San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land

by Michael Johns

A local rock star once said, “San Francisco is forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality.” No American city has such a broad sweep of staggering views—of the ocean, of a huge bay, of surrounding hills—or such a high opinion of its own worth. San Francisco has always been rich, too; the city’s great wealth has long underwritten the broadmindedness so vital to its charm. But there is much more to the City by the Bay than money and rarefied air, and, in San Francisco, Michael Johns intimately portrays the history and surprisingly complex sensibilities that give this small city its outsized personality.

Johns explores how, despite its sophistication, San Francisco retains a frontier quality that has always attracted seekers—of fortune, power, pleasure, refuge, rebellion. Yet the city is more than irreverent, independent, and a bit outside the it’s also historically progressive, technologically innovative, and open to all kinds of people and ideas. As Johns shows us, San Francisco is an easy place to be different—a home to the Beats and the hippies, a vibrant LGBT community and left-wing politics, the rise of Burning Man, and the creation of technologies that make today’s San Francisco the City of Apps. From Haight-Ashbury to the Tenderloin, Chinatown to the Mission, Johns’s urban journey blends historical narrative, personal reflections on the city today, and a treasure trove of images for a true San Francisco treat.

Genres: American History

256 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2018

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost certainly the best short history of San Francisco yet written, but also an ethnographic snapshot of the city in the mid-2010s. Johns is a geographer at UC berkeley, and his acute sense of placeness suffuses the book. He is especially attentive to the class struggles that have shaped the place, and obviously loves the long-standing open, libertine, and culturally diverse traditions of the city. Though he tries to be open minded about how the city has changed in recent years, his snapshots of different neighborhoods today, which takes up the last quarter of the book, clearly smell of the lament of someone who thinks the latest transformation of the city into a place of complacent techies, alienated old timers, and squalid abjection is not really to be celebrated — his nostalgia for the lost world of crazy bike messengers is the real tell, even as he acknowledges that their lives were hardly wonderful. As San Francisco has lost its working class neighborhoods, its artistic edge, its harder punk and gang dimensions, what remains is a bourgeois technopleasuredome with a sprinkling of Calcutta.

[Mills College Library]

979.461 J659 2018

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

This needs to be read via the hardcopy version on the book. It relies heavily on its graphic design to differentiate the Highlights pages dropped frequently into the midst of its main narrative chapters, easily adapted to as the reader of the paper version.
Unfortunately, the e-book, which I started with, did nothing to adapt the book for the less-graphic onscreen presentation. For example, in the midst of a section talking about Harry Bridges in the 1930s, it suddenly veers to 3 paragraphs re 2 SF eccentric personalities from the 1870s-80s, then reverts back to the Harry Bridges narrative. This kept happening. The e-book would show the title of section A, then the title of section B when it switched, but not refer back to the title of A when the narrative went back to A. I eventually realized there was a extra line space between the paragraphs at the switches, but that was barely visible onscreen. The e-book needs reformatting to make sense.