Let the golden age begin

I've been watching a bunch of films about the dirty, violent 70s New York lately -- Serpico, The French Connection, even Saturday Night Fever -- so it's appropriate to note that four of the 14 persons interviewed in Sunday's Times said that New York experienced a "golden age" in the 1970s.

I wonder how many of them had just moved there at that time, or came of age during their chosen era. Cities are usually most enchanting when they're new to you, especially after months of anticipating your move there. The San Francisco in which I arrived in 1999 was deeply conflicted: while the champagne glasses clinked on tech company rooftops and 22-year-olds straight out of college landed $75,000-a-year jobs playing foosball, nearly everyone else lamented the loss of everything that made San Francisco cool. (I saw a t-shirt that had the name of the city with "1965-1999" beneath it.) People had to wave their freak flags higher, but some folks just took them up to Portland instead.

Yet the time was undeniably golden, in its way. Jobs were plentiful. In the workplace, you were not told what to do so much as asked which one of the many tasks at hand you would like to do, because they were about to hire somebody new who would do whatever you didn't pick. Creative restaurants were opening everywhere. Our new ballpark appeared, financed privately with boomtime money. Bright people left New York, or wherever, and came here. And although most of the businesses around town were doing really frivolous work, the tech industry made something great and world-changing too.

Blue-collar families suffered hard during this time. Rents were exorbitant; people had to leave. Cultural institutions couldn't afford to stay here either. Dance studios closed, rock bands went elsewhere. The place threatened to become a one-industry town, like Hartford or Detroit. For a lot of people, the golden age sucked hard. For my part, I had a foot in both worlds: covering it as a journalist (sort of), rocking out at night, scrambling for rent as my share spiraled up almost 50% in my first two years here.

I take offense at Daniel Henninger's response to the Times piece, which implies in its final statement that artists who fondly remember the roughness of New York in the 70s need to grow up. (He, or his editor, also needs to rethink putting "artists" in quotation marks in the deck above the story.) There is nothing childish about trading a little cleanliness and safety for a more interesting city. (I doubt it would sway Henninger's opinion to note that what he terms the "funkless outer boroughs" gave us the biggest thing that's happened in music during the last 25 years, which is indeed a funky thing.)

I consider myself fortunate to say that most days in San Francisco still make me feel like I'm on vacation. Even today, as I rise to face an unending winter rainstorm, I can't help thinking how lucky I am to be living and working here. The title of this blog refers to geography, and my sensitivity to my environment is the main reason. There is such a huge variety of human circumstance out there, and there are very, very few people with whom I'd trade places, in time or place.