All the wonders of traversing the financial district streets on a weekday in San Francisco.
This particular encampment is outside a popular Asian restaurant, an iconic often-filmed bank building, and a fashionable health gym.
It spans at least four feet of an eight foot wide sidewalk. On both ends, there are piles of rubbish, garbage, containers with leftover food.
Along Market Street between New Montgomery and Third Street, outside the Ritz Carlton Residences, the brick-laid pavement is littered with wet newspapers and plastic wrappers.
At the junction of Third, Market & Kearney, Lotta’s Fountain is a landmark tourist attraction which is featured in many films set in San Francisco, including several by Alfred Hitchcock and, of course, the Michael Douglas and Karl Malden classic series, The Streets of San Francisco.
Every day of the year, visitors are taken to this island on the busy streets to hear guides describing the fountain’s origin and function during the 1906 earthquake.
At the entrance to the Metro Station, on the same corner as the world famous Palace Hotel, across the street from the sunny plaza of the McKesson Building, a man begs for change every day, scoots along the street in his wheelchair, using his feet to propel his vehicle, to the nearest coffee chainstore to spend his
panhandling gains. Behind him, is what remains of a planter that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority has abandoned from its once beautifying effort to this:
Some San Franciscans claim that their city is doing very well, thank you. Those of us who battle the litter, the beggars, the needles, the homeless off their meds, the stench from the gutters and drains, the dog messes (at least we pretend it’s dog mess), the acres of garbage and the dangers of physical bodily harm from all of the above, have a different opinion.
Farewell to a city that is one of the most expensive for residents while offering “sanctuary” for criminals who are here illegally, giving $300 a month to each homeless person (estimated to be about 795 homeless people per 100,000 residents [approximately 7,200]) of taxpayers’ money, (about $2,146,500 every month), satisfying the agenda of supervisors who justify their tax-grab, appease their constituents, and defend their rising requirement for more money, while ignoring the rising property crime and the disappearance of the people whose work built this once naturally diverse, working class urban paradise.
The city of neighborhoods of my childhood has been transformed by so-called liberal policies into a decaying relic that pretends to be the flower of Utopian Urban Life.