Reflections of a Self-Proclaimed City Kid: A Love Letter to San Francisco
Simone Felton
Issue I ||
Personal Essay
I was recently very drunk at a friend’s birthday party making small talk with a guy visiting from out of town for the weekend. The guy was from Washington, D.C., and I told him that D.C. reminded me of my own hometown, San Francisco, in that it seemed to be a city of neighborhoods; each region of the city has its own distinct character. He asked me if I liked San Francisco. I told him earnestly, “I love it.” He smiled at my enthusiasm.
“What do you love about San Francisco?”
I thought about it for a moment, drunkenly staring at the ceiling in a cartoonish imitation of contemplation. It had been a while since I had been asked that kind of question. When I first arrived at Yale a year and a half ago, this was natural fodder for drunken party small talk and I probably had some grand answer about the city’s architectural and natural beauty, its geography, its diversity, its home to the arts, its niche subcultures, its small family businesses, its character at once metropolitan and communal. At the time this answer was also a thesis. I am Simone Herko Felton, city kid, Muni rider, local historian, San Francisco born and raised, and fuck you if you call it “San Fran.” I was forged from the process of exploring my city in all its variety and notorious weirdness. I loved San Francisco because it so uniquely represented all the quirks and beauty that the world had to offer.
I looked at the wavering drunk boy in front of me. “Honestly,” I said, “I think I just know San Francisco really well. You can love anywhere if you know it well.”
He smiled again. “That’s a very honest answer.”
Perhaps. But it also more or less ended the conversation; we drifted away.
Actually, I think San Francisco has been slipping away from me. I don’t seem to know it anymore, or perhaps knowing it is no longer a sufficient way of loving it. Sometimes I wonder if I ever knew it at all, or just constructed an image of the diverse, bohemian city that history and popular belief had always professed San Francisco to be. Ever since moving to New Haven (or, really, to Yale) my returns home have been frantic. I’ve attempted to digest my visits of three or four weeks into a series of experiences. My high school friends and I visit old haunts — the café where we held our pretentious philosophy and literature club, the canyon near my house, our favorite taquerias, the last of the Mission thrift stores yet to shut down. And yet this feels empty. What was once an organic and exploratory relationship with the city is now a sequence of discrete destinations that somehow fails to capture the city’s richness, its dynamism. I feel like a tourist.
And, separately, the city seems more dystopian each time I return. Or perhaps I’ve just stopped being used to it. I always hated the conservative news coverage about San Francisco that exploited images of the homeless to take cheap political shots at a “progressive” city. Fuck you — you have no interest in trying to help. In these news clips, homelessness and drug addiction were utterly dehumanized, discussed as the ruin of a once great city rather than the symptom of a sick society. Yes, San Francisco showed all those symptoms, but the city was more than that. Now, though, walking down Market Street where tech offices tower above the people on the sidewalk below, most of whom are homeless, I wonder if this inequality is all the city has become. Perhaps that’s all it’s ever been in the time I’ve known it, and any belief otherwise was an illusion. More than just objects of beauty, the city’s neighborhoods of attached single-family homes and lush parks appear to me as monuments to wealth. With real estate in the city costing what it does, this is true on a very literal level of price per square footage. San Francisco is odd in how dense it is; one can walk a few blocks off Market Street and enter an entirely different universe in Nob Hill, the ritzy former neighborhood of 19th century San Francisco’s robber-baron elite, or North Beach, the quaint Italian neighborhood and home of the Beats. I think once this variety was interesting, if depressing, but now it just feels deceitful. Walking up to North Beach requires turning your back on Market.
Recently I rewatched the movie “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” The last time I saw it feels like an eternity ago, at my friend’s 18th birthday in February of 2020. It was back in high school, when I used to spend every weekend wandering San Francisco’s streets, by foot or by bus, and making it mine by treading every possible block of the city. The film is a love letter to San Francisco and, watching then, it seemed to give voice to precisely the kind of love based on intimate knowledge that I felt towards the city. Watching it now, I read it as an expression of the love of loss — a very different kind of loss from what I feel — and so watching the movie is at once cathartic and foreign.
