"I'm proud to have been a Yankee. But I have found more happiness and contentment since I came back home to San Francisco than any man has a right to deserve. This is the friendliest city in the world." - "Joltin'" Joe DiMaggio
Welcome to SFist. We're here to sing the praises of one of the fairest ladies in the world, beautiful San Francisco. Ours is a city of sun and fog, food and drink, poverty and riches, urbanity and parochialism - the blessed terminus of a hilly penninsula which protects the Bay to the east from the Pacific to the west. We are truly the Golden Gate.
While we might not be as big as our friends in New York, Chicago or LA, we don't hesitate to say that pound-for-pound we're one of the best boxers around. More than our fair share of writers, artists, sportsmen, musicians, scientists and philosophers have called the Bay Area home - or wish they did. What we lack in size we make up for in sheer beauty and vitality. People don't come here to become famous, but they do come, because The City offers something more lasting than fame. We offer a friendly face and a warm greeting, a slap on the back and a cold beer with your calamari, an enthusiasm for both genius and the absurd.
The SFist team is so happy to bring you this journal and digest of the Bay Area. We just love this place so much we had to explore it, read about it, photograph it and finally write it all down for those lucky enough to live here and smart enough to come visit. News, food, sports, art, music and literature will all be covered with a local eye and a cosmopolitan wit. We hope to be a valuable member of the community and a place where you can visit for a few minutes every day for news, ideas and interaction. Here's to you, San Francisco - may you always be the most magical of American cities!
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This is certainly one of the most astutely edited publications of its kind. This editor must have it in his genes!
Mom! You're embarrassing me.
Has anybody written the Presidio Trust board asking them to stop the plan to make it into Disneyland North? See SFGate at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/09/MNVA10QGPG.DTL&hw=presidio&sn=002&sc=402
Here's mine:
From: John Renesch [mailto:john@renesch.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 2:57 PM
To: 'mainpost@presidiotrust.gov'
Cc: 'gavin_newsom@ci.sf.ca.us'
Subject: developing the Presidio
Dear board members of the Presidio Trust:
The current redevelopment plan flies in the face of earlier-promises to the community and, therefore, violates the public trust. A few points:
Most of you made or make your living doing real estate development so your reasoning context is development is a good thing. There are times when development is NOT a good thing and the Presidio is one of those. Getting to financial sustainability doesn’t require making it into a highly congested tourist attraction like Disneyland.
Traffic has already gotten tedious for anyone entering or leaving the Presidio and all the existing renovation isn’t even done yet. Imagine the additional traffic when all the existing buildings are occupied! If you go forward with this plan I can only imagine your next stage of development will be to widen all the roads so more people can get into the Presidio in order to meet retail occupants’ demands for greater egress and ingress (isn’t that what happens in suburbia?).
Personal wealth and power alone should not dictate what is done here, nor should individual egos, which seem to be strongly in play in this plan.
Finally, the same argument for massive development was made when the huge Lucas complex was proposed and the Trust got their way on that one. Most of us have reconciled this gargantuan edifice rationalizing that the worst is done. But, no, here you are again!!
I urge you to return to a sane approach to making the Presidio financially sustainable by 2013, not at the sacrifice of this rare treasure within the city Herb Caen once referred to as “the city that knows how.”
Respectfully submitted,
John Renesch
San Francisco resident