As the city loses tax base and tourist revenues while gaining pathologies and street crime, they predict the end is near. Ron DeSantis, and many other critics persistently push an exaggerated portrait of the city as a hellhole, where car thefts and fentanyl deaths, corporate flight, and retail closings fuel a so-called Doom Loop. Of course, parts of downtown San Francisco do face huge social problems-homelessness, drug addiction, shoplifting invasions. It’s important to remember the things that made, and make, San Francisco great-not for the sake of nostalgia or adolescent literature, but to ensure that a dark fog of disdain doesn’t block out everything else. I fear that San Francisco has gotten such a bad rap-borne of an often brutal, and mainly conservative, narrative about the city-that people have lost sight of its unerasable allures, and its irreplaceable spot in American history and culture. It’s a depiction that pushes back against the rampant San Francisco bashing in vogue today. The little paperback’s romantic portrayal of the City by the Bay grabbed me and never let go. Whitney, led me to develop an affection for that distant, hilly city on the Pacific coast: San Francisco. One book in particular, Mystery of the Green Cat by Phyllis A. Children’s and young adult literature let me imagine independence-meeting new people and exploring different places on my own. My family often visited nearby Manhattan but that was still off-limits for solo wandering. Those novels took me places, out of my crowded, insular hometown. I read them in bed or in a park, on winter nights or summer days. Best of all, they usually had nothing to do with schoolwork. A few weeks later, paperbacks arrived at school in wondrous boxes. I would carefully select books from a paper form distributed in class. For a young bookworm like me in 1960s New Jersey, almost nothing was more exciting in elementary school than ordering my own paperbacks from the Scholastic Book catalog.
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