In 1987, San Francisco was a place best known for its past, prominent for its history: the Gold Rush, the Summer of Love, gay liberation. Wealthy local Dianne Feinstein was in her final year as mayor after ascending there in the wake of the Milk-Moscone murders. The gay community was reeling from another tragedy, too—as the New York Times reported that year, ten percent of the entire country’s deaths from AIDS had occurred in the city of 725,000 people.

The 49ers victory in the NL West league, led by then-25-year-old Jerry Rice, was a rare bright spot. There was tourism, of course, but mostly to well-trafficked areas like Fisherman’s Wharf, and numbers of visitors hovered just over three million per year.

Back then, we did not want to become Manhattan. Today, we want to be Shanghai.

“It was a good city, but it was just ragged,” Lewis Butler, a practicing architect in the city in 1987, tells Condé Nast Traveler. “The waterfront was a mess, the Ferry Building was a mess, there was no growth downtown, and there were huge skyscraper battles. I think it considered itself a second-rate city.”

Today, San Francisco is a city of the future, fueled by the energy of tech execs and internet fortunes. Downtown gleams with new skyscrapers, joggers fill the waterfront, and the Ferry Building is a gourmet marketplace selling artisanal produce, cheese, and chocolate. Last year was a record-breaking tourism year: There were 25.1 million visitors in 2016, up 2.3 percent over 2015—or around eight times as many as 30 years ago. For a city with a population of 865,000, that’s 34 visitors per capita each year; compare the city of Chicago, with 51.4 million visitors but a permanent population of 2.7 million—or 19 tourists for every local. No-go areas from the 1980s like SoMA or the Mission are now trendy, crammed with buzzy restaurants, high-end homes, and new offices. The LGBT community has rebounded, too; at 6.2 percent of locals, it’s the highest percentage of any city in America. (A rare low point? The 49ers, who only managed to beat one team in their 2016 season.)

“San Francisco went from being the end of the rainbow to being the center of the universe," says hospitality legend Chip Conley, who helped pioneer the boutique hotel and went on to serve as global head of hospitality for Airbnb, who opened his first hotel in the city on January 1, 1987.