I love SF
San Francisco is not a hellscape at all
I had my first real visit in SF recently, and don’t worry: I had a nice time!
This article is part of I Love San Francisco, a feature series of essays that highlight what makes San Francisco iconic and irreplaceable.
By Lindsay Pugh
The first time I visited San Francisco, I almost stepped into a gutter full of raw chicken.
It was July 2017. I was en route to SFMOMA, stoned out of my mind, and couldn’t stop laughing. I scoured Twitter for the chicken origin story, but came up empty. If I didn’t have that photo on my phone, I would assume I had imagined it.
My favorite thing about visiting a new city is walking around and observing shit. This is how I get a feel for the people, the pace of life, and maybe even some of the problems. In 2017, that street chicken felt like an appropriate symbol for SF, a place so intriguing that I could easily overlook its unsavory elements.
From my outsider’s perspective, SF seemed to suffer from the same problems as other big American cities: public transit, homelessness, drugs, crime, and gentrification. Aside from the earthquakes, I wasn’t aware of anything that made SF worse than Brooklyn, the city I lived in from 2011–2016. Even Ann Arbor, Michigan, my current place of residence, routinely deals with similar conundrums on a much smaller scale.
SF’s better than many places, too; I completely understood its charm. Everyone was friendly, navigating the city was easy, and the beautiful weather put me in an unshakeable good mood. Coming from a place where the summers are unbearably hot and the winters are straight-up Dickensian, I would happily tolerate anything short of torture in exchange for mild coastal climes. While my initial visit was brief, I vowed to come back soon for a lengthier exploration.
Cut to June 2023. My friend Michael, who sings for the SF opera, invited me out west for some shows. We’ve known each other since we were teens in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania, jumping off rope swings into shallow creeks and fantasizing about the day we would both leave our boring hometown. He’s been an ardent champion of the Bay Area since moving there in 2009 and I knew he would show me the best time.
I also wanted to finally meet The Bold Italic editor in chief Saul Sugarman, who I knew primarily through his delightfully unhinged comments on my blog’s “Gilmore Girls” recaps. With two locals at the helm, I could kick back and relax instead of worrying about which areas to dodge because of all the human turds, AKA the street chicken of the 2020s.
Right before I left for my trip, a slew of articles came out with headlines about San Francisco’s downtown “doom loop.” I saw these digital illustrations in the Financial Times and was immediately reminded of Gratiot Avenue in Detroit, a downtrodden corridor that’s frequently referred to as “crack central.” I know Ron DeSantis came out with some dumb commercial after spending all of twenty minutes in the city, but I refuse to watch it because his stupid face gives me nightmares. When I told a work acquaintance where I was going, he joked, “Hopefully you won’t get shot,” cementing himself as someone to avoid going forward.
If I believed every dumb thing I heard about San Francisco, I would have missed out on one of the best trips I’ve had in recent memory.
I drank coffee each morning in Michael’s Bernal Heights backyard, the perfect place to smoke a joint while marveling at the tiny hummingbird nest perched in his apple tree. The afternoons were spent wandering the stacks at Green Apple and Dog Eared Books, scooping up cheap used copies of Natalia Ginzburg and Deborah Levy. During my last night in the city, I unexpectedly fell in love with opera during “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” a show that made me cry as soon as the curtain went up because the opening scene was so overwhelmingly beautiful.
I walked miles each day, ate Gyeran Bbang at Breadbelly, and had high tea with Saul at The Rotunda. All of it brought me renewed faith in humanity; none of it made me feel like San Francisco is a trash city on the verge of collapse.
Out of curiosity, I walked downtown along Market Street and made a pit stop at the Westfield Mall. Although on the brink of closure, it was still much livelier than my hometown mall, which sold for $100 at auction in 2017. The whole area was crowded with a combination of homeless people and employees for the controversial Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit organization that cofounder Lena Miller refers to as, “the Google or Instagram of social services” [insert eye roll here].
I didn’t see anyone openly masturbating or doing drugs, though. Granted, it was 6 p.m. on a Friday and I’m probably somewhat desensitized to these things, but I will say that I didn’t feel unsafe. No matter where I walked in the city or what time I took public transit, there were always enough other people around to keep my anxiety at bay.
Yes, San Francisco has issues, but it’s still a beautiful place where art and culture are alive and well. There is no other U.S. city where I can step outside into foggy, crisp 50-degree weather in June after watching a world class opera. Drinking a gimlet on a vintage trolley is not something that can happen just anywhere.
Those adventures are SF-specific and magical, and well worth the occasional brush with fecal matter and raw chicken.
Lindsay Pugh is a digital strategist and writer. You can find her thoughts on film and TV at Woman in Revolt.
The Bold Italic is a non-profit media organization that’s brought to you by GrowSF, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. Donate to us today.
