SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
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San Francisco, 2018
The bright California morning sun lit up an azure sky on a typical San Francisco weekday morning late one recent January as dozens of ferryboats came and went from the city’s famous Embarcadero. A chill in the air proved just enough to require light coats and jackets. The streams of commuters disgorged by the boats perhaps sported fewer neckties than their counterparts back east trekking through Manhattan’s Grand Central Station that morning. They nonetheless moved with no less purpose into the surrounding forest of Financial Center office towers. A main branch of streaming humanity flowed up Market Street, thinning out block by block as a handful peeled off into this or that workplace lobby. Just past Freemont Street, the determined calm of commuters making their morning journeys crumbled. A beefy bald man just past his prime was walking against the flow in a jacket pockmarked by union insignia. He shouted at the top of his lungs for “millennial scum” to return home. This was “our city,” he bellowed. “You rich leeches, get the F@#% out of our town.” Suddenly, California didn’t seem quite so mellow. So this is what Silicon Valley has done to The City. San Francisco has been a quirky place ever since the famous California Gold Rush that passed through its docks. The city always seemed to have space
for eccentricity and misfortune. It was a working-class town for much of its existence, as all ports are. The views were more spectacular, the weather more benign, perhaps; but life was life. The Tenderloin District south of Union Square could hold its own with the Bowery back in New York for down-on-their-luck troubadours and grit. As in Manhattan, those who have, passed in close proximity to those who have not. This was just the way of the world in a town dominated by commerce and waterfront. The unions represented on the shouter’s jacket told as much about the city’s history as the bankers and corporate lawyers gathering a few hours later over lunch at Nob Hill’s Pacific Union Club. San Francisco has been an immigrant haven (though survival for many new arrivals, especially the Italians and Chinese, required accommodation to native bigotry). American blacks were never particularly welcome, though they too found ways to survive. Gays famously came to town, especially following America’s wars in the Pacific as the Navy and other armed forces discharged those caught in the closet at the first port on national shores. San Francisco was the sort of town that anyone could claim as home. The cyber revolution changed all of this. Suddenly, people who thought themselves
