Tag: san francisco

Categories
Memories Radio San Francisco/California

Radio Hill

Radio Studio in Hotel

In the mid-1960s you could stand on California Street between the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill and know that two different San Franciscos were being invented a hundred yards apart.

KSFO lived inside the Fairmont. KYA lived at One Nob Hill Circle, the annex that had once belonged to KSFO. They had traded rooms a few years earlier. The adult station and the kid station were living in each other’s former houses.

I listened from Westlake in Daly City. I was in high school. We had just moved from Ohio. It seemed strange, even then, that one of the voices came out of a hotel.

I was deep into ham radio then, so I studied how the stations actually worked, not just how they sounded. At the Fairmont you could see into the KSFO studios through glass walls. KYA’s transmitter sat on the hill above Candlestick. Both were 5,000 watts. Nothing special. Up on San Bruno Mountain, James Gabbert would fire up KPEN — later KIOI — licensed for 120,000 watts and the first FM stereo west of St. Louis. I knew the difference between those numbers before I knew much else about the city I’d landed in.

Continue reading “Radio Hill”
Categories
Bread San Francisco/California

Best San Francisco Sourdough Bread

A while back I wrote about my old favorite sourdough bakery: Larraburu. Unfortunately long since closed.

Recently the San Francisco Chronicle did an updated review of the best sourdough bread in San Francisco. Their winner was one I’ve never tried before: Josey Baker Bread.

I love sourdough bread but really have to watch my carb intake so I’m forced to limit my consumption!

Categories
Apple Cars iPhone Travel

The Custody of the Map

The screen on the dashboard knew the way home before I did. We were coming back from dinner, a left turn already glowing blue two blocks before I would have thought to make it, and I caught myself watching the little arrow slide along the road instead of watching the road. Somewhere behind that ease, an old reflex stirred. I found myself wondering, of all things, what had happened to the Thomas Guides.

There was a time when finding your way through San Francisco meant a spiral-bound book the size of a phone directory, kept in the door pocket or wedged under the seat, its cover gone soft and slightly oily from years of glove-compartment heat. You looked up a street name in the index, found a page number and a letter and a number — page 132, grid D3 — and turned to a small black-and-white rectangle of the city that resolved, for that moment, into something you could hold. Thomas Bros. had been drawing Southern California since 1915, when George Coupland Thomas and his brothers sold wall maps out of Oakland, and by 1945 the company had shrunk the whole sprawling region down to something that would fit in a car door. The timing mattered. The subdivisions were multiplying faster than the old fold-out maps could keep up with them. George Thomas liked to say his maps were accurate to within ten feet, which was a claim worth making and, it turned out, a claim worth stealing.

That’s where the trap streets come in. A company vice president named Barry Elias explained the trick in an interview years later: scattered through the guides were streets that did not exist. Short, usually a single block, dead-ended, drawn with a broken line as though still under construction — the visual grammar for not finished yet, so no one following the map too literally would drive into a field. The San Bernardino and Riverside County editions were said to be the thickest with them, low hundreds of invented streets tucked into real neighborhoods. Some were named to sound plausible, Spanish-inflected phrases that belonged to the landscape — La Taza Drive, Loma Drive. Others, according to people who worked there, carried the names of a cartographer’s child or dog, a private joke folded into public infrastructure. If a rival mapmaker’s cheap knockoff showed the same nonexistent cul-de-sac in the same place, there was no arguing about where it came from. The fiction was the proof.

I like that a business built on precision needed, here and there, a small deliberate lie to protect the truth of the rest of it. It’s the kind of quiet craft that doesn’t announce itself, and I don’t think I would have gone looking for it if I hadn’t been sitting in a car that no longer needed any of it — no index, no grid square, no glove box, just a screen that already knew.

Before any of this, before I’d heard of Thomas Guides or would have understood what a trap street was for, there were the free maps. Gas stations gave them away. You pumped your gas and the attendant handed you a folded map of wherever you were, no charge, the company’s logo across the top like a small act of civic generosity that happened to also be advertising. And then, sometime in the 1970s, they mostly stopped. I’ve always assumed it had something to do with the oil crisis — gas itself getting scarce and expensive enough that a company stopped throwing in a free map with it — though I’ve never been sure that’s the real reason and it may just be the story I’ve told myself because the timing fit. Whatever the cause, the free map disappeared, and after that, if you wanted one, you either bought it or you joined something. AAA required a membership, dues, an envelope in the mail. Being oriented had quietly become a thing you paid for, one way or another.

