On the first day of the heat wave this month, I took the kiddos across the street to McLaren Park to meet up with friends. I was wearing several layers and had not bothered to check the weather because, most days in San Francisco, there is no real downside to bringing something extra with you. Except it was already sweltering, and within about three minutes I was carrying everything I had so confidently put on. Oh right, I thought. Of course there is going to be a heat wave in September.
I should remember this by now. The rest of the country is beginning to dress for fall just as San Francisco finally gets around to summer, and the change affects more than what we are wearing. The Richmond and Sunset move outside, Ocean Beach becomes somewhere to stay for a while rather than somewhere to admire briefly before retreating from the wind, and a backyard or roof deck that has been more aspirational than useful suddenly begins earning its square footage.
This past Sunday, we were leaving my in-laws’ house in the Mission and heading to Ocean Beach for Tashlich when we got caught in the traffic surrounding Fiesta de las Américas on 24th Street. Music, dancing, food and people had filled the neighborhood, and although we were mostly trying to figure out how to get around it, there was something joyful about stumbling into one celebration while we were on our way to another.
The two had nothing to do with each other, which was what I both liked and pondered about the moment. Within one trip across town, we had passed through two very different traditions unfolding in public on the same warm September afternoon. The day before, several blocks of Clement Street had been taken over by the Richmond Autumn Moon Festival, with lion dancing, kung fu and mooncakes. None of it had been coordinated to say something larger about San Francisco. It was simply the city being several different things at once.
After that Sunday, I began noticing how much else was happening across the city. Flower Piano has placed twelve pianos throughout the Botanical Garden, which means someone can hear a professional performance or come across an unknown person who decided to sit down and play. At almost exactly the same time, Dreamforce brings approximately 50,000 people into the blocks around Moscone Center, temporarily filling downtown with badges, product announcements and conversations about AI. The experiences could hardly be more different, but both alter the part of the city they occupy.
As the month continues, Chinatown will hold its own Autumn Moon Festival along Grant Avenue and the San Francisco Symphony will open its season. The Sunset Night Market will take over five blocks of Irving Street on a Friday evening, at exactly the point in the year when even riding an e-bike across town for something happening near the ocean feels less like fighting the elements and more like a good idea. Then Portola Music Festival will arrive at Pier 80 on the same final weekend that the Folsom Street Fair will fill the streets of SoMa nearby. There are more events than can reasonably be mentioned, much less attended, and very little connecting them beyond their proximity to one another.
We spend a great deal of time discussing what San Francisco has lost, and some of that conversation is deserved. The city has certainly changed, important things have disappeared and there are parts of its current identity that remain unresolved. But I also wonder whether we sometimes look for San Francisco culture as though it should be one coherent thing, when it has always been people with very different histories, interests and ideas about a good weekend day building their own versions of the city remarkably close to one another.
The warm weather draws more of that life into public view, but it also gives us a reason to move toward it. We stay longer, go farther and occasionally find ourselves in the traffic created by a celebration we did not know was happening.
It’s difficult to insist that San Francisco has lost its culture when you cannot get across town because so much of it is happening in the street.
Photo credit: Gardens of Golden Gate Park
