1997 S.F. resident wouldn’t recognize it today
What if Washington Irving’s classic “Rip Van Winkle” story were set in San Francisco in our times? Everybody knows the tale — a man is asleep for 20 years and wakes to find a whole new world.
If he fell asleep in the first week of December 1997, he’d awaken today to see an entirely different world.
In only 20 years, the way we live is very different. And so is San Francisco.
There was no Facebook back then, no LinkedIn, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Spotify, no smartphones. Nobody took selfies in 1997. Polaroid cameras and One-Hour Photo counters still flourished.
Funky-looking vehicles pulled up at construction sites and factories at lunch hour, selling sandwiches and snacks. Patrons called them “roach coaches.” Now they are fancy and colorful food trucks.
It was cool to rent a movie for the night in 1997, and video stores were social centers where people met up with their neighbors and traded local gossip.
In the summer of 1997, Reed Hastings and software guru Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix. According to company lore, they got the idea while commuting between Sunnyvale and Santa Cruz.
Their idea went a long way to killing off video stores. Who knew?
Most of the people who developed the new high-tech world were only kids in 1997. Mark Zuckerberg was 13 years old and living with his parents in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. His father was a dentist, and young Mark, who had learned coding, was working on a family messaging service he called “Zucknet.”
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Craig Newmark, a newcomer to San Francisco, had just started an event-listing service he called “Craigslist.”
San Francisco was going through a minitech boom in 1997, only it was centered on an area near South Park, in old warehouses. They called it “Multimedia Gulch.”
The buzz back then was all about startup companies like Pets.com, which was going to make a killing selling pet food over the Internet, and Webvan.com, a billion-dollar grocery delivery outfit.
It was the future, they said. The Internet was new, but by 1997, one-third of the people in America had computers at home.
The dot-com boom went bust not long after the turn of the 21st century. Nobody was too sorry. As usual, old-time San Franciscans didn’t like change.
But we hadn’t seen anything yet. Back in 1997, there was no Uber, no Lyft, no tech company buses rumbling through the streets, no bike-rental racks in every neighborhood.
According to a poll conducted for the Bay Area Council at the end of 1997, the biggest problems were traffic and transportation. Crime was No. 2 in the poll. Crowding and overpopulation ranked fifth. In San Francisco, 7 percent of those polled thought crowding and overpopulation were serious problems.
Twenty years later, traffic remains a serious problem. And no wonder. According to the latest estimate, there are now 870,887 San Franciscans, the largest population in the city’s history, over 108,000 more than the city’s population in 1997.
The city looks different, as well. Twenty years ago, the biggest thing south of Mission Street was the 460-foottall Pacific Telephone Building. Salesforce.com did not exist in 1997, let alone the 1,000-foot-tall Salesforce Tower, which the company founded in a Telegraph Hill apartment in 1999 will soon call home.
The eastern half of the Bay Bridge was an outmoded and dangerous cantilever bridge, Mission Bay was a dusty wasteland, and hardly anyone had heard of Dogpatch. You could buy a house there for a song, too — well under the $260,000 median price for Bay Area homes.
The biggest news in the first week of December 1997 was that Eddie DeBartolo had stepped down as president of the 49ers after a bribery scandal. However, it was said that the problems would not stop the development of a $535 million shopping center and stadium at Candlestick Point.
That turned out to be only a dream.
Twenty years later, Candlestick Park is just a memory, and the 49ers are in Santa Clara. In San Francisco, the dot-com bust has turned into a tech boom, and San Francisco has more billionaires — and more homeless people — than ever before.
It’s a new world.