SF has TONS of neat places to visit-I would move there in a heartbeat if I could. You have grat bars (Left O’Douls, the Owls Nest, the Medusa), great restaurants (John’s Grill, The Stinking Rose, LULU), great sighst (Golden Gate park).
I could spend a year in SF and never get bored.
Stranger on a Train:
Any city?? Alcatraz is unique, Lombard Street is unique, the cable cars and Golden Gate Bridge are what San Francisco is most associated with - that’s generic??
And from where do you get “and then gave up”? I had one week of vacation time (and as an Orthodox Jew, Saturday is a tourism black hole). In that time, I spent a day driving through the redwoods, a day in San Jose, a day in Monterrey, a day in Sequoia, and a day in Yosemite. I spent a day in San Francisco as well, doing things heavily associated with San Francisco. And I did say I could have used another. Restaurants are mostly out of the question because we only eat Kosher, and I don’t travel to buy used books. I live in New York City. If there’s any old book I want that I can’t get on line, I’ll bet I can find it closer to home - and please don’t take that as a slight to your city.
Douglas Adams wrote all that before the Sandwich Revolution, of course. Britain is now the biggest sandwich market in the world. There is nothing that Brits won’t eat, as long as it comes in sandwich form.
Wow, those sound like some amazing panhandlers! I think …
They are abusive, but at least they do not believe vaccines cause autism.
Me too.
I wanted to post this last night but my notebook battery timed out just as I was finishing up without saving my Notepad document. Then after retyping the whole thing, I tried to post and it turns out my subscription expired at midnight.
Too tired to renew membership right then and with visions of free posting possibly being very close at hand, I thought it best to call the whole thing off and start fresh sometime today. I just know, had I renewed membership before going to bed, guaranteed there would have been a sticky up this morning announcing free posting. Sorry all, I just didn’t have the energy.
Here’s a day trip just outside the city I would like to do, and it might be nice for a person bored with San Francisco. Board Caltrain regional rail at 4th & King St., with your bicycle. Step off the train an hour later, 29 miles south at Palo Alto Station. Bicycle through the Stanford campus, gradually making your way to the Linear Accelerator three miles west. The Interstate you see crossing over the Accelerator is I-280.
Start backtracking through Stanford and continue easterly. With the help of map or GPS you’ll reach Google in about an hour. Mozilla is right there too. The Accelerator is like a compass needle pointing to the southernmost shore of San Francisco Bay seven miles away, which is where Google is. A straight line from the Accelerator to Google will pass through Hewlett Packard as well. That’s the route I would take. From Google go east one mile to NASA Ames Research Center. Then head directly south five miles until I-280 again blocks your way. Here at I-280 & Homestead Road & Mary Avenue is Homestead High School where Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak graduated (five years apart).
Bicycling one mile east on Homestead Rd., then right 1/4 mile on DeAnza Blvd. brings you to 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, entrance to Apple.
Backtrack north up DeAnza 2.5 miles to Sunnyvale Station and catch the train back to San Francisco. Making allowance for plenty of meandering, the whole bicycling route is 35 miles at the most, eminently doable for almost anyone. Sounds like a fun day.
Let’s compare earthquakes against hurricanes, shall we?
Katrina killed on the order of 30 times as many people as Loma Prieta, and caused 4 to 8 times as much property damage after adjusting for inflation. Yeah, you can see hurricanes coming, but they are much harder to defend against. I’ll take earthquakes any day.
I prefer earthquakes to tornadoes myself ( I’ve been in both ), but realistically I’d have to admit you can’t really compare the death tolls of any storm to truly major 'quakes.
Earthquakes are by a vast order of magnitude the biggest killers of any natural phenomena. Even tossing out the putative champ from 16th century China, you just have to look at the devastation of the ( earthquake-caused ) Indian Ocean tsunamis of 2004, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands. No mere hurricane or suite of tornadoes ever came close to that level of damage.
Monterey and Seattle are both better. GG park used to be good until the Supes defied the voters and shut down the roads for cyclists.
Stranger On A Train, the weather is nice during the day, but after dark on a cool summers day it turns very very cold for anyone dressed for summer.
Note that Lombard street really isn’t crooked, it’s made crooked by planters. Vermont Street, on Potrero Hill beats it.
OK, you got me on that one. Still, quakes that devastating are pretty rare. How much damage is caused by violent weather each year? I’d still rather live here than on the Gulf Coast.
I’ll save you the time:
Adelaide: Great food. Lousy nightlife. Whatever
Melbourne: Overrated. Expensive. Decent coffee. Whatever.
Perth: Who knows? Whatever.
Sydney: USA-lite. Whatever.
