The V-J Day celebrations in San Francisco making the end of World War II in August 1945 started with parties in the streets — and ended with 11 dead and more than 1,000 people treated for injuries.
Duke Downey/The ChronicleThe Golden Age of San Francisco has always been in the rear-view mirror.
That mythical time in San Francisco’s past has been celebrated — and used as a cudgel to attack the present —since the Gold Rush. We hear it from fed-up young residents, cranky S.F. natives and people who have never lived here. (Especially from people who have never lived here!)
“A friend who lives in San Francisco told me that, unlike most things you hear in the news, the decline of San Francisco isn't exaggerated,” venture capitalist Paul Grahamgriped from afar last month on Twitter. “It really is as bad as the stories say.”
That was a few days before finance shouterJim Cramer went on TVand described an alternate reality Embarcadero where, “I (don’t) let the team go out there by themselves, even in daytime.”
I’veattempted to disprove the fallacyof San Francisco’s steep decline before,many times,sometimes with helpfrom a friend. But since example after example doesn’t work, perhaps we need a mathematical formula.
“Peace Rioting — 11 dead,” read The Chronicle front page on August 17, 1945, after V-J Day celebrations in San Francisco turned violent.
Virginia De Carvalho/The ChronicleSo, I dove into The Chronicle archive, searching for references to the “Golden Age of San Francisco” or “San Francisco’s Golden Age” and their variations, writing down both the date the article was published (DAP) and the date that the Supposed Golden Age (SGA) occurred; rounding to a median when a Golden Age was listed as a decade or era. (“The 1950s” = 1955.) Then, I subtracted the SGA from the DAP, accumulated the results and divided by the total number of Golden Age mentions. The result was the Golden Age of San Francisco Index (GASFI).
Before we reveal that number, a few notes:
• The most frequently cited Golden Age was the decade after the 1906 earthquake, a 10-year period when city leadersfought to banish the Chinese population to Colma, and San Francisco’s mayor wasjailed for extortion and bribery.
• The earliest Golden Age was named in 1940, when a critic lamented that “San Francisco’s Golden Age of Theater” had passed in 1887.
• The Golden Age of San Francisco was referenced in three obituaries. In each case, the Golden Age occurred during the childhood of the deceased (who grew up in three different decades).
•草卡昂在1981年确定年代的黄金时代ports in San Francisco as the year the Giants arrived in 1958, claiming “the 49ers with Bill Walsh are a faceless group that is hard to identify with.” (They won the Super Bowl less than a year later.)
• For years up until the early 1990s, The Chronicle insisted that the Golden Age of Fine Dining was in the 1910s and 1920s, at downtown hotels only a portion of the population could afford. In 1989 the newspaper printed “Recipes from the Golden Age of San Francisco,” which included green goddess dressing, crab Louie and oyster loaf (a land mine of gluten and calories that encased butter, fried oysters and bread crumbs inside a loaf of bread.)
George Moscone, with his wife and daughter during election night in November 1975.
Gary Fong/The ChronicleAfter running all the Golden Ages through our equation, I came up with a GASFI of 40.118. So, whatever date today is, the Golden Age of San Francisco was approximately 40 years and 40 days earlier. Asking the question as this is being published, the Golden Age of San Francisco was Monday, Feb. 7, 1982 — a day when gas prices spiked to $1.55 per gallon, four fires broke out in the Mission District and two Oakland narcotics cops were booked for conspiring to sell cocaine.
When you read a few dozen nods to the Golden Age of San Francisco, all contradicting each other, you start to see how easy it is to overlook the challenges and downsides of any given decade, while pining for oyster loaf at your favorite hotel.
In the 2000s, for example, this newspaper called the 1970s San Francisco’s Golden Age at least three times — arguably dismissing a murdered mayor and civil rights leader, the Zodiac killer and thecity’s highest homicide rates, by far, of the last 62 years.
In this context, it’s easy to imagine what people might say 40.118 years from now, somehow overlooking fentanyl deaths and a housing crisis to declare the 2010s or 2020s as a Golden Age. They’d have a decent argument: The Warriors and Giants won six titles between them. There was an explosion of outstanding affordable dining representing a variety of cultures. And while the nation took sides in a worldwide pandemic, this region distanced, got vaccinated in large numbers and followed the science.
或者…旧金山的黄金时代不是一个日期but a mindset that includes this very moment. That the phoenix on the S.F. flag is there for a reason. That no matter how many people tell us we’re trash, we’re going to keep working for solutions, because the city is 100% worth the fight.
The hero of this story is William H. Crocker, a banker who was key to rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Looking through nearly 40 Golden Age references in The Chronicle, Crocker was the only non-reporter who suggested that the Golden Age was the moment in which he was living.
Crocker gave that speech to his fellow wealthy citizens in 1937. And even as he heralded the city’s Golden Age, he also pointed to San Francisco citizens “living in the height of luxury,” shaming them to donate more charity for social services and calling them “appalling” for not supporting the growing poor population.
There were strong parallels between Crocker’s era of the late 1930s and the 2020s, so we’ll let him have the final word today:
“The world has never known a city like this. Look at the building activity; look at the huge deposits in the banks. … This is the Golden Age of San Francisco right now.”
Peter Hartlaub (he/him) is The San Francisco Chronicle’s culture critic. Email:phartlaub@sfchronicle.comTwitter:@PeterHartlaub
