Revolution Station: Old San Francisco
What happened to San Francisco? Though it now enjoys the reputation of being an eco-friendly, happy, hippie place to live, it was once the scene of a great amount of violence. It was once the epicenter of a counter culture movement that threatened to topple the United States. It threatened the very fabric of our society and promised a new reality, a new age.
Over the water, in Oakland, you had the Hell Angels burning up the streets and the Black Panthers lifting their fists in protest. The entire Bay Area was on fire — literally. Something was in the air and for whatever reasons; nothing was going to satisfy this new youth. Something had to change and it was sure not going to be the revolution.
The promise of a new generation was being carried, one banner at a time, and the television cameras were dispersing them across the nation and across the world. Everything was in flux and it seem like if you were going to be part of anything you had better get to the city and find a room to rent in any of the San Francisco hotels in and near Haight and Ashbury.
You had to be there. If you wanted to be part of something, you had to come. You had to participate and you had to be willing to suffer a hail of baton blows. Even now the SFPD still enjoys a reputation for being rather fascist. What that means, I’m not quite sure, but it has never been beloved by the people. If you were going to be a part of the solution, and not part of the problem, you had to come to San Francisco and prove you merit.
Now, you’d hardly recognize the area was home to much more than fashion retailers and tie-dye aficionados. Massive swathes of the city have been gentrified and rezoned to accommodate more and more people. Now, you have nearly 900,000 people living on a seven-square mile peninsula. This kind of population density is what prompts comparisons to New York. The only problem is that New York isn’t on a fault line.
You can book sumptuous hotels in San Francisco for a song.