Brisbane: Tropical. Whatever.
Darwin: Humid, cyclonic. Whatever.
Hobart: Cold, wet. Whatever.
Actually, I’ve only ever been to Melbourne and Hobart (and live in Adelaide, or thereabouts).
My Sydney experience was limited to the airport, and I’ve never been to the others at all. Still, that’s the rep they have, so you can save yourself the travel $$$ and pretend you’ve already been. 
Missed the edit window. Forgot to say: I really loved the Palace of Fine Arts and would have gone there daily if I could, but honestly the rest of SF was pretty much just ‘okay’ to me. Not extraordinary in itself. We had a total blast, but it was predominantly the company we were keeping.
Having said that… I did like the Chinatown and Japan Town areas, and we got some great chocolate in the Castro district, and all the locals that we interacted with were just lovely.
I even got the local Police to pose for a photo with me.
I’m glad we went. We did have a lovely time, met some fantastic people (very colourful locals) and ate some really good food. (Though by the time we got there we’d been away from home for several weeks and I’d have killed for a meat pie or some Vegemite toast.)
The pan-handlers and homeless were really off-putting, I have to say. I wanted to like San Francisco a lot, but my wife and I just didn’t feel particularly safe going out after dark because of them.
Any other major city would be doing something to keep the homeless away from anywhere the tourists might be. I’ve spent a bit of time in London, but while London has homeless people they’re not as omnipresent as they seemed in San Francisco, and I hardly saw any in LA or Las Vegas. Sure, they were there, but they weren’t as… aggressive as they were in San Francisco.
I know, it’s great. I throw on a thick herringbone wool sweater, grab my blackthorn shilelagh, and stroll down to the local pub to grab a seat near the snug so I can read while sipping a glass of Tyrconnell Single Malt. It’s almost like bein’ back in the old country.
I haven’t been to Austraila, so I don’t know your experience, but the homeless in San Francisco are hardly all that dangerous. Sure, they’ll come up and shake a cup of change in front of you or give you the, “Buddy, yougotadolla’ihaven’teateninthreedaysyoulooklikeamillionairegimmesomemoney,” but they’re no worse than most other major cities and a lot better than most; if you want to fear for your life from the homeless try New York City, New Orleans, or Philidelphia. Las Vegas probably don’t have much in the way of homeless–it’s an artificial and now disneyfied construct, anyway–but if you didn’t see homeless in Los Angles it is just because you didn’t venture out of Whiteyville; we have homeless spanning from Santa Monica to Pasadena, and especially thick around USC and the warehouse district. Heck, we have them on the sidewalk on Colorado Ave in Pasadena (though I suspect the city brought them back in after gentrifying Old Town just to give the place a sense of character for the tourists). I can show you prominent areas of Los Angeles that are thick with homeless and other urban archetypes. Heck, you can’t walk five blocks between Hollywood and Sunset without being hit up for money, offered a wide variety of illegal substances, propositioned for bizarre sexual activities, invited to join a cult, warned not to join a cult, given a free stress test by people who will invite you to join their non-cult cult, offered money to star in a pornography film, nearly run down on the sidewalk by reckless drivers, and dodging a series of running gunfights between the LAPD and the LACSD resulting from endless “Glock versus Beretta” debates.
Another thing you have to appreciate about San Francisco is (at least traditionally) that it is a socially liberal city and tends to soft glove the homeless and indigent to a point of fault. They might lock them up in Omaha; in San Fran they just try to encourge them to tuck their cardboard shelters away out of sight during the day. That’s part of the quote-charm-unquote of the city. It’s Boston of the West Coast, only the MFA doesn’t smell nearly as bad as the T.
Stranger
Yeah, I’ve stumbled into areas in a lot of big cities that made me nervous, but there’s something about SF that never made me fearful, even if it looked really seedy. People bug you for money & cigarettes and things, but I never got the feeling I was going to get mugged or stabbed. The homeless & vagrants & panhandlers seen to fit in with the laid back atmosphere.
I have no idea what the violent crime rate is in SF compared to other big cities, but it never felt like a violent crime type of place.
True, nothing like a nice thick Aran wool sweater.
Nobody’s mentioned them yet, so I’ll add the Asian Art Museum and the Ferry Building. And it is possible to get to the Winchester Mystery House by public transportation. Slow and painful, but possible.
The homeless here tend to stay out of people’s way, or simply sit on the side of the footpath with a bowl and a sign asking for spare change. They’re not obtrusive or obnoxious, and certainly not omnipresent the way they were in San Francisco, and that’s been my experience in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.
We saw a few in Santa Monica, but they seemed more to just “be there” rather than actively panhandling, if that makes sense.