The film follows a young Black man named Jimmie Fails, based on a real man of the same name who plays his fictionalized counterpart. In the film Jimmie attempts to reclaim his family’s former Victorian home in the historically Black and gentrifying Fillmore District. (I went to middle school in this neighborhood, and frequently walked from the streets lined with public housing projects to the iconic painted ladies on the hills above.) The home is now owned by a white couple, and Jimmie, who is one of the last of his family to still live in San Francisco in the historically Black Bayview, visits every two weeks to upkeep the exterior of the house, painting the trim and pruning the garden. There is no doubt in Jimmie’s mind that this home is defined by the time in which his family owned it. “Didn’t I tell you these railings are periwinkle, not black?” he says to his friend Mont in one scene, matching a paint swatch to the gates overgrown with vines. “We gotta start coming more than every two weeks, bro.” When the couple who own the home chase Jimmie away before he can finish repainting the trim, he just sighs. “Fine, I’ll finish it next time.”
Eventually the couple are forced to move out of the home when the woman’s mother dies and she enters into an estate dispute with her sister. Realizing that it may be tied up in court for years, Jimmie and Mont move into the home and dedicate themselves to refurbishing the interior and populating it with the family’s historic furniture. It is upon their first arrival to the house that Jimmie, standing on a balcony, overhears a segway tour guide on the street below discussing the Fillmore’s midcentury history as the thriving “Harlem of the West.” But when the tour guide says that the home was built in the 19th century, Jimmie interrupts. “My grandfather built this. He came here in WWII, he bought this lot, and he built this house.” The tour guide stares at him in puzzled disbelief. “Wow. That’s … pretty amazing.” The tour moves on.
Even at this point in the film, Jimmie’s claim feels fantastical, although I remember that watching it for the first time I half believed that it could be true. Eventually the claim is revealed to be false; and by the end even Jimmie admits that “I’d been telling people he built it for so long, I almost forgot it wasn’t true.” Jimmie’s reasons for wanting to believe the lie are obvious: under the belief that his grandfather built the house, he has more claim to it than the couple who own it do. The movie doesn’t shy away from the idea that this couple also has a meaningful connection to the house; in one scene Jimmie and Mont arrive to find the woman who had lived there sitting on the steps and crying, saying, “I’m just trying to ... let go.”
But the fact that Jimmie’s story about his grandfather is a lie does not negate the fact that it’s an expression of a legitimate claim and sense of belonging. Last semester for an urban history class I read a chapter from a book by Andrew Hurley entitled “Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities.” In it, Hurley argued that the historic preservation movement, which attempted to reverse the trend of urban decline by designating historic districts and establishing financial incentives for preserving buildings in those neighborhoods, psychologically contributed to gentrification by valorizing a “golden age” in the distant past that was entirely divorced from the histories of recent residents being displaced. Hurley wrote:
Privileging the distant past at the expense of the recent past … robbed people of the ability to make connections to the past by tracing neighborhood change across the years incrementally. Moreover, it increased the difficulty of embedding residents’ personal histories into a larger community narrative since most inner-city residents could not trace their lineage back more than a generation or two in the place where they lived…. The people who remained from a preceding era found little that affirmed their rightful place in the community…. A landscape shorn of recent history became a mechanism of disinheritance.
When Jimmie claims that the house was built by his grandfather in 1946, he may be telling a lie, but he is also asserting a history that is undervalued by the tour guide’s obsession with 19th century architecture. This architectural history is of no personal value to anyone, and it certainly doesn’t explain why the house matters to Jimmie. The house matters because it represents an era of dignity and belonging for his family — and for Black San Franciscans more generally. The tour guide briefly alludes to this era, referencing the “Harlem of the West” and the “hip cats” who lived there, but even this description places value on the history as a nostalgic representation of “culture” rather than the far more mundane value of a neighborhood where everyday Black people lived and had community. Jimmie’s attempt to stake a claim to the house is also him staking a claim to San Francisco; it’s an assertion that he still belongs there even when most of his family has been priced out. His claim is legitimate not because his grandfather literally built the house but because his family lived in and “built” the city across generations, having shaped its community and character. “We built these ships, dragged these canals,” says the soap box preacher who stands by Jimmie’s Bayview bus stop each morning, “in the San Francisco they never knew existed. And now they come to build something new?”
