Posts Tagged ‘San Francisco hotels’

The Paris of the West. The New Metropolis of Manifest Destiny. The New New York. For a hundred years, if you wanted or needed the sweet thrills of a proper city on the Left Coast, you went to San Francisco. It was a modern, imperial city, and was the largest, most hip, port on the United States Pacific rim. There was New York, Chicago, then San Francisco.

How did the train jump its tracks, then? How did this staunch shipyard stalwart turn into a gentrified dandy? Let’s start with a little jog down memory lane. The city was built in large part thanks to the influx of people and capital from the Gold Rush. They’re called the 49ers for a reason, savvy? This set up the town as a port of call and a banking hub.

It faced the Great Quake of’06 head-on and watched the city burn. But, it rebuilt itself into one of the old financial centers that actually beat back the Stock Market Crash of’29. While the rest of the country was taking shelter from the Dust Bowl, San Francisco was building bridges and buildings galore.

It became one of three primary embarkation spots for boys shipping out to the Pacific theater in WWII. After the war, the city was booming with big bucks and new influx of former service men and laborers. The suburbs expanded, and downtown and the financial district were Manhattanized with a slew of skyscrapers.

What about the crazy gentrification? Why does a one-bedroom set you back $2,000 a month? Take one part development projects and one part booming local economy and you’ve got a recipe for massive gentrification. The influx of nearly 300,000 new residents to a seven-by-seven mile wide peninsula, and you can see how only the very wealthy can afford to live in the City By the Bay. The best most of use can hope for is booking a beautiful little bedroom in a happening San Francisco hotel.

Hurry, baby, get into the swing of Fog City. Book your tickets, scour the San Francisco hotels, and get to the third-most visited tourist destiUS in the US.

As I looked out the window of my fourth-floor hotel room, I couldn’t help but appreciate why I was visiting San Francisco. My friend, Brad, has always had to work hard his whole life. His parents never had that much money and he started working at relatively early age. He worked his way through high school, delivering pizzas and working at the Gap.

On top of all that, he was a soccer player and dabbled in tennis. Somehow, he always managed to make straight A’s. In college, it was the same story. All four years of his undergraduate degree saw him working two part-time jobs on top of his full class load. Brad is the type of guy who has an open heart and likes helping the less fortunate, even if that eats into his work or school schedule.

Appropriately enough, his major was social work. At the ripe old age of 22, he graduated with honors. I remember being flabbergasted by his drive and commitment. As the years went by, though, I could tell his job in social work was wearing him down.

Not long after he had graduated, his sister ended up in the hospital with serious complications. His parents were on a fixed pension and the bills were piling up. When he told me that he was going back to school to become a doctor, I was shocked. It’s not that I didn’t think he could pull it off, mind you. But medical school is a grueling decade of work.

That’s Brad in a nutshell, for you. He never thinks in terms of hard or easy. He just does it. That’s why this trip to San Francisco was so special — because he just finished his first semester in medical school. There are people in our lives that remind us that it’s never too late to take a risk — make sure you make time to celebrate them.

If you find yourself in the City By the Bay, you should have a plethora of San Francisco hotels to choose from.