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This is a cool thread idea. If you want to know anything about the San Francisco Bay Area, I've lived there my whole life. I've lived mostly on the East Bay, San Jose/Oakland side. Like most people living in the East Bay, my parents worked across the bridge on the Peninsula, and eventually I went to school there. The people there were very different, and it's a trend I've noticed in the greater Bay Area, the significant cultural differences. You could drive a ring around the bay with an unbroken line of buildings, roadways, or man-made structures. I've done this several times; drive from the East Bay, take the freeway north, head up to Oakland. Stop there for lunch. Meet up with some friends in San Francisco, hang out at the beach, go back to their place for dinner on the Peninsula, go to a bar in San Jose, wrap up the night, head back north home in the East Bay. A full loop, and if it weren't for the signs, I'd never be able to tell you where one city started and another began. It is a fully urbanized ring around this body of water. From an outside perspective, these places are totally indistinguishable, so it may surprise you to know all of these places, are extremely different. The Bay has a ton of diversity, my great great grandfather was this Oregan-Trail settler who was a sheriff in the North Bay, and he was not alone. People from all over the world have made their place here, and it shows. There's a small commercial area near where I live that I end up at a lot, and it never seemed unusual until I traveled out of state. ramen (Japanese Noodles) and dosa (Indian... pancake... wraps) are just as common as any burger joint. There's this collection of businesses near the train station on the East Bay that's full of Afghani and Pakistani stuff. You can get a loaf of Afghani bread the size of a beach towel and as flat as a cracker, fresh out of the oven for 50 cents at one of the markets. It's like stepping into another world every five miles. I love it. I don't know what I'd do without it. The whole of the Bay Area has undergone massive economic growth in a seriously short span of time. Let me tell you about Jack London. One place I used to hang out at is Jack London Square. It's a little place on the waterfront, a few blocks from Chinatown. It's a commemoration of the prolific writer Jack London, who is famous for writing White Fang and Call of the Wild, but really just wrote anything he saw or could think of. Most of his writings are about this place in the early 20th century, and there was absolutely nothing. I have next to me a copy of "The Valley of the Moon", a story where Jack London travels up the Pacific Coast. If you're interested in how different it was, you should check it out. The houses I grew up in were the first constructed on the land, without renovation, built in the 1960's or 1970's. The further you get from the epicenter of San Francisco, the newer and newer the structures become. There are houses a five minute walk from where I live now that used to be mustard fields, but is now an endless row of suburbia, already filled with out-of-towners, trying to make it in computer Mecca. Or make five cupcake Kickstarters, you never know. There are "Victorian" houses in San Francisco, highly coveted, but not as old as they seem. Most of what did exist burnt down in the fires after the earthquakes of 1906. A few notable historical sites remain, such as San Francisco's Old Clam House, but almost everything here is as new as it gets. But anyways, that's a lot of rambling. I love this place. You can ask me anything about it. My history in the area started in the 90's, so unfortunately all I've got for Summer of Love or the Bathhouse AIDs Outbreak is secondhand, but I got to see the second bursting of the Silicon Valley bubble, the DotCom boom and bust, the rise and fall of AOL, the enormous changes to San Francisco as a city from the artist's haven to the rich tech guy's playhouse, The '08 economic collapse and the massive tent communities that exist all over the place now, anything you want to talk about really. 
DISCO KING fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Feb 1, 2017 |
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Feb 1, 2017 08:52
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:13 |
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