Jimmie’s sense of belonging is very different from my own — it’s intergenerational, and it’s not grounded in discovery because San Francisco is already known to him. He was born into it, descended from a family that helped shape the city into something more than a tiny peninsula crowded with streets and houses. And his sense of loss is very different, too, because he never doubts that the city is his, and it’s being wrested away from him despite it. It’s undoubtedly a much crueler loss than mine. Rewatching the movie, I can still see what I saw in it the first time. The film is replete with shots of San Francisco, shot in a soft, rich color that exists just for the joy of seeing it. Much of the film follows Jimmie in transit, riding buses and skateboarding, and it seems that in each of these transitory scenes, new neighborhoods are featured. The shots are beautiful — Bernal Hill framed between rows of houses, Jimmie bombing down a hill on his skateboard with the lush green of Buena Vista Park on his left and rows of Victorian houses on his right, the soapbox preacher silhouetted against the morning sunrise over the bay. One scene at the beginning is just a montage of people, frozen against their backgrounds, in various parts of the city — first all Black, then all white, as Jimmie and Mont skate through different neighborhoods. These loving, imagistic treatments of the city were what I related to so strongly when I first saw the film — they seemed to capture the way I saw the city, how I explored its beautiful and various neighborhoods and touched as many corners as I possibly could. Watching the movie in my dorm room at Yale, it makes me smile to see my city captured in this way, especially when I can recognize particular street corners or vistas because I’ve stood there myself. Watching the film, I am almost able to once again see San Francisco as I did when I lived there. The film is full of allusions that are meant to be appreciated by locals; in many scenes, Jimmie spends so much time waiting for the bus that he decides to skate instead, a feeling well-known to anyone frequently dependent on the Muni system, and one of the stickers on the bottom of Jimmie’s skateboard is of a cartoonish red dog, based on an iconic large statue located by the San Francisco Zoo.
But I’ve also come to read that loving eye differently. In one scene, Jimmie is on the bus and he overhears two women complaining about how sick they are of San Francisco. “I came here for Janis and the Airplane, not to work at a fucking startup.” The second woman says that they should move to LA, and the first says, “Seriously, fuck this city.”
Jimmie interrupts. “Excuse me. You don’t get to hate San Francisco.”
The women are offended. “Sorry,” one of them says, “I’ll hate what I want.”
“Do you love it?” Jimmie asks.
“I mean, yeah, I’m here,” the woman says. “But do I have to love it?”
“You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.”
The women scoff. “Classic Muni shit.”
This, to me, is the feeling behind the film’s loving eye. It’s a love filled with feelings of anger and loss that make the film’s gaze fundamentally different from my own. And this scene in particular places the two visions of love in stark relief. The woman Jimmie speaks to may not profess to love San Francisco, but she does stake a claim to it. When she says, “Classic Muni shit,” she asserts a knowledge of the city that implies belonging. Anyone who has taken Muni frequently enough is full of stories of its quirky characters. I remember being in high school and swapping stories with classmates about the French-speaking guerilla preacher who was known for cornering people on the 49 Van Ness. On Muni I have spoken to a homeless man who claimed to have been to Nancy Pelosi’s house, to random high schoolers who asked me for thoughts on the shoes they’d shoplifted, to an older man who talked my ear off about the origins of jazz. I’ve kept my head down for several fights. And this mundane integration into the fabric of the city granted me a sense of belonging. And yet this woman in the film, who works at a reviled tech startup and refuses to love San Francisco, also professes to know it in this way. “Classic Muni shit,” she says, but this asserts a knowledge that is far shallower than Jimmie’s knowledge of San Francisco. And though I, unlike her, love the city, my knowledge of it is also more similar to hers.
