Kansas City a fine rival but nothing beats L.A.

Go ahead, Niners fans. Revel in the moment. It’s been almost 30 years since the 49ers’ last Super Bowl championship.

Add to that, the past few off-seasons have been a carousel of humiliation for the Giants. You know, the team that keeps getting outbid for premier free agents by other Major League Baseball teams? The latest slight came courtesy of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who locked up megastar Shohei Ohtani for $700 million even though the Giants reportedly offered him a virtually identical deal. Retired Giants catcher Buster Posey said he thinks it’s because free-agent players and their wives are scared.

“There is a bit of uneasiness with the city itself, as far as the state of the city, with crime, with drugs,” he told the Athletic. If Posey’s theory is correct, it would not be the first time that Los Angeles has benefited at the expense of San Francisco.

There is an element of karma at play here. In 1870, it was Los Angeles that made outsiders uneasy. Any thought that the two cities might become rivals was laughable. San Francisco was the financial, cultural and geopolitical capital of California, its 149,473 souls dwarfed Los Angeles’ 5,728. The Bay Area’s wondrous “Golden Gate” harbor was a magnet for international trade; landlocked Los Angeles had no such deepwater harbor.

Ironically, San Francisco helped fuel Los Angeles’ rise, thanks to a steady pipeline of investment money and the

expansion of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The San Francisco-based railway reached Los Angeles in 1876, opening it to transcontinental travel. Six years later, Harrison Gray Otis and, subsequently, his son-inlaw Harry Chandler took control of the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper was a pulpit from which the men boosted the city’s business profile by condemning San Francisco, where pro-union, “socialist” conditions translated to 30% higher labor costs.

Along these lines, Otis led the charge to create a “free harbor” in Los Angeles. The city did this by annexing San Pedro and lobbying the government to finance the dredging of San Pedro Bay. By the early 20th century, the newly renamed Los Angeles Harbor had become an international seaport, a more convenient option for northbound freighters passing through the soonto-open Panama Canal.

The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake gave Los Angeles another reason to gloat — never mind the 3,000 dead. Instead, implored the Los Angeles Herald, let us “appreciate again the delicious sunshine, the green trees, and the rose-embowered cottages of beautiful Los Angeles,” while embracing all the Northern Californians now fleeing for this “city of refuge.” As hundreds of city blocks smoldered in San Francisco, the Herald was practically forecasting its demise: “This is the longest state in the United States, and one end might be wiped off the map without the other feeling a jar.”

In 1911 — following a decade in which Los Angeles’ population soared 211% compared to San Francisco’s 22% rise — Al and Charles Christie relocated from the East Coast to San Francisco to shoot a movie. Chandler kept tabs on the filmmaking brothers … and the weather. When San Francisco’s skies predictably turned gloomy, Chandler chartered a train for the Christies to come down to sunny Southern California and finish their photoplay.

The Christies were so happy with the arrangement that they built the first studio in Hollywood, soon to be joined by dozens of others.

When the 1920 census figures came out, Los Angeles had finally eclipsed San Francisco’s population — 576,673 to 506,676. When the U.S. Postal Service announced that it was commencing airmail delivery, Chandler quickly organized Western Air Express, preemptively blocking San Francisco from becoming the state’s aviation hub while paving the way for companies like Douglas Aircraft to locate there.

Other industries also flocked to Los Angeles. Besides cheap labor, Chandler and the city’s leaders extolled its reliable supply of water and power, thanks to William Mulholland’s Los Angeles Aqueduct. The coup de grâce was the building of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which secured the city’s bid for the 1932 Olympics and its place on the world stage. Who was laughing now? In the battle for California supremacy, Los Angeles had won.

Or had it? If one measures a city’s accomplishments by its progressive policies, San Francisco has Los Angeles beat. San Francisco emerged as a trailblazer for gay and civil rights, a stark contrast to the racial unrest that has defined Los Angeles over the decades, from the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, the Watts uprising of 1965 to the Rodney King Riots of 1992. And while the City of Angels allowed itself to be paved over by freeways, San Francisco was the first U.S. city to stage an organized Freeway Revolt. Citizens shut down proposed routes like the Golden Gate Freeway to preserve their neighborhoods. Lately, though, such quality-of-life issues have bumped against San Francisco’s high tolerance for body autonomy, contributing to an epidemic of open drug use that has famously turned away people and businesses (just ask Posey).

But sports fans have long known that their team’s fortunes can change on a dime, similar to the trajectories of the host cities themselves. A Google search of “San Francisco versus Los Angeles” yields over 1 billion results expounding on the virtues of one city over the other, with no clear winner. If the score hasn’t been settled by now, perhaps both cities should simply embrace their roles as “unrivals.”