Sundays Are For San Francisco
San Francisco is a city of relationships. It’s not a place you just visit even when visiting. Nor is it a town you’re forced to commute to for work even if you work there. San Francisco is a city of sensation, it’s a place you can feel. No one has ever laid eyes upon the fog crowning the hills that hover over the Golden Gate and thought to themselves “meh.”
It’s a city that you befriend because of its beauty or dismiss as an enemy because of its evils. But it certainly isn’t bland.
One of the great challenges for popular places is they lack intimacy. It’s hard to feel like the city sees you when there’s a seemingly endless parade of people marching along Market Street. But on Sundays, the city clears out, and you finally can spend some quality time with your good friend, or maybe even your sworn enemy: San Francisco.
I rarely am in the city on Sundays. But I’ve been working with Mario0o0o0o0o and others on digital contents for the past few weeks, and he reached out because he wanted me there to do street interviews with native San Franciscans about the effects of gentrification on their communities. That was when I met Gunna, a rapper and community activist in the Fillmore District at the Banneker Homes on the corner of Buchanan & Grove Street. He walked us around the complex and talked about the changes going on in the City, and you could feel the history hidden within its walls.
What made the tour better was Gunna actually knew what the fuck he was talking about. When I heard him tell the history of his neighborhood, I knew he’d done his homework. I’m a Bay Area nerd, I’m not just from the Bay, I go out of my way to learn about it too. I never really had a family unit in the traditional sense, so I needed a way to make myself feel rooted to something, so I decided to dig myself in the region I was born and raised in as a way to compensate. At least that’s what my therapist thinks…
Not long after our short tour of the Fillmore, we parted ways with Gunna and headed to the Mission District. The drive was short and calming. Cars weren’t constantly clogging up the roads and my eyes could wander. I looked at the buildings, the fat-marker graffiti scribbled on bus stop awnings and the fog covering the hills in the western horizon.
When I parked my car on the corner of 26th and Valencia, I walked up to the parking meter and I realized that I didn’t have to pay. The SFMTA wasn’t in effect. Street parking was plentiful (by San Francisco standards) and that’s when I said to myself “Sundays are for San Francisco.”
I met back up with Mario0o0o0o0 on 24th street and found myself admiring the tiny colorful flags that hang above a significant portion of the street. The area was bustling, but it wasn’t crowded. Everyone had their own space. The big buildings downtown felt like a distant memory when immersed in the southern half of the Mission.
We filmed some street interviews, cracked some jokes, and ate some fucking INCREDIBLE tacos, and I left with that sense of awe I had when I was a kid. Sometimes the City is the greatest place on the planet, and you should be honored at the opportunity to be a living, breathing person in God’s greatest work of art: San Francisco
But only on Sundays… The rest of the week it’s fucking annoying.
😉
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Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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