I knew the free maps first from the back seat. In the summer of 1960 my father packed my mother, my sister, and me into a blue Dodge Dart station wagon and drove us from Ohio to California and back, camping the whole way. Every evening before dark he would spread that day’s map out — hood of the car, picnic table, wherever we’d stopped — and study tomorrow’s drive. My mother kept the maps in the front seat, in charge of them the way someone is put in charge of the medicine or the money, and my father, who usually knew the way, would drive on his own certainty until he didn’t. That’s when the sparks flew. She’d try to get him to pull over and look. He’d think he already knew. I can’t tell you now what any particular fight was about, or how it resolved, only that it happened rarely enough to be memorable and that it always had the same shape: his confidence against her custody of the paper.

At home he had a Rand McNally road atlas of the whole country, the kind that lived on a shelf and got pulled down for no reason at all. I came to like it for its own sake, apart from any trip. I’d trace the roads we’d actually driven that summer, find the towns we’d camped near, follow the thin red lines out from Dayton toward places I now knew the taste of the air in. It wasn’t studying, the way my father studied. It was closer to rereading a book you already loved, tracing your own path back through it just to feel the shape of where you’d been.

I think about that atlas now next to the dashboard screen, and I don’t feel the loss I expected to feel when I started turning this over. What I actually feel, watching Apple Maps or Google Maps do instantly and without complaint what used to take my father twenty minutes of squinting at fine print by a Coleman lantern, is closer to plain amazement — that this much orientation now sits in a pocket, free again in a way the gas station maps never quite were, more accurate than any trap street was ever built to catch. My father’s confidence and my mother’s custody have both been absorbed into a piece of glass that argues with no one.

What I can’t decide is what got lost in the trade, if anything did. Maybe nothing. Maybe the studying itself — the folding, the tracing, the mild domestic argument over who really knew the way — was never really about the map at all, and the map was only ever the excuse two people needed to be lost together for a minute before deciding, out loud, where they were.

Categories
San Francisco/California Writing

The Company of Fog

Note: a little fun this morning with a piece envisioning Jimmy Breslin writing about lunch with Herb Caen at Tadich Grill…

I went to San Francisco to meet a man who writes about the place the way a guy writes about a woman he still wants to sleep with after thirty years.

His name is Herb Caen. He has been telling this city about itself every morning since before most of the people reading him were born. They call him Mr. San Francisco. In New York we don’t hand out titles like that. In New York you earn the right to be called a son of a bitch, and you take it as a compliment.

We met at Tadich Grill. Open since the gold rush, and it still looks like it never got the news that things change. Dark wood. White tablecloths. Waiters old enough to remember when the bridge was new and still sore about it. The fish comes out of the water and onto the plate without a lot of conversation in between.

Caen was already sitting when I got there. Neat. Jacket. That California tan that never quite goes away, like the sun signed a contract with him. He stood up and shook my hand like a man who has shaken a lot of hands and still means it. I ordered a martini, because when you’re in another man’s town you drink what the town drinks, even when the town is wrong.

He had one too. Stoli, twist. He called it Vitamin V.

We talked about columns. About writing for a city that never sleeps against writing for one that takes long naps in the fog and calls it lifestyle. I told him New York will rob you and hold the door on the way out. He said San Francisco smiles while it’s doing it, then writes a nice item about your necktie.

He works in three dots. Little pieces, one after another, like a man feeding a parking meter all day instead of buying the car. Gossip, jokes, the name of whoever just opened a place on Union Street. I need more room than that. I need to turn around. He said my way was fine if you like carrying a piano up the stairs every day. I told him his was fine if you don’t mind never sitting down long enough to find out what you actually think.

The sand dabs came. Caen looked at his like a priest looks at the host. I ate mine like a man who skipped breakfast. Everything on that table was good — the bread, the butter, the light coming in off the street looking like it had been there as long as the wood and knew it.