This was what a lot of the locals said when we asked them about the homeless. Oddly enough, most of them seemed to agree that they were a nuisance and something needed to be done about it. A couple said that apparently Rudy Giuliani bought a lot of the New York City homeless one-way bus tickets to San Francisco, on the theory that it was the other side of the country and none of the homeless could afford a ride back. I don’t know how true the story is, though.
I love San Francisco, and I’d rank it in the top 10 cities I’ve been to. It’s unfortunate that Martini Enfield had such a negative experience, but I can understand your sentiments. I’ve been to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, and certainly I never experienced the obnoxious panhandlers that are ubiquitous in San Francisco. When in the Tenderloin, I just try to ignore the panhandlers and marvel at the transvestites. I find the punks in the Haight to be way more obnoxious than anyone in the Tenderloin, although I feel a whole lot more insecure in the Tenderloin.
Sydney is a top ten city for me, and it reminds me a lot of San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city on a bay with iconic buildings and bridges. Both have world class food. I mean, Sydney has Porky’s and San Francisco has the O’Farrell Theater. I could live in either town with no problem at all.
I haven’t been to Brisbane in years, but i think you might be idealizing Sydney a bit. If you walk around the right (wrong?) parts of the city, you can find plenty of homeless people, including quite a few who are obtrusive, in the sense of asking for money, sitting on the sidewalk, etc.
And tourists tend to notice the homeless in San Francisco precisely because one of the key “down and out” areas of the city, the Tenderloin, is basically adjacent to the downtown core, just west of Union Square. This area has remained quite run down despite the incredible gentrification of San Francisco as a whole, and it still contains a considerable proportion of the city’s homeless and poor population.
The Tenderloin has quite a lot of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) places, where people who can’t afford a proper apartment or house live. While they sometimes have a roof over their heads, many SRO occupants can’t always afford to keep their places, and many drift in an out of homelessness. In other cases, you have multiple families sharing SROs or very small apartments, and these people are virtually homeless, in terms of their day-to-day needs. They often end up panhandling on the street, just the same as those who are actually “sleeping rough.”
It’s no surprise, with so many poor and underhoused people in the Tenderloin, that they end up panhandling on the downtown streets. It makes perfect sense that they would go where the money is. Why hang out on the back streets of the Tenderloin, soliciting money from other poor people, when you can try to get it from the tourists and the shoppers and downtown workers?
There are other parts of the city where you can find drug use and homelessness. Wander around the corner of Mission and 16th for any length of time, and you’ll see people sleeping rough, pushing loaded shopping carts around, and conducting drug deals in the alleys. But there are also plenty of parts of the city when you can walk for ages without seeing a homeless person at all.
Maybe i’ve been lucky, but i’ve walked around downtown and through the Tenderloin itself, both during the day and at night, and i’ve never been subjected to any panhandling that was aggressive enough to make me uncomfortable. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, just that it never seemed as bad as some people make out. The downtown/Tenderloin area of San Francisco seems no more or less dangerous or unpleasant to me than the more seedy parts of Kings Cross or Darlinghurst in Sydney, or the Main/Hastings area in Vancouver’s East End.
Maybe it’s partly because i’ve been living in Baltimore, a city with so many blasted and destitute neighborhoods, so many homeless and drug addicts, so many boarded up houses, and so much violent crime, that those cities’ problems seemed sort of quaint by comparison. When you’ve lived in Baltimore, there’s a natural tendency to go all Monty Python when someone starts complaining about their city’s problems. “Looxury! When ah was a lad, we’d give our left arm to 'ave aggressive panhandlers!”
I’m not quite sure, based on this and your previous comments, exactly what you have a problem with. Is it the homelessness itself? Or just the fact that the panhandlers annoy and inconvenience you?
As opposed to saying what? “Hey, we love our homeless problem! It adds some spice to the city, and keeps the minimum wage schlubs on their toes”?
Just about everyone agrees that “something” needs to be done about homelessness. The bone is contention is what that “something” should be. Some people want more government programs; some think private charity and the free market can fix the problem; and others just don’t want to see homeless people while they’re sipping their morning coffee.
I’m willing to bet that the Giuliani story is probably apocryphal, but the fact remains that, in many regions, the homeless tend to gravitate towards areas of dense population, precisely because it gives them opportunities to panhandle or, if they’re of a less scrupulous character, to steal. They also gravitate to areas that have shelters and other social services that they can draw on, and if you’re a homeless person in northern California, you’re probably most likely to find such things in places like San Francisco or Oakland. And when a city like San Francisco has a well-known reputation as a relatively tolerant and liberal place, where people on the street are unlikely to be abused or run off, that increases its magnet effect.