In Search of Old San Francisco
It’s been a long time since I visited San Francisco. Back in my younger days it seemed like I went up there every couple of years. The Left Coast Crime Conference was held in San Francisco this year and it gave my wife and I an opportunity to make a return visit. After the conference was over, we spent a couple of days revisiting the city.
One of the things we like to do when we travel is to seek out the old stuff—restaurants, bookstores, parks and buildings that act as cultural repositories for the city’s soul, its living history.
With that in mind, one of the first places we visited was the City Lights Bookstore, leftover from a time when bookstores played a major role in the cultural life of our cities, a place where readers, writers, artists, intellectuals, and other movers and shakers would meet. City Lights is best known as a center of the San Francisco’s alternative movements and progressive politics during the second half of the twentieth century. First opened by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 the store, and its publishing arm, became ground zero for the Beat movement after publishing Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, the first volume in its ongoing Pocket Poets Series.
Best of all, City Lights is still in the same location and still going strong. And it’s still a place where you can “participate in that ‘great conversation’ between authors of all ages, ancient and modern.” (Ferlinghetti)
The weather was nice so we spent a few hours at the San Francisco Botanical Garden and the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.
For dinner we went to Tadich Grill, the oldest continuously run restaurant in California (third oldest in the United States). Established in 1849 by Croation immigrants, it’s a European-style bistro featuring a long wooden bar, white-linen service and an old-fashioned, but still delicious, grill menu. It manages to be both classy and lots of fun. You rarely find this kind of place anymore (especially in California).
Not all of our adventures were historical. We also got a glimpse of the future when we rode in a Waymo self-driving taxi.
Here’s sixteen seconds of our journey from inside the taxi. The future is here. Better get used to it.
And last, but not least, we made a visit to the Musée Mécanique, with its wondrous machines from the past, including this Mighty Wurlitzer player piano.