Is San Francisco about to return to its Bohemian roots?

San Francisco

Unsplash / Eduardo Santos

When I moved to San Francisco from England in 2007, the city was still a lovely, fun mess. I’d gotten to the rough edge of America for Rudyard Kipling to be called a “crazy city inhabited by completely insane people”. For every young Brit who saw “Bullitt” under a poster of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in their dormitories, San Francisco was the coolest place on earth.

Although it had been half a century since the beats roamed the streets and bars of San Francisco, the city and the completely insane people didn’t disappoint. Instead of a ’69 Mustang GT, I happily drove my old VW Jetta like Steve McQueen over the hilly intersections of Nob Hill (but with more respect for bike paths). I moved into an apartment on Golden Gate and Baker on what is known as Western Addition and secured the spot over the phone, invisible, for about a third of what he would rent today. I discovered that the apartment was the lower half of the duplex where Patty Hearst was held captive by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. That was pretty cool. Everything was pretty cool.

I formed a band and spent my nights in the dingy pubs and music venues of town listening to or playing hideously loud guitars. We rented a shared rehearsal room at SoMa’s community studio / street drink facility Lennon Studios, where we took in $ 75 a month for the room.

Our band played shows to small, whiskey-soaked crowds, mostly made up of friends forced through Facebook events at Hemlock, Kimo’s, Elbo Room, and Fernet shots with ginger hunters at The Summer Place and Koko. We’d see better bands with a bigger crowd at Slim’s or 330 Ritch. I wrote about the shows for SF Weekly and my English friend, who was also making the trip to California, photographed them. We’d wake up and watch Liverpool at Mad Dog in the Fog and eat Bloody Marys before our hangover could kick in.

As you can see from these links, each of the places mentioned is now permanently closed.

Until 2007, the first dotcom bubble was mostly just a joke about Pets.com and Boo.com’s short life, but the growing disdain for techie culture often voiced by the artist community was real. The great recession, which faced the rise of more resilient tech giants in the city like Twitter, Facebook, and Google (and their greedy, transplant employees), forced artists to make money as landlords. A spike in homelessness, a wealth gap, and protests over “Google Buses” (remember them?) Embodied the city suddenly deprived of the art, music and free-running spirit of crazy creativity we came here for. The mood can be summed up pretty well in an incident at Molotov’s punk pub in Lower Haight when a user was greeted frostily with Google glasses.

The city was changing again, as it had so often before.

Up until 2016 it was harder to find any messy issues or bands to go through the nights. Most had moved to Oakland, Portland, or LA – the all-surface-no-feeling SoCal rival that San Franciscans traditionally grinned at for lack of real culture. But by then Los Angeles had apparently become the target of all hedonistic creatives who had suddenly left the no longer so interesting streets of San Francisco.

Many of the rehearsal and art rooms in the warehouse disappeared and were replaced by startups, e-scooter stations, condominiums, and artisanal gyms (yes, that was one thing).

I wrote an elegy on the scene that frustrated people with sincere hope and still tried to hold onto the heady days of yesteryear. I regretted being the naysayer, but in fact, the city where the rent for a one-bedroom apartment was nearly $ 4,000 a month was proven not to be an artist’s destination anymore.

But creative kids will always find a way, especially in San Francisco.

This year has been an endless tornado no matter how you look at it. People love to speculate and read about stories of seismic cultural changes in the city, whether it be hate clicks from the political right enjoying the ultimate destruction of Nancy Pelosi’s modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, or from local Franciscans who worry about moving into all things tech. This can often lead to exaggeration in changes in the city, but 2020 is not just any year.

This year, over 100 restaurants and bars in San Francisco have closed permanently, and many more are temporarily closed for the time being. Rents in SoMa and in the city center have fallen by over 20%. Many of the tech companies in the middle of the market have told their employees that they can work from home forever, ruining any remaining hope for tech-driven renewal of the struggling neighborhood. And wealthy city homeowners are selling like never before.

It’s not a pretty picture, but could there be a sense of commotion when you return to the city’s artistic roots? Some believe the city will move back in that direction, and those hopes were bolstered by the $ 12.8 million round of annual grants Mayor London Breed announced last week for arts and culture across the city, including many organizations promoting urban musicians such as Intermusic SF and the Women’s Audio Mission.

Musician and longtime SF resident Jeff Knutson is optimistic that the scene will rise again, but it may not happen soon. “I really hope that bands, musicians and performers will revive in the city,” he says. “I haven’t seen that many apartments in SF in over 15 years, and rents are definitely falling. But let’s go.” Be honest, the rents here are still very, very high. “

One of the founders of the San Francisco Arts Collective, Tshakie N, sees some light at the end of the tunnel. “I am confident that the arts will return in a bigger wave to San Francisco,” she says. “What is evident is that SF residents are avid supporters of the arts. They have shown this through donations, support for online services, and demand for work from local artists.”

Outside of bands and artists, some residents have noticed a welcome slowdown in the pace of everyday city life.

Konstantin Kosov, AKA Fruit Jesus, the man who has been driving custom-made trailers full of fruit from the town’s farmers’ market since 2014, sees something happen through the chaos of the crisis.

“I think San Francisco is going to have a renaissance,” he says. “So much has happened in the last couple of months that it feels like an old SF to me. People are moving out, but thank god it got crazy here! Too many people, it was just, I don’t know, I like It kinda What happens, people just in the park or on the beaches just hanging out. I remember when the recession hit, I lived in Dolores Park, people were just people. They didn’t have to plan a three week hang because they were like that employed.”

What’s next for the bars and music venues around town that have gone through the pandemic over the decades from lubricating SF natives and artists to serving money tech staff to closing their doors?

Martin Cate, co-owner of Smuggler’s Cove and Whitechapel, believes a return to “normal” is imminent, whatever that means in San Francisco. “As vacancies go up and rents go down, we can see the return of hospitality, firefighters, teachers, and all of those professions that struggle to live in SF. We could see them repopulate and diverse the city.” Support the industrial sector. “

While the big established music venues like The Fillmore and The Warfield wait with bated breath for a timeline where they can potentially hold thousands of sweaty concert-goers again, the DIY punk scene that recently emerged from the garages of Ingleside and The Living Room is of sunset are ready to resume the underground explosion that was inadvertently the rock music sanctuary of San Francisco.

Just as thousands of square feet of street art and murals took over the boarded-up shop windows when they closed in March, when those painted wooden panels were finally pulled down and the bar’s doors reopened, the city emerged from its cocoon and may look different.

While the drop in rent and newly emptied office space could ultimately make room for artistic endeavors, in reality the rent in the city is still one of the highest in the country. Unless rates continue to fall, the city’s demographics are unlikely to change abruptly. But after a decade of the second tech boom that pushed San Francisco’s bohemian roots back into the ground, there is hope that bags will grow back with something more useful.

“It’ll happen eventually. And if it does, it might be better than ever. San Francisco is a special place, and it’s always been a magnet for creative people,” says Knutson. “In a way, the city has opened up and is less crowded, which is kind of cool. The real San Franciscans are still here, they will be here – they will find a way and they will not go anywhere. Hopefully we go. Come on.” with a little more balance, more space for everyone, not just the privileged few, to be part of what makes this city great. “

This will not be like Detroit, which has seen severe urban decay, barren streets, and a subsequent influx of artists. Right before an almighty earthquake, San Francisco’s 47 square kilometers are too sacred to be abandoned. And it won’t be a regression to the romanticized scenes of the past. North Beach won’t suddenly fill up with beat poets, the Fillmore won’t regain a jazz scene desecrated by crooked urban development. The Haight won’t be full of rock and roll bands again. But after the unprecedented chaos of 2020, San Francisco is about to change again, just like it was when I first found this great city thirteen years ago.

Andrew Chamings is an editor at SFGATE. Email: Andrew.Chamings@sfgate.com | Twitter: @AndrewChamings