High on a hill it calls to me

From time to time yet another article or video calls for attention to the city of San Francisco.  A video just showed up yesterday, and I recommend it to all lovers of what Bay Area locals know simply as "the city,"  twenty minutes of historical trivia almost guaranteed to fascinate and entertain.

The city is full of flaws which reflect the woes of the country at large.  It's got a nimby problem and it's full of homeless people who shit wherever they can because we have an aversion to providing public toilets out of concern they will be used by the many drug addicts. It has been colonized by the wealthy from Silicon Valley who decided it was more fun to live where the action is rather than stay in Palo Alto/Mountain View/Menlo Park and, just like those towns, it has become too expensive for most of the kids who grow up there to inherit their parents' homes and live happily ever after.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't continue to inspire passionate love and affection for the place. We may not sing San Francisco with quite the same enthusiasm as Jeanette MacDonald once did, but if you've been to a performance at the Castro Theater and felt the thrill of hearing it on the Wurlitzer Hope-Jones organ as it is being raised and lowered from center-stage through the floor at the start and at the end of performances, you can still find it in there somewhere.

I started my independent adult life in San Francisco back when you wore a flower in your hair in the Haight/Ashbury days, and despite my twenty-four years in Japan and my embrace of the San Francisco diaspora with my purchase of a house in Berkeley, across the bridge, when people in Germany or Japan or other places around the U.S. identify me as a San Franciscan, I wouldn't dream of correcting them.

Have a look and a listen to Daniel Steiner's history of the growth of The City.  You can make a game of picking out the several factual errors and bloopers - the commenters will fill you in.  It is a great way to get a booster shot for the virus that is disillusionment with one of the world's greatest places to visit.

Or call home.