This is the last Sunday of the year, usually a quiet day, a time to clean out the closets, take down the Christmas tree and put it with the trash. Out with the old. I don’t think anyone is sorry to see the end of 2019. It wasn’t much of a year.

The year had some high notes — Salesforce Tower opened its 61st floor to public tours in February, and the glittering Chase Center opened in September. Metallica and the Symphony played new music and the classics in a billion-dollar building. Very new San Francisco.

But if those were the high points, everything else seemed down. Lady Luck seemed to turn her back on the Bay Area. Think about it: The mighty Golden State Warriors almost made history, only to lose the NBA finals in the last seconds at their final game in Oakland. They moved to San Francisco only to have Stephen Curry break his hand just as the new season began.

That’s the kind of year it was: The Oakland A’s fizzled, the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, the Giants were a shadow of what they once were. Only the 49ers had a great year, but the city’s first major-league team now plays in Santa Clara, and the San Francisco faithful are still muttering about it.

Even the weather turned on us. We longed for rain after a dry year, only to get floods on the Russian River just before spring. It was the autumn of our discontent, beautiful fall weather marred by wildfires. It was the year the Kincade Fire blackened Sonoma County.

A strange year. Over the last summer, Mission Bay came to life as a new city neighborhood, complete with parks, kids and dogs.

In June, just in time for summer, a new 17-mile-long Crosstown Trail opened. It connected parks and open spaces all the way across San Francisco, from Candlestick Point to Lands End, a minor city miracle.

But at the same time, bits and pieces of an older San Francisco began to fade away, like one of those old Polaroid pictures.

It began in January, when Siegel’s Clothing Store on Mission Street folded. The place had been there for 91 years, selling everything from Catholic school uniforms to zoot suits. “It was unique,” Joe Eskenazi wrote on the Mission Local website. “It had everything. ... It had always been there.”

The building, it was said, sold for $6.5 million. Not far away, Lucca Ravioli, a fixture at the corner of 22nd and Valencia streets, closed at Easter time. It was a San Francisco landmark, a classic kind of place, busy all the time. But the property was too valuable for a ravioli store and deli. The parking lot next door sold for $3 million last year, and the store and building complex went on the market in 2019 for $8.5 million.

Sam Jordan’s Bar on Third Street in the Bayview had its last call on Nov. 2. Sam Jordan himself was a boxer, a politician, and the Mayor of Butchertown in the bar’s heyday. He died in 2003, and the place got into financial difficulties. It was one of the oldest black-owned businesses in the city, but San Francisco’s African American population and black business establishments have been dwindling.

“Now it’s survival of the fittest and less bohemian heart,” said Jay Foster, who owned Isla Vida, an Afro Cuban restaurant in the Fillmore that shut down in July.

So it was a curious year, a new city rising and an older city drifting away. A lot of us were optimistic at the end of 2009, just 10 years ago. We thought the city had entered into some kind of golden age. And it had. San Francisco became one of the country’s 10 “supercities,” according to various websites.

But this famous and rich city has not been able to solve the problems one sees in the street every day. On the last week of the old year, only a block from Salesforce Tower and its transit center rooftop park, I saw a beggar on the street, sitting outside a little house he had made with cardboard boxes.

So that was 2019. Maybe we ought to revive the custom of years ago. On the last working day of the year, people in offices in the Financial District used to open their windows and cast the pages of all those little paper desk calendars to the wind, as if to throw the old year out the window. Maybe we could bring back paper, just for a day. Out with the old. In with the new.

We are ready for a new year, even a new decade. Maybe we can see a better city in 2020. It’s a leap year, too. We even get an extra day.

Carl Nolte’s column appears Sundays. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf: