It’s become a depressingly common rite: sharing the news of the next neighborhood institution that lost its lease or can’t afford a new landlord’s rent increase or which is otherwise disappearing. We’re not even three months into 2018, and already Tenderloin gay bar The Gangway and North Beach’s Caffe Roma shut their doors, while La Victoria Bakery seems not long for this world. The Vestry, Babu Ji, and Brasserie St. James all called it quits on Valencia only a few months after 25-year-old vintage shop Retro Fit sold its last wig. Kinky cafe Wicked Grounds had a brush with death only to recover after an extraordinary outpouring of financial support.

Legacy registries and cultural districts can only do so much to stanch San Francisco’s bleeding. It’s not that treasured icons never disappeared before the tech bubbles; it’s that the churn of this particular phase of capitalism seems so vicious. And behind it are people living real lives. We shouldn’t lose sight of the tens or even hundreds of thousands of residents who loved and frequented these places and who’ve been forced out of San Francisco, either — just as we shouldn’t let ourselves get too worked up when people who have no idea what they’re talking about callously dismiss the closure of a neighborhood institution.

SF Weekly publishes our annual Best Of issue every May, but this year, we thought we’d supplement it with a list of 101 Things We Love About San Francisco. We present them in no order and with no claim to the list being comprehensive; undoubtedly, we love many more things than just these. They’re not all businesses — not even close — and they’re not necessarily at risk of disappearing. Some of them are vistas that will be with us for a million years or more, until fault lines and erosion shift the entire Bay Area’s topography. But we offer them as an incomplete snapshot of life in this city in early 2018, in all its weirdness, its coolness, its evanescence, and its beauty.