for spare change every 10 feet. Chinatown was pretty average as well.
SF is easily the most overhyped city in the US, if not the world.
AYRTS? IA?
Actually, outside of the Castro, SF is not an overtly gay city.