The liminal, exciting potential of San Francisco's downtown

"When you're alone and life is making you lonely/ you can always go downtown" isn't exactly true these days

I once interviewed for what would have been a fabulous job at a nationally known publication, the kind of job where I could have been able to coast on editorial initiatives and namedrop the place for the rest of my media career. The interview was mostly a disaster and I can pinpoint the minute I talked myself out of the job.

The big boss said, "My problem right now is our business tech coverage isn't good. We need to get really sexy coverage of Google and Apple. How would you do that?"

Since I am an idiot with no career-preservation instincts, I replied, "I wouldn't. You're getting smoked by other publications because they've got deep and well-sourced coverage, which takes years to develop. Let 'em have it. I think you've got a whole opportunity to define and own a market you're not covering at all now."

I ignored the notable lack of interest from the big boss and plowed on: "The San Francisco Bay Area is the epicenter of some of the most influential retail brands and trends of the last forty years: the Gap, Esprit, Restoration Hardware, Williams-Sonoma, Athleta, Title9 Sports, Smith and Hawken, Keen footwear, the North Face, Timbuk2. And that's not even including the DTC brands like Cuyana or American Giant or Everlane. 

"What I think we could do with this is go deep -- what are the factors that let these businesses identify what people want? Why are we so good at lifestyle stuff? What local businesses have been built around that? Nobody is looking at that."

Artistic recreation of how my answer landed.

My pitch failed to impress, I remain in tech journalism, and I remain convinced there's room in the media for a good look at why this particular region continues to identify and spawn consumer trends that eventually define national or global consumer behavior. 

The Bay Area had its own cultural-commercial successes rising in parallel with the companies that made Silicon Valley: Williams-Sonoma was founded in 1956, the same year Shockley Semiconductor Labs was founded; Esprit was founded in 1968, the same year as Intel; and the Gap was founded in 1969,  the same year the Stanford Research Institute became one of the four nodes of ARPANET. 

You can see where we’re going here, right?

By the 21st century, the parallel tracks were a little more linked. Without the World Wide Web, the rise of San Francisco-based direct-to-consumer (DTC) retail brands like Everlane (founded in 2010), Cuyana (founded in 2011), and American Giant (founded in 2012) wouldn't have been possible -- and these brands arguably formed the basis of a retail aesthetic where the minimalist lines were a direct reflection of two different sensibilities -- a sustainable, ethical, morally uncomplicated ethos of consumption or a uniform that reflects and abets the reality that one is "running survival drills for life under an advanced capitalist economy," as Jia Tolentino once memorably wrote about another DTC brand. Either way, the brands were perfectly positioned to provide a visual representation for an emerging cultural sensibility: hypercompetitive, complex, ecologically precarious, yet … design-y in a certain tasteful way. 

One should not make the mistake of confusing the use of tech in retail as a central pillar of retail and lifestyle, though. There's a wonderful recent article in Retail Dive,  "‘There’s the right home for any brand’: Why retail keeps turning to Los Angeles," which explores how Los Angeles has become the city of choice for launching DTC brands' in-person retail presences, and it comes down to the sui generis nature of Los Angeles as a city. The city of angels has always been more of a collection of culturally distinct villages, and it's not hard for DTCs to find the neighborhood to launch a proof-of-concept store.

All of which brings me back to the reason I began writing this. This weekend, the New York Times ran a piece, "What Comes Next for the Most Empty Downtown in America," asking how San Francisco could possibly survive the emptying out of the tech employees who used to pay $17 a day for their Mixt salads (if their offices didn't have on-site chefs already). This quote stood out:

“Imagine a forest where an entire species suddenly disappears,” said Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies urban real estate. “It disrupts the whole ecosystem and produces a lot of chaos. The same thing is happening in downtowns.”

This is the very point of downtowns and cities. Things change, all the time. New York magazine is running a series called Reread: Real Estate Mania, unearthing old stories about when hipsters discovered neglected brownstones and Soho in the 1970s, the Lower East Side in the 1980s and Williamsburg in the 1990s. It's a wonderful look at how cities are ecosystems and the ones that thrive retain an overall balance, even if the constituent species change over time.

A lot of those influential brands I mentioned are greatly diminished or even gone -- Esprit is operating only in Europe and Asia, Smith and Hawken couldn't scale up and is now found as one of Target's in-house brands, the outdoorsy brands Keen and the North Face departed to Portland and Denver respectively, lured by cheaper operating costs in those hubs of outdoorsy-brand talent.

The point is -- they started here. They all identified an opportunity and found the people to make it happen. Retail, tech, other industry verticals that have aggregations of talent in this region are always reacting to shifts in the ecosystem, then expanding ever outward in response to external conditions.

The NYT article notes near the end, "There’s a more existential question of what the point of a city’s downtown even is." I would bet on the people who live in the Bay Area to figure it out,  then figure out how to sell the answer to the rest of America. They've been doing so for seventy-plus years.

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MODERATELY RELATED: Christopher Moore is a funny author and his 1995 novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, while ostensibly about a fledgling writer who moves to San Francisco and begins a relationship with a vampire, captures the last minutes of the pre-startup city. 

In the book, a vagrant who styles himself The Emporer (in homage to famed San Francisco eccentric Emporer Norton) delivers this wistful quote as he watches bankers rush through downtown:

“They are the fallen gods. The new gods are producers, creators, doers. The new gods are the chinless techno-children who would rather eat white sugar and watch science-fiction films than worry about what shoes they wear. And these poor souls desperately push papers around hoping that a mystical message will appear to save them from the new, awkward, brilliant gods and their silicon-chip reality. Some of them will survive, of course, but most will fall. Uncreative thinking is done better by machines. Poor souls, you can almost hear them sweating.”

Cities are ecosystems and the species are always coping with changes to their habitat.