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Welcome to the North Beach 'experience sector'
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So apparently I've been laboring under a misapprehension here. I thought I was writing about a vibrant neighborhood, teeming with people who live lives, win love and then lose it, raise their kids, swill their wine, and eventually shuffle off this mortal coil, all the better for having been here.
Turns out I was wrong. Turns out I've been writing about an "experience sector."
According to no less an authority than the San Francisco Business Times, that's what North Beach is: an "experience sector."
What, you ask, is an "experience sector"?
Well, according to the SFBT, it's a place where tourists go to enjoy something called the "San Francisco experience." And in order to provide that experience, an "experience sector" needs to be unfettered by pesky regulations that limit the number of bars and restaurants that can be crammed into what used to be a functioning neighborhood of essentially happy -- if somewhat dull -- locals.
Because, apparently, you can't fully appreciate the "San Francisco experience" by merely visiting a genuine neighborhood with roots going well back into the 19th century, a neighborhood that evolved organically and seemed contented enough with its lot in life until the MBAs and marketing swine dropped in to show us the errors of our ways.
It seems that you can't enjoy a real "San Francisco experience" unless every goddamned building on the street is either a bar or a restaurant. Who knew?
Not me, obviously. I was very naïve, thinking that the reason people love San Francisco was because of its celebrated iconoclasm, its freethinking ways, its worldly sensibilities … and, yep, all them purty views.
But the Business Times has set me straight. Now I see that people come here to witness the final homogenization of culture, the sprouting of cookie-cutter skyscrapers and a total capitulation to the basest aspects of the Amuuur-ican way of life. And, buddy, what a life that is!
I was blind, but now I see.
The Business Times puts is so eloquently: "Yes, residents need local services. But the idea of saying No More! to restaurants and bars in hopes of preserving hardware stores and shoe repair shops raises questions about whether that's what the city should be doing."
Hear hear! It's get on board, you bloody socialists, or get out of town!
So I guess I owe a heartfelt apology to the North Beach Chamber of Commerce and the North Beach Neighbors and all those other free-market buccaneers out there who clearly saw all along what "one of the 10 best neighborhoods in the United States" is all about.
It's really about greed and capitalism and phony-baloney manipulation of the "San Francisco experience." I just didn't get it.
My bad.
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