It is the difference between these forms of knowledge, and the anger that accompanies it, that defines the film. It’s a sense that the people who are making San Francisco unlivable to Jimmie are drawn to it by a caricature of the city — by “Janis [Joplin] and [Jefferson] Airplane,” a mythologized legacy of bohemianism the remnants of which is itself being pushed out by these very people. In another scene, Jimmie is sitting at a bus stop (at the corner of Castro and Market — I used to take that very bus daily) and a nudist walks into the shot, places a plastic bag on the bus stop seat, and sits down. Jimmie hardly looks up. A party bus full of drunken people stops at the streetlight, and the partiers start heckling the nudist. “This guy fucks!” they chant repeatedly, and then start cheering as the bus drives away. The nudist looks bewildered and offended. “This city,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. “I already know, bro,” Jimmie replies.
Jimmie and this nudist, different as they may be, connect as holdouts of a dying city; and it’s this love for San Francisco that makes them hate it, as Jimmie says to the women on the bus. The movie doesn’t claim that people with shallower roots than Jimmie’s can’t also love San Francisco, and neither do I believe that. The woman who owned Jimmie’s grandfather’s house loved it. It’s her home, after all — her love is the love of beauty and familiarity, much like mine. But this is different, I think, from Jimmie’s love, based in deep, family roots and a sense of ownership in the character of the city — of being integrated into, and intimately aware of, the city as a community and a culture. I’m not even sure anymore what the character of the city is, what is the “true” San Francisco, and what is the city that I’ve spun into existence in my head — what is lost and what was never there at all. These aren’t questions Jimmie has to ask himself. He knows exactly what San Francisco is to him, and what it means to lose it. Meanwhile, sitting three thousand miles away with the privilege and security of knowing that the city will likely always be there for me to return to, I’m left reminded that, like many Americans, I have shallow roots, and wondering whether any image I ever had of a cohesive San Francisco was a figment of my imagination.
This question is tested every time I return home. There are always moments of regaining the feeling of total comfort and belonging, usually when I stop trying so hard to recapture it. The first couple times I went home I had a list of places I wanted to see while I was there, but I’ve stopped doing this; it makes me feel like my little pilgrimages are all I have left of the city and that San Francisco really is to me just a series of places rather than a feeling of home, a place with an ineffable character. The real test will come this spring break, when I’ll be heading back along with four of my friends from Yale. We’re going camping as well, and so we’ll only all be in the city proper for a few days, but in that time I’ll be charged with showing everyone around and attempting to capture for them the essence of this place that I love. The idea is frightening. I’m afraid it will reveal to me again how this essence now escapes me. It will force me to once again reduce the city to a series of destinations.
One of the people coming out west with me for spring break is my girlfriend. Over winter break she visited me at home for 24 hours while on a layover, and in that brief time I dragged her around, jet lagged, attempting to capture the city for her and with it a part of myself that she hasn’t yet had the opportunity to know. We didn’t have access to a car and so we took public transit, as I did for most of my life in San Francisco, from my house to the Mission District. It was a wet day, with a dense fog that bordered on rain, and the streets were mostly deserted. She was quiet and tired, and I filled the empty air with chatter about favorite restaurants and thrift stores both extant and long-closed, with stories about my childhood going to elementary school in the neighborhood, and as always, with an arsenal of facts about the history of the city. We hadn’t planned anything to do and so we just walked, from Mission St. westward to Dolores Park, and then south up the hill for a beautiful view of the downtown swathed in fog. We stopped there for a moment and looked in silence. I had exhausted my commentary about our surroundings. I asked her what else she wanted to see. She smiled tiredly.
“Whatever you want to show me.”
So we kept walking, through the wealthy residential neighborhood of Liberty Hill. Occasionally I commented on the design of the houses. The plan had been to just experience the city, soak in the environment, but she was exhausted and I was nervous. “I’m sorry,” I kept saying, “this isn’t super interesting.” She kept reassuring me that it was fine. But after a few more blocks of walking past rows of houses it was clear that in her jet-lagged state she couldn’t go much further, so we moved toward an above-ground train line and got picked up. The train, too, was empty, except for a family of tourists speaking German. The two of us sat in silence, her head on my shoulder, and I watched the tourist family peer out of the windows and wondered how they’d gotten so far off the beaten path of tourist destinations. After a few minutes we arrived at our stop and I roused her.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re home.”