San Francisco is over. You missed it. This ain’t the Summer of Love. Punk is dead. Die yuppie scum. Die techie scum. Fuckin’ hipsters.

Or, as Broke Ass Stuart proclaimed in The Bold Italic this week, “San Francisco is slowly shifting away from being our Neverland.”

The thing is, San Francisco has always been over. It ended about 20 years before you got here — no matter when that was. If you grew up here, it ended sometime before you turned 21, and you got to hear your mother tell you how you’re just tromping through the ruins of the real San Francisco that she caught the tail-end of.

SFist can tell everyone to “to stop bemoaning a vanishing San Francisco and move on,” as an editorial from March 10 put it, and Scott Lucas of San Francisco magazine can tell Broke Ass Stuart to “just move to Oakland,” but bemoaning a vanishing San Francisco is what we do. It may be the only thing that unites San Franciscans as a people.

My mother used to go to this jazz club called El Patio over on Market and South Van Ness in the 1950’s. She danced there to Perez Prado and the Dorsey Brothers when they blew through town — until Bill Graham took it over in 1968 and turned it into the Fillmore West. The Grateful Dead and Santana played there, and Allen Ginsberg read poetry from its stage.

“Then the hippies took it over and ruined everything,” my mother would say, lamenting the downfall of El Patio and the glorious San Francisco she knew. She and my dad hightailed it out of SF and landed in Redwood City. There weren’t any hoppin’ jazz clubs in the burbs, but they did get a pool out of the deal. You could get such perks then because the rent was too damned low instead of the other way around.

My parents escaped the hippie ruination in the ’60s. I returned to the city in the ’90s looking for just that sort of thing.

But to the Baby Boomers, the Summer of Love with all the brown acid you could OD on and all the venereal crabs you could catch was what made San Francisco what it was, and if you missed that, well, you missed San Francisco. The city was over. Dan White and Jim Jones stuck a fork in it in 1978. It was done. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

My parents escaped the hippie ruination in the ’60s. I returned to the city in the ’90s looking for just that sort of thing. I saw Dead Kennedys at the Farm in the ’80s, and I wrestled Macho Sasquatcho in a concrete nightclub in SoMa in the 1990’s (not-so-humblebrags, I know), but I still feel like I missed the better, crazier, wilder San Francisco that was.

This isn’t to say that brokenhearted nostalgia is unique to San Francisco. Vanishing New York will match every defunct diner and shuttered dive bar that VanishingSF can throw at you. Chicago can mourn its closed watering holes (along with a tragic number of public schools), but San Francisco clings to this idea of a more real version of itself that existed sometime before you got here. The city that was is the city that is, inseparable from us but distanced by a chasm of time.

You see this play out in pop culture too. When smarmy shipping magnate Gavin Elster hires Jimmy Stewart to tail Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), he tells Stewart, “The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast.” And the mid-20th Century San Francisco that Elster bemoans is the city that my mother longed to return to, ten years before Ken Kesey, Jerry Garcia, and Grace Slick showed up to wreck the damned El Patio.

“One final thing I have to do and then I’ll be free of the past,” Stewart says as he drives Novak through redwood trees that have lived on this earth for thousands of years. “I have to go back into the past once more, just once more, for the last time.”

The sad thing for Jimmy is that he can’t. None of us can either.

Twenty-two years earlier, the opening title card of MGM’s San Francisco (1936) informs us that SF “dreams of the queen city she was — splendid and sensuous, vulgar and magnificent.”

The catastrophic destruction caused by the quake goes a long way towards explaining why San Francisco is a city obsessed with its own demise.

That city was completely leveled by the 1906 earthquake and the pillars of flame that followed. In the film version, buildings shake apart via special effects that chart a Sodom and Gomorrah narrative. The city we live in today is the one that Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, and Spencer Tracy pledge to rebuild as they march towards the camera singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The final shot of the film shows the smoldering ruins of San Francisco fading into the 1930’s era Financial District — a shot Scorsese pays homage to at the end of Gangs of New York.

The catastrophic destruction caused by the quake goes a long way towards explaining why San Francisco is a city obsessed with its own demise, but these yearnings for a bygone Golden Age predate 1906. Bret Harte (1836–1902), one of early California’s great writers (along with Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce), tells us you pretty much had to come over on a tall ship with Richard Henry Dana to catch the real San Francisco.

In “Bohemian Days in San Francisco,” a short story published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1900, Harte recalls a city of houses with floors made from wooden tobacco crates and roofs that were nothing more than cloth tarps. If you thought things were rough in front of Taqueria Cancun on 19th and Mission in the 1990’s, that scene was nothing compared to “the weird stories of disappearing men found afterward imbedded in the ooze in which they had fallen and gasped their life away.” If you weren’t there for that, my friend, you’re just a fucking poseur.

However, knowing the laments of previous generations proves little comfort when faced with a city hellbent on becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. I fled suburban boredom and came to this city because of places like Lucky 13 and Bottom of the Hill, both now threatened by encroaching condos. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to live here without them, or the drunks, musicians, bartenders, and crackpot dreamers who make these places so special. Being close to work is a good enough reason to move to Cupertino, I guess, but it shouldn’t be what drives you to come to San Francisco.

If there’s any comfort to be had, it’s in knowing that it won’t be long before the vilified techies themselves are overheard mourning the death of “the real San Francisco.” Today’s ruinators will become the aggrieved of tomorrow, just as they always have in this city. We’ll laugh when that moment comes maybe, but nothing is going to stop a massive rent hike in the meantime.

Photo courtesy of Bill Badzo/Flickr

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