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Originally Posted by the Misanthropist
As much as I love downtown SF as it is now I wish some of those neo-Gothic and Italianate buildings had survived.
It's also interesting how the mainstream ethos of the city has changed. That looked very much like a city at work, and one full of churches, patriotic parades and vigilante committees, while it now projects itself as a hedonistic city and a militantly secular, politically radical one. I guess that could be said of any city to a certain extent, but it's particularly noticeable in San Francisco's case.
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What rubbish. It's still a city at work (just not the dirty and industrial type) and America's San Francisco has always been hedonistic, much more secular than sacred -from the Gold Rush days when the City was mostly filled with a ton of greedy & adventurous upper-middle class, lonely and horny young men visiting the 'cribs' to "society ladies" visiting the opium dens to the Berkeley bohemians, the North Beach beats, Haight hippies, Castro gays....and the beat goes on....more patriotic and racist than later -yep..but when compared to the rest of the country...well it's never been Peoria Misanthropist.