San Francisco: Heaven’s gate

By Karl Taro Greenfeld

updated 10:03 a.m. ET Feb. 29, 2008

Google and Facebook are going to fight. It's all anyone can talk about. The two of them have been jockeying for attention, and now the rivalry has reached the point where a throwdown appears imminent.

I'm at a Halloween party in San Francisco's Noe Valley, in a three-story house packed with tech company employees, the girls who date them, and the guys who want to finance them. The two young gents dressed as the competing Web powers — Facebook all in white, with the site's trademark features silk-screened onto a T-shirt; Google also in white, with eyeholes poked through the O's — have been feuding for a while (something about an indiscreet posting on a now defunct social-networking site). The two of them — drunk and staring each other down in the teak and stainless steel kitchen — have to be pulled apart by more conventionally outfitted revelers: a ninja, Lil' Wayne, and a woman I'm guessing is an Oompa-Loompa.

Costumes begin to deteriorate as more drinks are consumed and guests keep arriving: A cat's tail is shorn under the boot of a Blackwater employee ("Immune from prosecution since 1997"); Supergirl's cape is discarded after being covered in bourbon. The conversation, though, stays focused on Web 2.0 — the industry and culture that are driving and reviving San Francisco. "Did you get pre-IPO stock?" "What's the lockup?" "If you were one of the first 100 employees, you're worth $100 million today ..."

Surely we're all going to cash in, those of us lucky enough to be in this house, in this neighborhood, in this city at this exhilarating time. The tech industry, and hence San Francisco, is again dreaming big. The product of a thousand code-writing quant poets — millennial Ferlinghettis and Ginsbergs — is geysering into the ether just down the block. The neighbors are launching their own multibillion-dollar ventures, funded by the money czars on Sand Hill Road and executed in the office parks of Mountain View and Redwood City. You'll be employee No. 12 at your friend's start-up and cashing out with a bundle while you're still young enough to travel the world and mingle with the cool kids. The twentysomething guy who owns this house has done just that — made a killing selling his business to a bigger company — and now he's no-worries wealthy, standing by the dining room table sloshing bourbon onto Supergirl.

For a visitor, it's all so inviting. Why can't every one of us come to San Francisco, as generations before have, chasing the latest iteration of the American dream, the freedom to reinvent ourselves and — why not — strike it rich? But unlike California's other oasis of reinvention, Los Angeles, this is a real city, comforting in its compactness, its verticality, its bustle. Thousands of foot soldiers are pouring in from around the country, lured by the Web 2.0 boom and staying because they find a place that is even more livable than San Francisco 1.0.

The city by the bay has always beckoned and then thrived upon housing and servicing those who heard the call of whatever siren was singing: railroads, gold, shipping, free love, technology. When I visited in the 1990s, drawn by the possibility of a job during the first Internet boom, I didn't consider that I was joining a long procession of prospectors who came as far west as Manifest Destiny would allow to strike it rich in gold, bliss or binary code.

Lisa Limer Latin American-themed murals throughout the Mission District attest to its multiethnic past (and present).

Unlike countless culturally bereft Sun Belt sprawls or hollowed-out Rust Belt hubs, San Francisco has never had to work hard to sell itself. Geography has been the primary marketing tool. You came for the gold, the drugs, the start-up; you stayed for the weather and, um, the great port facilities.

In 1775, Spanish navigator Juan Manuel de Ayala became the pioneering European to brave the treacherous Golden Gate Strait. His report of a vast inland harbor — larger and more sheltered than Monterey to the south — would catalyze the subsequent settlement of Yerba Buena, in today's Mission District, and the building of the Presidio, the northernmost military bulwark of King Carlos III's New Spain.

Over the next seven decades, the settlement would grow into a sleepy seaport whose main industry was the export of hides and tallow. The Mexican-American War of 1846 passed stewardship of the land to the United States, transforming the Embarcadero into a point of disembarkation for Easterners looking to make their fortune and for Far Easterners who would build the western arm of the Transcontinental Railroad. Two years later, the Gold Rush turned San Francisco into the polyglot urban center and unique cultural hybrid that we know today.

An estimated quarter million people came from all over the world in the decade after gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, and the city developed a massive infrastructure to service all those thousands heading into the hills. The wealth thrown off allowed for the settlement of the peninsula we now consider San Francisco proper, as well as the creation of the network of parks and open spaces that make it such a welcoming place to visit. Travelers and tourists have always been the city's lifeblood, and the natives have taken pride in getting rich on the needs, wants and lusts of visiting rubes.

Slide show   City by the Bay San Francisco’s unique mix of physical characteristics, landmarks and attractions make it one of the most popular cities in the United States. more photos

So, are you heading to San Francisco? Of course you are. As America goes politically blue, San Francisco is retaking its role as the maverick that allows the rest of us to glimpse what's next. Just a few years ago, this beacon of liberalism was out of the mainstream in a country drifting to the right. If Bush & Co. won twice on so-called family values, where did that leave a city whose contemporary image was built on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll? Way out in left field, and too often the target of reactionary culture-war fusillades. The Bush administration and conservative congressmen delighted in portraying San Francisco as a Jezebel — a hotbed of same-sex marriage and the seat of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the bench most frequently accused of "activism" by the strict-constructionist right.

San Francisco and its easy-to-score medicinal marijuana seemed an urban anachronism, like a giant Flying Burrito Brothers' jam band that could never make the transition to the newer, sleeker Faith Hill America. The city voted overwhelmingly against Bush in 2000 and 2004, and in 2003 elected the dapper young Gavin Newsom, then 36, mayor.

Lisa Limer The roof of Renzo Piano's emerging California Academy of Sciences building will be as green as the surrounding Golden Gate Park.

Newsom's policies are progressive and progrowth — a winning combination in tech company–dominated San Francisco. The city that Newsom envisions is the kind we all aspire to, with universal health care, universal pre- and public-school arts education, and even citywide Wi-Fi. Meanwhile, the Moscone Center is the largest municipally owned solar-powered facility in the country, and the San Francisco Giants will soon become the first Major League Baseball team to play night games under lights stoked by the sun. Suddenly, San Francisco's values are back in fashion, embodied, at least in spirit, by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose eighth congressional district includes most of San Francisco.

"In my visits to other cities," says Newsom, "I am always looking at what I can bring back to San Francisco. We are looking at best practices all over the world and bringing them here."

MORE FROM U.S. & CANADA

U.S. & Canada Section Front

Deadwood marks 20 years of legal gambling Eat, shop, explore Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods TV tours a big attraction for N.Y. tourists America’s most attractive people America’s favorite cities Which Hawaii is right for you? Twilight-themed restaurant for Washington town Uncle Remus museum still grapples with race Explore Savannah’s squares, parks and homes Winter Olympics 2010 trip guide U.S. & Canada Section Front   Add U.S. & Canada headlines to your news reader: