A trip to San Francisco

I honestly love my family so much but every once in a while you just need to get away on your own so we have this regular practice of taking weekend-long trips apart, like maybe twice a year. My wife usually goes somewhere with a friend but that sounds like a lot of hassle to me so I usually just get a hotel somewhere in SF. Any vacation you can take a cab to is my kind of vacation and I will tell you, when you do that you see the city a whole new way over again.

Friday I checked in at the Grand Hyatt Union Square, a genuinely nice hotel that was absolutely buzzing with activity. If you’re old school you’ll remember they used to have a top-floor bar but that’s gone now and the hotel bar now is like one floor above Sutter which doesn’t have the same views but the people-watching is pretty good.

I should say I absolutely love hotel bars and airport bars, transient spaces where you know your connection with your fellow patrons is ephemeral and fleeting. In my experience, they encourage a strange kind of openness and affability because you know you’ll never see the other person again. Also, since there are no regulars, there’s no pecking order or hierarchy, everyone is at the same level and gets the same respect (as long as they don’t blow it, which I have seen happen, especially in airports).

But I can’t pay hotel prices for more than a drink or two so I met a friend at Lark Bar on Market, which is where it moved from around the corner on Third (along with its associated wine store, Cask). It’s big and airy but not in the industrial way that was so everywhere in the early 00’s, more like just high celings and your usual sports conglomeration on the walls and a full-size canoe hanging from the ceiling for some reason. On Friday at 5 it was packed.

Then we went to this newish place called Dawn Club that has live jazz and looks like it cost a fortune and the drinks were insamely expensive but it was cool to check out.

It was crowded too, at least when we first got there, and then sort of lightened up when the Giants game was about to start.

Then we went to Delarosa just down the alley and got Italian food and it was good-to-very-good.

On Saturday I walked around the Embarcadero and the famer’s market and the Ferry Building. Like prime tourist shit, you know? I noticed a few things:

• There was almost no visible homeless presence. (I walked from roughly Steuart to Pier 23, so I covered a fair amount of ground.)

• The famer’s market was pleasantly busy without being mobbed.

• Inside the Ferry Building, it was crowded but not crazy.

There was about a 6-person line for Blue Bottle, which is just about as long as I will wait.

Later that day, I walked through Union Square and hung out there a bit. Hard as this will be to believe, I saw two cops walking a foot patrol, which everyone is begging for more of.

I don’t know if it’s related, but Union Square was pretty chill. A couple of groups here and there, fairly quiet over all.

Then I went to Johnny Foley’s, the redoubtable Irish bar on O’Farrell to talk to some tourists. I sat next to a couple from really really rural Arizona (they said “two hours from Flagstaff”) who were younger, like probably late 30’s, and who said they came to SF on a whim for a few days. They were scared to come because of the bad press but they were having a great time and said they were amazed, it was nothing like what they expected. This was punctuated by a conversation with the next group down about whether Brock Purdy was a top 5 quarterback in the NFL (consensus: no).

Same exact conversation with another couple: they were nervous about coming but said it was fine and they were having a blast.

The fish and chips at Foley’s weren’t very good so I guess I did encounter some trouble on my trip.

Look, my office is basically in the Tenderloin and I know my weekend wasn’t necessarily reflective of what happens on the streets on a daily basis. But I was left with the impression that San Francisco is fine, and the perception that it’s a dying city is being oversold like hell. There are problems, fundamental and serious problems, but it was so nice to spend a weekend in a way that I would never regularly do.

Still a great fuckin town.