San Francisco is full of surprises, some good, some bad
I was thinking of a June day in the mountains and a long pull through some rough country. We'd stopped at a small creek, tired, out of breath. We could see the way ahead in the distance, a high pass miles away. Very discouraging. 'Relax,' my hiking companion said, 'We're halfway there.'
That's where we all are just now. It's mid-June and the summer solstice comes on Friday. It's the longest day of the year, a time the ancients celebrated the turn of the season. You can mark it yourself — 7:42 p.m., not long before sunset.
Halfway there. It's been an interesting year, history swirling like storm clouds. Presidents, protests, flags, riots. Sometimes, though, you have to turn off the television news, put down the newspaper and just go for a walk. Live your life. See how things are halfway there.
We had mild expectations for 2025 when the year began, a new administration in City Hall and hope for San Francisco's recovery from the doldrums of the last couple of years.
So I looked around town a bit and I was surprised; things are looking up. But still a ways to go at the halfway point.
The biggest surprise was a weekend visit downtown for a Sunday errand. I headed for Union Square on a slow Muni ride. Typical long wait for the weekend streetcar and then lots of stops and starts.
Downtown seemed a bit empty, but everyone expects that. We've all heard the sad stories about vacant stores, seen the homeless in the shadows, heard the rumors.
But I was surprised to discover Union Square full of life — full of children on a Sunday afternoon. The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department and a business group had set up a kids' playground in the heart of the city. There was a kids' reading room with an assortment of books, a 'recess stand' offering crayons and paper to draw pictures, and kid-size tables and chairs. There were hula hoops and pingpong sets.
It was a bit of a shock to a seasoned San Franciscan. Union Square had always been a bit solemn, a formal kind of place, important.
That was the ideal, but in recent years Union Square had slipped, had developed an air of vague unease, the kind of urban space one walked through quickly. There were always people hanging out, watching. You know the kind. Don't make eye contact.
But it had changed this spring. It was different, better.
I went back a few days after my Sunday visit. It was midweek and people were sitting at small tables with blue and yellow umbrellas taking the sun. A small café on the Powell Street side, offering coffee and light snacks. Not many kids around but adults playing pingpong and other games next to the Dewey monument. It was a mix: tourists and locals on their lunch break. The park was clean, too.
In a way, Union Square is classic San Francisco in the heart of the city: cable cars, shops, the grand old St. Francis Hotel. And now it has a European flavor that wasn't there before.
The real life in the city is not downtown, of course. It's in the neighborhoods, up and down the hills, out in the Sunset, in Chinatown and all the way out on Third Street, where the downtown towers are off in the distance, like a separate city.
No matter how well you think you know it, San Francisco is full of surprises. An afternoon walk took me up the local hill. There was a surprise there, too: Neighbors had seeded the hillside in early spring, and now the hill was alive with flowers.
There was a knot of people at the top of a set of stairs watching something. That can't be good, I thought. What is it? I asked. 'Owls,' a woman said. 'Great horned owls, four of them. They've made a home in these trees.'
The woman had binoculars and there they were, big birds, sitting on a broken branch, as solemn as judges. I've seen seals in the bay, raccoons in the backyard, coyotes down the street, but never before urban owls.
Halfway there. I felt good about the city; good vibes and good omens. But after my visit to Union Square I rode a taxi up Market Street. We stopped for traffic halfway up Market, almost to the Castro, and out the window I saw a man writhing on the ground, on a Wednesday afternoon in broad daylight. An overdose, maybe.
A woman with a dog walked by. A man walking by himself glanced at the man rolling on the street and walked by. Nobody did anything. We may be halfway toward building a better city, but there is a long way to go.
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