San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
City isn’t the same without tourists — and all their cash
Here we are in mid-July, the busiest month of the year for tourism in San Francisco, and there’s hardly a tourist in sight.
And San Francisco without tourists is like a summer without fog. It may be nice, but it’s not San Francisco.
I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the tourists, and for more reasons than one. Tourism is our biggest industry, and the coronavirus pandemic has caused it to collapse. Not just here, but everywhere. Back in the day when San Francisco was a manufacturing city, a headquarters city and a seaport, tourism was nice, like the whipped cream on top of the St. Honore cake from the Victoria Bakery in North Beach. But tourism became our bread and butter — until this year.
They call economics the dismal science and the economic news about tourism in San Francisco is dismal indeed.
In the last week of February, just before the industry collapsed, San Francisco Travel, the city’s tourist agency, announced the results from the 2019 tourist season. There were 26.2 million visitors last year and they generated $10.2 billion in spending, accounted for 86,111 jobs, and brought in $819.7 million to the city in taxes and fees. The city’s hotels were 82.9% full with an average room rent of $276.92 a night.
On the other hand, bigtime tourism comes with a price. Tourists crowd all the best places in the city, produce traffic jams of slowmoving cars, have turned the cable cars into a Disneyland ride, and filled the streets with gawkers, staring at cell phones and looking at locals like you and I as if we were animals in the zoo.
It seemed, sometimes, as if we had sold the city’s charm for money. It was a bit like prostitution. That was the view of the late, great Chronicle columnist Charles McCabe.
We felt superior to tourists, and secretly delighted when asked for assistance. “Can you tell me please, how much it costs to ride on the trolley car?” one nice lady asked me on Powell Street. “These are not trolleys, madam, but cable cars,” I said with the arch knowledge of a San Franciscan. But then my heart softened and I told her how she could buy a discount pass and save money.
San Franciscans are pleased when tourists tell them how much they like the city. It’s nice to know people want to take a vacation in your hometown. Some of us miss that bit of praise. It made us feel good to be a San Franciscan.
I miss that feeling. But most of all, I miss the people. I miss the crowds at the cable car turntable at Powell and Market. I miss the slap and rattle of the cable under the street as well, especially at Powell and Geary where the cable runs close to the surface like a steel snake.
The streets around Union Square are nearly empty, as if they were abandoned because of a plague. Which is close to the truth.
I walked through Chinatown. Grant Avenue was as empty as I have ever seen it. There were red lanterns spanning the street, and about half the souvenir shops were open. You can tell tourists when you see them. I counted four between Pine Street and Broadway.
I went on to Fisherman’s Wharf. There wasn’t a soul at the crab stands and restaurants at the heart of the wharf on Taylor Street. No pots of boiling hot water to steam crabs. There were no street musicians either, no oldtime Muni streetcars, no jugglers, no man painted all in silver standing like a statue.
The Bushman, who hides in some foliage and jumps out to scare tourists, was nowhere to be seen. I always thought he was a pain in the neck, but now that he’s gone, I miss him.
I always thought you had to be nuts to buy one of those Alcatraz Psycho Ward Tshirts, but they added a certain gaudiness to the scene, and I miss them.
It was like a carnival, a bit flashy, a bit tawdry, a tourist trap with a chorus of sea lions and cable car bells. Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen, it’s San Francisco, nothing like it in the world.
Last year 18 million people walked by the corner of Jefferson and Taylor streets. At lunchtime on a July Wednesday, there was nobody at all.
Maybe next year.