Without one or both of those obsessions (I have both), this could be the most boring video you've ever seen.
But it brought back for me all the sense of thrill I felt when I first discovered San Francisco in 1962, and expanded on it in the years 1965 to 1970 before moving to Japan for the first time. I once thought the perfect job for me would be driving a cab in San Francisco. I knew all the downtown streets and was working with a map to extend that knowledge into the residential areas.
That fascination never entirely faded away, but it did get greatly diluted once I parted ways with the city itself in the 24 years I lived in Japan and came back with regularity to my house in Berkeley - not the city itself - which I bought 26 years ago.
But I'm an old man now and I get to live with memories of terrifying visitors to the city by pretending to be Steve McQueen and racing up and down the hills behind the cable cars and treating the city as a lover would treat a loved one, singing its praises and just hanging out, wanting to be close and intimate.
That San Francisco is long gone, except in my imagination. It stopped being the city of white buildings built on hills where one's favorite pastime was running from one hilltop view to another sometime in the 70s and 80s when it gave itself over to becoming Manhattan West and the downtown became more shade and shadows than sunlight. And today it's a city of super rich technocrat spillovers from Silicon Valley and a poster boy for American homelessness. American lack of equity in a microcosm.
I can't walk much anymore - getting up the hill to my dentist's office on Sutter Street from the Powell St. Station is about all I can muster, and I've now decided I have to give up even that and take the Stockton Bus up from Market to where it turns into the Stockton Tunnel, a sad reality of growing old.
But I know I'm not alone. There are others out there who once found San Francisco a magical city - and there have got to be some out there who still do.
For me, this review of the development of the streetcar and BART lines brought back years of affection for the place. It's still there. Not what it was to me in my early years of living on my own for the first time, of coming out in a warm and welcoming environment, (well, relatively speaking...) and of the discovery that it wasn't just Europe that could create magnificent cities. But still a place to make my heart go thumpety-thump when Jeanette McDonald gets up to sing.
In any case, for you train buffs and San Francisco lovers out there, a nice little history lesson for when you tire of Icelandic horror detective fiction on Netflix:
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