He leaned in. “You know the difference between our two cities?”

I waited.

“In New York, the people are the story. Here, the city is the story. The people just get to live in it for a while.”

That’s a hell of a thing for a man to say about his own hometown — that the place is bigger than everybody in it, including him. I told him about the man who dug Kennedy’s grave, the one nobody else thought to ask. Caen nodded. He understood the assignment. It was the only time all lunch he didn’t have a joke ready.

We stayed too long. The martinis did their work. Outside, the fog came in soft and certain, the way it does out there, like it’s been rehearsing. Caen put his coat on like a man who has never once been in a hurry. I put mine on like a man who has somewhere else to be, even when he doesn’t.

On the sidewalk he tipped his hat. An actual hat. Nobody tips a hat in New York anymore. We’re too busy hailing something.

“Come back,” he said. “The city likes company.”

I walked toward the cable car line, the fog thick enough to make the streetlights float like they’d given up on the ground. Two men, two ways of loving a place. One writes it in little pieces that catch light for a second and go dark before the next one starts. The other digs until he finds the one man nobody else remembered to ask about, and doesn’t stop until the shovel hits something.

Neither of us was going to change. Neither was the city. That’s probably why we got along.

I caught the cable car and rode it a few blocks just to feel it move under me, the way you touch a thing to make sure it’s real. Behind me somewhere, a man who’d spent his life telling San Francisco it was beautiful was walking home through the fog he’d helped invent — which is either the best job in America or a life sentence, and he never once let on which.

I never did find out if he got tired of saying the same true thing a different way every morning. I didn’t ask. Some men you let keep their secret. Besides, I had my own city waiting, and it doesn’t smile at you while it robs you. It just takes the money and tells you to have a nice day.

Categories
Aging Living San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Zone

Sail Away - San Francisco - 2014

I have been alive for nearly a third of the time this country has existed. It arrived the way facts do at a certain age, sideways, while I was thinking about something else, and it sat me down. Two hundred and fifty years, and my own decades take up a third of it — whether I meant to claim that much room or not.

I used to think the road was where I went to escape the smallness of a life. Now the road doesn’t call the way it once did. Some of that is willingness. More of it, if I’m honest, is a body that’s less steady, a bladder with a mind of its own. The body files its objections. I used to override them. I no longer do — not because I’ve grown wise, but because the overriding costs more than it used to and buys less.

But I want to tell you about what I got instead, most Fridays, for not quite a decade, because it isn’t nothing.

Doug came across on the ferry from Larkspur, and I’d meet him at the Ferry Building — watching the boat come in, watching him pick his way down the gangway with his camera bag, before either of us had said a word or made a single decision about where to walk. Then we’d head out along the Embarcadero, sometimes up into the financial district, and for the first ten minutes my mind would do what minds do. It would analyze. It would compose. There, the light coming off that glass tower, wait for the man in the overcoat to cross into it, no — too late, gone. Appraising and timing, the way I’d once weighed a stock, or a runway, or a route.

And then, without my choosing it, something released. There’s no threshold you feel yourself cross. But sometime after the tenth minute, the appraising stopped, and seeing took over. Not looking for. Not looking at. The street would stop being a set of problems to solve and become only itself: a longshoreman on a break outside a pier, a gull working the same patch of pavement three times, fog sliding under the Bay Bridge like it had somewhere to be. Doug, a few yards off, would go quiet the same way, and we’d shoot for an hour or two and then find each other again at the end of the block.

By then we’d have worked up an appetite for something other than pictures. Tadich Grill, if we could get in — the linen and the old wood and the waiters who’d been there longer than some of our careers. We’d order something plain and good, and that’s when the talking would start. Not small talk. The real kind. Work, kids, the state of things, whatever had lodged itself in each of us that week. The seeing on the street and the talking over lunch were not two different activities. They were the same hour, extended. One was attention paid to the world. The other was attention paid to each other.

I have flown airplanes and driven through weather I shouldn’t have, and I loved both for the demand they made on me — the total, narrowing attention that leaves no room for the self that worries. What I didn’t understand then was that a boat crossing from Larkspur, and a Friday, and an old friend across a table at Tadich, could ask the same thing of me, for free, without a single mile of my own driving.

