Late last December, I took a morning walk from Washington Square down Columbus Street and into the Financial District, where I was hoping the kindly customer-service team at the Verizon store on Market Street could resuscitate my cracked and recently comatose iPhone 5s. This walk is memorable to me for two reasons, neither of which has to do with the phone I ended up throwing away. First, the fog. Most days, as it rolls in and burns off, the fog—from down on the sidewalk, at least—looks to me like a soft ceiling of thinly stretched cotton, melancholy and peaceful as it migrates inland and starts to disintegrate, like a sedative losing its grip. But on this day, the fog did not simply roll in and burn off; it did not pass. It swallowed the city whole, consuming everything in the way that radio static consumes words. It was immersive and physical, decapitating buildings and shrouding the streets in what felt and looked like thick, wet wool.
The second and probably more impactful reason this walk is memorable to me was how genuinely at home I felt during it. The type of San Francisco days immortalized on postcards and screen savers can be so alienating, the sky like a giant magnifying glass of paranoia and expectation when it’s chemical-clear; the fog, both when it’s peaceful as well as when it’s glacial-thick, is like insulation against that, providing an odd, Zoloftic kind of comfort, a kind of comfort that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is available here in this city of contradictions and evictions.
One reason why the fog provides a sense of comfort is that in its timelessness, it makes the city more recognizable. It makes the city feel familiar again. Or at least it does for me. Concrete facades scarred with rivers of water like gray cheeks streaked with mascara. Sidewalks and storefronts coated with a wet, grungy sheen. The dream-catcher piddle of not-quite-rain tapping against the slick polystyrene material of one’s jacket. These are the grainy, pockmarked instances of memory—the slides of slightly tarnished film—that I see and hear when I sit alone and close my eyes and think about the iteration of this place that I love and identify with most. In other words, I suppose, these are the images and sounds that constitute “my” San Francisco. These are the aspects of the city that, among others, make me feel like I belong here.
I’ve been thinking a lot since taking that walk about this idea of belonging in a place—about what it means to feel like a place is yours, about what that entails and about whether it’s even a thing anymore. But this is not exactly novel of me. So far as it applies to the dynamic, shifting, socio-revolutionary microcosm that is San Francisco, over the last eight years or so—as the city has succumbed more and more to the largely self-perpetuated and now unmovable mechanisms of its sharply exclusionary brand of gentrification—what it means to feel like you belong in this city has been discussed and written about and tweeted about so much and with such impassioned assuredness that the topic is now, in many circles, both cliché and at the same time sort of taboo. (Don’t bring it up around friends who work in tech.)
The general tone of the essays and think pieces and tweets I’m referring to here are equal parts apocalyptic and accusatory; however, some are more productive. This article from TechCrunch, for instance, breaks down the politics that created the aforementioned self-perpetuating mechanisms accelerating the rate of San Francisco’s gentrification. And this essay, written two months ago by Colleen McCullough for this publication, epitomizes the more personal effects of it: namely, the disappointment that accompanies the unraveling of the allusion that places are somehow obliged to remain loyal to those who occupy it at any given time.
Now the disappointment inherent in these theories about what’s happening to San Francisco is real and warranted. That’s probably why so much of what you read on this topic is so mournful in tone. But as I sort of realized that morning while walking through the city—specifically, I think, as I crossed the vague intercession of marble and concrete where North Beach fades into Chinatown—is that it’s too easy to focus onlyon the badness. Moreover, the energy we exert in focusing on the badness is often misplaced. The idea that a city or a place as it exists in a moment of time can and should belong to someone is simply wrong. Cities are living things, emblematic of all organisms that grow and change over time. As much is true especially of this city. That’s part of what makes it what it is. And on the flip side, San Francisco, to be sure, has never belonged or remained loyal to anyone, not even the ghosts who immortalized it. And it shouldn’t be expected to. Places don’t belong to you in the same way that people don’t belong to you.
But this isn’t all the way true. You can make anything yours in the sense that you can grab onto the less tangible components of it and capture those for a moment and work them over like pieces of clay in your mind, until they resemble a singular, cohesive thing—a thing that contorts to the demands of your brain and your palm. In other words, you can create a city to keep in your pocket. Retrieved from memory, mine is like a marble, and the fog is the strip of discoloration that graces the surface of the glass.
At a time when this city’s propensity for transmogrification is growing stronger, and as the manner in which the city is changing becomes more visual, more tangible and more violent, appreciating the aspects of it that are timeless and that remind you of why you at least at one point loved it here—that is, creating a city to keep in your pocket—is, I think, more important than ever.
Now I don’t mean to understate the importance of thinking about and talking about and getting angry about components of a place that grow to be problematic or cancerous—that needs to happen. Likewise, I believe that feeling melancholic about something changing is human, as is saying goodbye to it, metaphorically or literally or however you want to do it. But while we shouldn’t condemn criticism, we shouldn't encourage absolutism.
At some point that morning, I finally reached the Verizon store. After being forced to wait and browse tablets and GoPros for 45 minutes, I was told relatively bluntly by a customer-service rep that my phone was fucked and that I would either need to buy a new one or, as he put it, “just live without a phone, man.” At that moment, because I was broke, I chose the latter; and because there then appeared to be actual rain materializing in the sky, I decided to take the bus home. I sat near the back and put on my headphones. Vince Staples, Summertime’06.
The bus that day, with its shock-bright lights made somehow more visceral and ugly by the dishwater sky, gave off the vibe of a psychiatric ward on wheels. But for whatever reason, this proved comforting too. Uniquely, almost inexplicably content, with a just filthy baseline growling through my headphones, I turned my attention to the window and watched the city I love pass by through a frame of grout and grime, the bus picking through the streets like a spider along a giant web. I told myself I would remember how I felt in that moment.
This is me, remembering.