Wow

Off a link from BLDG Blog, a eulogy for a Paradise Lost, San Francisco. This article makes me deeply sad.

I hesitate to cut and paste, because the whole article is a must read if you care about SF in the least, but:

What gave San Francisco its grandeur, way back when, was the way the natural surroundings -- the hills, the sea, the sky -- defined the skyline. The architects of the day designed buildings meant to blend in and complement the sweeping landscape, not dominate it. San Francisco was a pastel canvas then, with most of the buildings painted in colors that gave the town a Mediterranean quality. ("The most European city in America," it was called.) Even the larger downtown buildings, nearly invisible today unless you happen to be standing directly in front of one, were clad in warm sandstone or red brick or some other aesthetically pleasing façade. They were buildings that said, "People work here," not "Corporations rule from here."

and this:

Our movers and shakers have also suffered from penis envy to match their greed: One politician after another, one businessman after another, has queued up to tell us how important it is to be a "world-class city," a phrase that has haunted San Francisco since then-Mayor Joe Alioto proclaimed that as the cornerstone of his administration.

What Alioto and nearly all of his successors failed to grasp was that San Francisco was a world-class city -- until they screwed it up. On the one hand, the town was very parochial, a family town, a place where people identified themselves by the neighborhood they came from. On the other, it was still a great seaport. The combination invested the place with a mixture of provincialism and cosmopolitanism that was the envy of other American burgs and the delight of travelers who came here from distant shores. A lot of them stayed on, and we were the better for it.

San Franciscans of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, who took fierce pride in their town ("Manhattanization" was a dirty word then), kept the politicians and the "it's all about me" school of architects at bay by passing anti-high-rise ordinances meant to keep San Francisco from turning into what it has now very nearly become: just another noisy, crowded, overbuilt American city, drunk on capitalism, paralyzed by traffic gridlock and increasingly devoid of charm. I can remember voting for at least two of these anti-growth initiatives, both of which passed by a wide margin.

It's strange. I grew up in the 'burbs of SF and spent a lot of time in the city growing up. I lived there for a year and worked there in summers and after college. I always have a fondness for the place. But there is something amiss in SF and I've never been able to put my finger on it. It feels like the best days are in the past and I can't explain why. This article does. I've always been conflicted in this feeling, however, because the place feels so goddamn rich. And rich is good, right? Money is good. It allows people a measure of freedom. It allows a healthy lifestyle. It improves quality of life. But is the money real? Or is it just borrowed dough from speculative real estate prices? Is it from the creation of something useful or just a bubble of debt? I thought it was a trickle down from the dot-com boom. From google and all that. All the employees, all the lawyers, all the accountants, all the vendors, and the restaurants, etc. That's where I thought the money was coming from. But anyway, maybe it isn't about the money. Because money can be made again. But character is harder to retrieve.