Covid stopped it. Not gradually — the way most rituals fade, through scheduling and distance and the slow drift of people’s lives — but all at once, the way everything stopped that spring. The ferry didn’t run. The restaurants closed. We never quite picked it back up, not the way it was. I don’t think either of us decided to let it go. It just didn’t survive being interrupted.

A third of the country’s whole life, and it took me most of my own to learn what those Fridays were teaching me — and then to lose them before I’d finished learning it. I still see the ferry pulling in. I still see Doug on the gangway with his camera bag, in no hurry, already half in the zone before his feet touch the dock.

Categories
Bread California San Francisco/California

Larraburu

There were three sourdough breads in San Francisco and they were not the same thing. Boudin was at Fisherman’s Wharf, which told you everything. Parisian was on the better grocery shelves and at the airport, which told you the rest. Larraburu was in the neighborhood, which is to say it was not selling anything except bread.

I was living in Daly City when I found them. I was seventeen, or eighteen, which is the age when you begin to understand that the thing everyone points to is rarely the thing worth finding. I had eaten Boudin at the wharf, standing in the fog with everyone else who had just arrived somewhere. It was fine. It was what people meant when they said sourdough. Parisian was more serious, or wanted to be — the bread you bought at the airport to prove you’d really been here, to carry the city home in a bag. But there was something in both of them that felt like a performance, and I was at the age when performance was exactly what I was trying to see through.

Larraburu didn’t perform. The crust was softer than it had any right to be. The sour was there but it didn’t insist on itself. You tasted wheat and time and something faintly cool and creamy underneath. It was bread that assumed you already knew what you were doing.

They closed in 1976. Parisian lasted until 2007. Boudin is still on the wharf.

I have thought about this more than is strictly reasonable. What I keep coming back to is not the taste exactly, though the taste is there when I reach for it. What I keep coming back to is the distinction itself — the fact that I made it, that it mattered to me, that I was nineteen years old in Berkeley and buying bread from a neighborhood bakery in San Francisco because I had decided it was the real thing. You make these small declarations about who you are. Most of them dissolve. Some of them stay.

The two brothers who started Larraburu came from the Basque country in 1896 and brought their starter with them. By the time I was eating their bread the starter was already older than the state of California. They fed it three times a day, every day, for eighty years. That kind of commitment doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up in the bread.

In 1969 scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture began studying sourdough cultures from five San Francisco bakeries. They were trying to understand what made the bread taste the way it did, why you could not replicate it elsewhere, why bakers who moved away and took their starters with them found the flavor slowly changing, the sourness shifting, something essential escaping. They worked for years before a team at Oregon State University finally isolated what they were looking for — a previously unknown bacterium living inside the wild yeast, producing the lactic acid that gave the bread its character. They named it Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. One of the five bakeries in the study was Larraburu.

The starter the brothers brought from the Basque country in 1896 was not simply old. It was a living record of every bakery it had passed through, every hand that had fed it, every climate it had survived. A sourdough starter is not a recipe. It is a culture in the biological sense — a community of organisms with a history, shaped by everything that has ever happened to it. You can write down the formula. You cannot write down what the starter knows.

Larraburu baked twenty-four hours a day. The sponge was rebuilt every eight hours, three times daily, without interruption. Two parts previous sponge, two parts high-gluten flour, one part water. Hold seven to eight hours. Rebuild. The rhythm was closer to farming than to cooking — less a process than a relationship, sustained across decades, across generations, across an ocean.

What I know now that I didn’t know then is that the starter survived the bakery. Someone saved a piece of it when they closed. It traveled to Hawaii, sat in a refrigerator on Maui, kept being fed. A culture that old doesn’t care about bankruptcy or lawsuits or whether the ovens are still running. It just wants flour and water and time.

I find something in that. Not consolation exactly. More like confirmation of something I already believed at seventeen, standing in the fog, learning to tell the difference.

Categories
AI California San Francisco/California

Distant Billboards

Greg Isenberg came back from San Francisco with seventeen observations. The billboards advertising either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies, the seed rounds, the forward-deployed engineers, the founders showing each other their Obsidian vaults like athletes comparing gym routines.

He noted an important thing in observation fifteen, almost as an aside.

Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats — none of them use any AI at all.

Everett Rogers formalized the technology diffusion model in 1962. He was studying hybrid seed corn in Iowa. He noticed that the farmers who adopted early weren’t just better informed — they had different social networks, different relationships to risk, different orientations toward outside knowledge. The late adopters weren’t slower. They were operating from a different set of facts about what was safe to try.

Those AI billboards in SoMa are not visible in the Mission. That’s not metaphor. That’s just geography.

What strikes me about the taqueria is not that it’s behind. It’s that the conversation happening a mile away — about MCP endpoints and agent fleets — is not legible to it. The vocabulary doesn’t exist there yet. Nobody has sat across from the woman making carnitas for twenty years and said: here is what this could do for your ordering, your scheduling, your response to a customer who asks on Yelp at 11pm whether you’re open on Monday. One day her daughter or son might.

The builder class optimizes for the builder class. You build what you understand, for people whose problems you can see. The founders in SoMa understand each other’s problems with extraordinary precision.

The woman making carnitas has different problems — thinner margins, less access to capital, relationships built over decades that don’t easily transfer to a new system. Nobody is at the Series A meeting making the case that her problems are the interesting ones.

The historian of technology David Nye wrote about the “technological sublime” — the awe Americans felt in the nineteenth century standing before a great bridge or a locomotive or the first electrified city. The feeling was real. But the sublime is a view from a particular angle. The workers who built the bridge experienced something quite different. The families displaced by the railroad’s right-of-way experienced something different still.

The question isn’t whether the technology will eventually reach her. It will. The diffusion curve is patient. It likely will surprise.

The question is whether anyone is doing the translation work. The act of standing in a specific kind of life and asking: what would this actually change here? In the actual kitchen, on the actual Tuesday.

Isenberg noted that the coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people.

The taqueria is also a place where people want to be around people. It has been that for a long time.

She’ll adapt. She’s been adapting for twenty years.

But that’s a very different story than the one being told in San Francisco on those billboards.

Categories
AI Technology

The Bathwater Problem

Gary Kamiya was writing about the Tenderloin when he said it, but the line has been following me around: “The problem is that by saving the baby, you also save the bathwater.”

The pattern is remarkably consistent across every major information technology. Each one arrives promising to liberate the deserving — the faithful, the learned, the civic-minded — and each one immediately, inevitably, arms everyone else too. Gutenberg’s press was understood by its champions as a device for spreading the true Word; within decades it was the primary infrastructure for Protestant schism, Catholic counter-propaganda, astrological almanacs, and pornography. The reformers got their Bible. They also got their pamphlet wars.

The telegraph was greeted as a force for peace — shared information would make war irrational, commerce would bind nations. It also became the nervous system of commodity speculation, financial manipulation, and the first truly industrial-scale news hoaxes. The telephone: connection and the crank call, the crisis line and the threatening voice in the dark. Radio: FDR’s fireside chats and Father Coughlin. Television: Murrow taking down McCarthy, and also fifty years of manufactured consent. The internet: the largest library ever assembled and the largest sewer.

The pattern isn’t coincidental. It’s structural. Each technology expands what’s possible for human expression and coordination — and human expression and coordination contain both the noblest and the worst of us in roughly fixed proportion. The tool doesn’t change the ratio. It scales both sides of it.

What’s interesting historically is how each generation believes their technology will be different — that this time the architecture can be designed to select for the good. The internet era produced the most elaborate version of this belief: algorithmic curation would surface truth, network effects would reward quality, the wisdom of crowds would outcompete misinformation. Instead it turned out that engagement was the attractor, and outrage was the highest-engagement content. The bath got hotter.

The AI moment is the same belief system, restated with more technical sophistication. But the Kamiya line stands. You are saving a baby, and you are saving bathwater, and no one has yet designed a tub that can tell the difference.

The question isn’t whether the bathwater comes with the baby. It always does. The question is whether you turn on the tap.

Categories
AI New York City San Francisco/California Work

The Paradox of the Pulse

The skyline has always been a silhouette of our collective ambition. For a century, the steel and glass towers of our major cities functioned as the secular cathedrals of the modern age. But as Andrew Yang observes in his reflection on the shifting urban landscape, the pews are emptying. The “doom loop”—a self-reinforcing cycle of vacant offices, declining tax revenue, and diminishing services—is a mathematical ghost haunting our city planners.

