In an era when vibes often overpower facts, San Francisco is beginning to feel as if the vibes and the facts are on the same side.
Rainbow laser cannons illuminating Market Street, monthly festivals taking over downtown, impromptu raves on the waterfront, impromptu raves at Civic Center, beautiful light displays at Grace Cathedral — San Francisco is having its best summer of the 16 I’ve spent here. Something about the city’s mood has begun to shift for the better, and we have the pictures — and the data — to prove it.
Call it our “brat” summer (assuming that cultural moment isn’t over already). It’s starting to feel like that long, dark period when San Francisco-bashing reached a fever pitch is over. Collectively, we are waking up to the city’s inherent awesomeness, led by visual art and live music, along with plenty of new parks and way less bipping.
Let’s start with the loudest part: all those outdoor shows. Virtually every week, thousands of people of all ages have headed out to shake their tail feathers together. In last weekend’s case, it was free of charge: For the first time in my San Francisco memory, Embarcadero Plaza was a desirable place to be Sunday, thanks to “Back to BAYsics,” a four-hour set with DJs from Dirtybird, the local label that grew out of free barbecues in Golden Gate Park. Staged by SF concert powerhouse Another Planet Entertainment, the show was part of an agreement between the promoter and City Hall to produce three free outdoor events per year for three years in exchange for a second festival in the park one week after Outside Lands.
This program, called SF Live, is designed to breathe new life into beleaguered downtown spaces, something Mayor London Breed “has prioritized as a component of her broader economic strategy to revitalize and add vibrancy to pockets” of the city, according to a spokesperson.
That’s pure bureaucratic boilerplate, no doubt. But there’s no denying that it’s working, with the reinvigoration of the Hibernia Bank, a Beaux Arts white elephant in the Tenderloin, well underway after an open-to-close Bonobo set this month. Noise Pop, another veteran of the live music scene, is the force behind this weekend’s SF Live performance, with violinist and vocalist Sudan Archives crowning an all-Black, all-queer lineup Saturday at Dogpatch’s Crane Cove Park. More free Noise Pop events will hit parks later this summer.
Previously quiet corners of the city pulsate with unprecedented nocturnal vigor. The Taiwanese-style Sunset Night Market that debuted last year will see its footprint swell to seven blocks of Irving Street when it returns for three nights in August and September. At Battery and Clay streets downtown, the Bhangra & Beats Night Market has two samosa- and henna-filled Fridays yet to go this season. And all this novelty hasn’t crowded out the established players, with the Tenderloin’s First Thursday art walks still going strong. Contrast that vitality with Oakland’s vaunted First Fridays, whose future is again in doubt.
In the realm of visual arts, Illuminate, the nonprofit responsible for the “Bay Lights” and “Golden Mile” on JFK Drive, has expanded on its previous “Summer of Awe” successes, shooting 20 rainbow lights down the entire length of Market Street over Pride Weekend and, more recently, projecting light through Grace Cathedral’s rose window.
I can’t remember the last time I went to church at 10:30 p.m. on a weeknight and sat reverently in a pew, quieting my chatter-prone mind. But the Grace Cathedral display, titled “Window,” really was transcendent.
Meanwhile, at the Embarcadero, we have an addition to our overwhelmingly male civic statuary in “As Sounds Turn to Noise,” Thomas J. Price’s nine-foot depiction of a Black woman in jogging clothes that has become a meeting point for running clubs.
Of course, these are just the events that have gotten the green light from the city. San Francisco has a long tradition of tolerating (or tacitly championing) quasi-legal events and underground culture, from the first few Burning Man celebrations on Baker Beach to guerrilla street actions like Critical Mass. The spigot of dynamism and creativity doesn’t flow only on City Hall’s say-so, and sometimes the powers that be prove unable to turn it off, even when they desperately want to — as in the case of illegal stunt-car sideshows.
Deafening, dangerous and flamboyantly law-defying, sideshows have no shortage of haters, and with ample cause. But looked at another way, they’re an expression of youthful energy and a loud rebuttal to the notion that the exorbitantly priced city has been emptied of street culture. Venture out to witness one up close — or, a safer bet, watch it go off from a balcony above — and you will witness a true primal scream, like live graffiti with pyrotechnics thrown in.
Only slightly less polarizing is the Dolores Hill Bomb, with which the San Francisco Police Department seems to have made a tentative peace after botching 2023’s event with mass arrests that led to a class-action lawsuit. Prior to this year’s July 6 hill bomb, the cops warned everyone not to even think about it, so the skaters moved across Dolores Park to Church Street. A much-smaller deployment of officers turned a blind eye to the event, nobody got handcuffed, and the kids came off looking clever and defiant in the face of slow-footed authority.
It’s not all rosy, of course. Homicides may be down, but violence is a constant, lurking presence — most horrifically in the case of a hotel worker who died in July after allegedly being pushed by a homeless man into the path of a BART train at the Powell Street station. Commercial vacancies remain stubbornly high, some blighted areas remain blighted, and the restaurant and nightlife industries’ post-pandemic recoveries remain uneven at best. Yet for the first time in a long time, I find myself on my phone hope-scrolling instead of doom-scrolling.
To some extent, we can predict what’s coming. Now that Bay Area-born Vice President Kamala Harris is likely to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, San Francisco is in for another round of sustained bashing at the national level. And if Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November, we will be his administration’s political foil once again. We know that right-wing commentators will seize on anything they can to tarnish our reputation, even when — as in the case of this month’s supposed attack on a visiting Australian executive — it turns out to be false.
But it almost doesn’t matter. The trend lines are palpable, and, if you’re out on the streets, so is the energy. Even the woebegone Tenderloin is getting in on the action. As Rene Colorado, executive director of the Tenderloin Merchants said, “You measure the city by its weakest link, and that’s us in the Tenderloin.”
Colorado recently partnered with Adam Swig, executive director of nonprofit Value Culture, to produce LoveFest SF, a free, all-day block party Aug. 3 where the vendors will be hyperlocal and the performers will include more than a dozen artists who’ve been on the San Francisco party scene for years.
LoveFest is where the pernicious narrative about San Francisco’s decline will be broken for good, its creators say. “We’re ending the doom loop, on Larkin Street on Aug. 3,” Swig said. “We’re having a ceremony.”
Correction: A photo caption incorrectly misidentified DJ Steve Fabus.