North Beach is where magic lives. Neon strip club signs throw color at the pavement below while Coit Tower sits illuminated on Telegraph Hill, like God’s own fire hose nozzle. Smells of garlic and sauce drift from restaurants whose large windows teem with people from around the world. Street barkers

I live on the top floor of a building constructed in 1914. To put that in context, Russia still had a Tsar when my building went up. Because it’s old and wooden, it shakes and sways. When a big truck goes by I can often feel the rumble. When they

As 2024 winds down, we’re reflecting on another incredible year of sharing the stories, art, culture, and nightlife that make the Bay Area so unique. BrokeAssStuart.com wouldn’t be what it is without you—our community of readers, supporters, and believers in independent media. This year, instead of asking you to join Patreon

At some point last week, I realized that it was about to be the holiday season. Somehow, we’d trudged through one of the most trying periods in modern history, and that celebratory end-of-year blowout of family, festivities and gift giving was nearly upon us. Unfortunately, just because this year is

For the first time in a long time, I’m optimistic about the future of San Francisco. I know that’s a weird thing to say considering most of us barely leave the house, tons of people don’t have jobs and many of our favorite institutions keep closing down. But honestly, I can’t remember the last time I felt SF was so full of hope.

But as we lurch toward what the new normal will look like after this harrowing experience, I wonder, have the people in power learned anything?

So much of what I do now, so much of my devotion to this problematic, maddening, beautiful, brilliant, heartbreaking, mystifying city is tied to the way San Francisco made me feel when I was in my early 20s. It was a city of dreamers and believers, seekers and preachers, people who didn’t belong anywhere else, and never wanted to anyways. It was a city of “hell yes!” in a world of too much “no.”

I want to walk through our thoroughfares en masse, in unison, in celebration of something — anything — instead of in protest. I want to hold hands with a stranger while we do this, just because it feels right.

The story goes that when the Great Library of Alexandria burned down in 48 B.C., it had a copy of every book in the “known world.” Its destruction represented the annihilation of so much of the world’s knowledge that humanity lost things that are now gone forever. What’s remarkable is that each of us holds, in our pocket or bag, a device that connects us to infinitely more information than could have ever been held in a million Great Libraries.