Yet, if you walk the streets of Manhattan today, the sidewalks are often busier than ever. In San Francisco, the “Cerebral Valley” AI boom is sparking a gold rush of intellect that rivals the original tech explosion. We are witnessing a strange paradox: the Death of the Office occurring simultaneously with a Rebirth of the Urban Pulse.

The crisis Yang describes is real, but it may be a crisis of form rather than function. We tolerated the friction of urban life for the sake of career “flow.” Now that the flow is digital, the city is being forced to justify its existence through something more primal: energy.

“We are looking at a fundamental restructuring of the American city. The office was the sun around which everything else revolved. Now, that sun is dimming.”

The AI boom isn’t happening over Zoom; it’s happening in “hacker houses” and shared spaces where the speed of a conversation over coffee outpaces a fiber-optic connection. This suggests that the “doom loop” might only apply to the traditional, sterile corporate cubicle. The city is shedding its skin. It is moving away from being a place where we must be, toward a place where we want to be.

Yang’s warning serves as a necessary guardrail. We cannot ignore the fiscal cliff of empty high-rises. However, the vibrancy of NYC and the reinvigoration of SF suggest that the city isn’t dying—it’s just no longer a captive audience. We are standing in the ruins of an old habit, watching a new, more intentional way of living together take root in the cracks.

Five Questions to Ponder

  • The Pull of Proximity: If we no longer have to be in the city for a paycheck, what is the specific “energy” that keeps you coming back to the sidewalk?
  • The AI Renaissance: Is the AI boom in SF proof that high-innovation industries require physical density, or is it just the last gasp of the old model?
  • Form vs. Function: If a skyscraper can no longer be an office, what is the most radical thing it could become to serve a “busy” city?
  • The Captive Audience: For decades, cities were built for people who had to be there. How does a city change when it has to “woo” its citizens every single day?
  • Digital Nomads vs. Urban Anchors: Are we moving toward a world of “temporary density,” where cities are vibrant hubs for projects but no longer long-term homes?
Categories
AI Living Productivity

The Reality Gap

“I follow AI adoption pretty closely, and I have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap. People in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives… people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams.” — Kevin Roose

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from scrolling through the “Inside” of the AI bubble while the rest of the world simply goes to work. It is the dizziness of watching a new species of behavior emerge—”wireheading” and “claudeswarms”—while the vast majority of the economy is still asking for permission to use a spellchecker.

The future isn’t just unevenly distributed; it is becoming mutually unintelligible.

Roose notes a “yawning inside/outside gap” that feels distinct from previous tech cycles. In one reality—geographically centered in San Francisco and digitally centered in specific discords—people are operating with a level of agency only sci-fi writers dared to imagine. They are deploying multi-agent swarms to manage their lives and consulting large language models for existential guidance.

In the other reality—the one inhabited by the vast majority of the global workforce—people are still waiting for an IT ticket to clear so they can use a basic productivity assistant.

It is tempting to look at this divide solely through the lens of technical access, but Roose hits on a deeper truth: “there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one.”

This is the friction of our current moment. It is not just that the tools are different; the permissions we give ourselves to use them are different. The “Inside” is operating with a mindset of radical experimentation and integration. The “Outside” is operating within legacy frameworks of risk mitigation and bureaucratic approval.

The danger of this gap isn’t just economic inequality, though that is a guaranteed downstream effect. The immediate danger is a loss of shared context. When the creators of technology live in a reality where “claudeswarms” run the day, they risk losing the ability to design for, or even empathize with, a world that is still fighting for permission to use the tools at all.

We are living in the same year, but we are no longer inhabiting the same time. The challenge for those of us on the “Inside” is to resist the intoxication of the bubble long enough to build bridges, rather than just building faster escape pods.

Meanwhile, in China (from the Financial Times)…

“I’ve witnessed first hand how China has grown from having zero AI talent 20 years ago to mass producing them,” he said. “Some of our most cutting-edge work is now done by fresh graduates. The real geniuses to change the world soon could well be among them.”