

San Francisco Noir - donmcc
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/travel/san-francisco-noir.html

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webwielder
>San Francisco is well known for its transformations, the most recent one
fueled by tech money that has seemingly scrubbed much of the city clean.

Well if this is to be taken literally, it's laughable. San Francisco's
thoroughfares are littered with garbage, the city smells like piss, and its
public transportation is third world at best. I can't imagine what SF was like
before the latest "transformation"!

~~~
tizzdogg
I believe the author meant that a bit more metaphorically than you are taking
it. Scrubbed clean in the sense of removing the hard edges and character..
whitewashing so to speak. That said, the tech industry has definitely cleaned
up areas of the city. Compare the area around the Twitter office today to how
it was even a few years ago.

Also this comment is pretty harsh, and you clearly are not spending time in
the right parts of San Francisco if you think its all littered with garbage
and smells like piss. I will grant you that muni isnt great compared to cities
10x the size like New York or London.

~~~
ido
It compared badly also to cities smaller than it: compare SF (metro
population: 4.5m) to Vancouver (2.5m), Vienna (2.4m), Zurich (1.8m) or Prague
(1.2m).

~~~
tizzdogg
The population of San Francisco is 800k, so it is significantly smaller than
any of those cities.

If you are talking about the entire Bay Area that is a different thing, but
not really a valid comparison. The infrastructure problems in San Francisco
tend to be due to it being a small city surrounded by lots of even smaller
cities which dont want to play along for the greater good of the region (eg by
expanding BART or shouldering the burden of homeless services). If the Bay
Area as a whole was governed as a single unit a lot of these problems would be
improved. But it's not.

It's a small city in an earthquake area with large hills, and uncooperative
neighbors, all of which make it very difficult to build massive subway or
streetcar systems.

~~~
ido
The populations I mentioned for the other cities are also metropolitan (urban
populations are smaller in all of them).

Zurich's city-proper population for example is just less than 400k: half of
SF's.

~~~
tizzdogg
Well that may be true. Of the cities you list I'm only familiar with the
metros in vancouver and vienna, both of which are very nice. My point was not
that muni doesn't have issues, but that they mostly stem from regional
political problems which presumably those other regions dont have to the same
extent. If the whole bay area would get on board with bart, things would be a
lot better.

In any case comparing it to a third world country like the parent comment is a
bit of a stretch.

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redwood
I highly recommend to anyone who lives in the bay area to check out some
classic noir films and others at the Stanford Theatre in palo alto.

It's a real gem of a place.

~~~
Bulkington
Drifting even further afield than the above, but since it's the weekend on HN:

I remember watching a 50s era SF-based film during a Hitchcock festival
(Vertigo? Read Window?)in the City, and the streets in the movie were torn up
for repairs to the street car system just like outside. The place cracked up.

Everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed over the views with no hi-rises, though.

Even more unrelated to typical HN topics: How have those old tourist courts
and motels on Lombard/101 on the way to the GG survived all these years? A
serious question.

~~~
richardfontana
Vertigo (1958) SFAIK was the only Hitchcock film set in San Francisco. Rear
Window was set in Greenwich Village, though it was reportedly inspired by a
stay by Hitchcock in a Jackson Heights garden apartment.

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thrush
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