the other day i argued with jason and jolie about san francisco being a small city. their conjecture was the inter-connectedness of everyone they know. i countered with the theory that to them the clubbing/bar-hopping gay community might be small but that doesn’t make san francisco small. after all, gay is not the whole city (current weekend of pride aside).
today however i realized that the asian boy with the motorcycle helmet who is frequently to be found sitting in my library is the same one who i often see driving past me in the morning on his bike when i am walking to the bus stop up the street.
which is not to say that the richmond district or USF are the whole city. but perhaps i need to give more credence to this small city theory. or at least the group dynamics which make it up.
I think you’ve hit on something but then missed it. The thing which is neat about San Francisco is that it has real communities in it. You see that boy all the time because he either lives/works/ or goes to school in your neighboorhood. I can tell you that I’ve never seen him in my life and with the in city population of 800,000 people probably never will. However, I see people who live in my neighboorhood all the time. So no, the city is not small, it’s just that it’s layout (really hilly and valleyey) and culture promote bouroughs and districts and sub-communities. This whole community thing, for myself at least, is totally new and wonderful. Growing up in the burbs where everyone drives everywhere (Hey, wanna go to a movie? Sure, we’ll just drive over to 680 to head up to the Brendan) because of the distances between things, sequesters people from each other. You can’t really notice a guy you see all the time as he flies by at 65, and if you did, you wouldn’t have the option of having a conversation with him. Because of this, I’ve never known my neighboors, or felt like I was part of a community. Now I do. And it rocks.
wow, i totally disagree with you. there are real communities in the suburbs too. people you work with, go to school with, see at the grocery store. and how could you never know your neighbors in the suburbs? i know none of my neighbors in the city and all of them in the suburbs. also, when you commute to a job every day from the suburbs you can get to recognize other commuters on the freeway. point is: there are communities everywhere.
i had a community in the suburbs, which was you guys, and i got that from school. so yeah, people there form communities in school or at work, and some do get to know their neighbors well enough for a neighbor community feeling (see kim’s experience growing up) although i didn’t have that. but i think sf offers more opportunities for random communities, because of the forced intimacy of public transit and because of, as gene says, the city layout, and because one does tend to walk to more places and therefore has more chance to talk to people. i meet new people on the street in sf whereas that never happened to me in phill because i never had a reason to be out on the street and neither did most other people.
you should predicate your comments based on the fact that you’re upper middle class. because certainly a lot of people take public tansit in the suburbs and a lot of people walk places. not us, admittedly, because we all had cars.
you had a perfectly fine neighbor community. you know the neighbors next door with the kids, the dog across the street, ian, that other next door neighbor boy you had, etc. wow, even i have a sense of community in your neighborhood. you walk the dog and meet other dog walkers in your suburb community, right? so you are out about walking?
in conclusion though i will rescind my previous blog statement and say that i think perhaps it would be more accurate to claim that the city is full of coincidences than that it is small. coincidences are more happenstance and amelie-like.
that’s true, my mom meets people with the dog and is friends with some of the neighbors. maybe i just like the city better and so everything seems more exciting when it happens here.
The city is small. Period. New York has 8 million, Los Angeles has 3.6, Chicago has 3 million–by comparison, we are tiny. We are less populous than San Antonio, Detroit and Indianapolis. We are only as big as Santa Ana and Long Beach put together. Plus, we are denser than everyone but New York. The city is small and we’re all up on’s. Though I still don’t get to meet new people on the street. I’m jealous.
http://www.demographia.com/db-uscity98.htm
Here’s a statistic I heard on NY1 last night. There are currently 1 million students enrolled in the public school system in NYC (highschool and below). That’s more than the entire population of SF. As for the forced intimacy argument, I feel everything but neighborly when I’m crammed into a subway car at commute time like a can of sardines.