I MENTIONED LAST WEEK THAT I have begun writing a book about my experiences growing up in the Bay Area. Part of the reason for that decision was that I was recently laid off from the tech company I worked for in San Francisco (they were very good to me in terms of severance, so not to worry.) While losing your job is never a pleasant experience, I realized that maybe I could see my misfortune as an opportunity to tackle the book I had been pondering (but not actually doing anything about) for years.

As a “day job” to keep the rent paid and lights on while I write my book, I recently began driving for one of the car-sharing services that have sprung up in the last couple years. My work takes me to San Francisco most often (that’s where I find the steadiest supply of passengers) and my work there has deepened my love for that fair city.

One of my earliest memories is going with my father and older brother to visit art galleries in San Francisco sometime in the late 1960s (1967, maybe?). The city had a vibrant and varied arts scene in those days. The Beat poets were still more or less in their youth — Allen Ginsberg was still giving readings of his poetry at City Lights Books in North Beach — and galleries both humble and posh dotted the city then as now. My father spent the day explaining the different styles of painting we were seeing. My older brother was quite taken with the flashy “Op art” which was then quite popular, and I was fascinated with the “Photorealist” paintings which were virtually indistinguishable from actual photographs.

San Francisco has changed a lot in the intervening years. The SOMA (“South of Market Street”) neighborhood used to be a much grittier place — I remember my father warning off a bum who had come too close — but also far more blue-collar than it is now. The buildings that are now chic industrial-style loft apartments for young tech workers were then industrial-style industrial buildings, housing numerous small manufacturing concerns, machine shops, and various other businesses of the kind that involve men wearing goggles and shiny flame-resistant clothing and pouring hot metal out of giant, glowing vats amid showers of sparks.

Virtually all those places are gone now. The parts of SOMA near the Transbay Terminal are currently a giant hive of construction activity, and the showers of sparks are now made by welders fastening steel girders together in a forest of enormous skyscrapers going up at a dizzying pace. (Speaking of which, the largest is the Sales Force Tower to house the new headquarters of the company of that name, and my opinion of the architecture is not a complimentary one: the completed building will look amusingly like the sort of “accessory” one can order from the back of certain women’s magazines. The new Transbay Terminal going up nearby is a far more attractive design in my view, and is a vast improvement over its hulking, squalid predecessor that was not exactly mourned when it was demolished five years ago.)

I have traveled through much of the United States and some part of the rest of the world, and I can say that San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities on Earth. Part of it is an accident of geography: it is situated on one of the finest natural harbors in the world, built upon hills that offer wonderful views of that harbor and the ocean to the west, and so on.

Much of San Francisco’s beauty can also be credited to the choices made by a century and a half of architects and city planners. The San Francisco Civic Center, one of the jewels of the Beaux Arts, was built in the early years of the last century, after the 1906 earthquake leveled its predecessor along with much of the rest of the city. Cable cars, perhaps the most beloved public transportation in the world, climb the steep hills like clanking jewel boxes. In a more commercial vein, the Mark Hopkins Hotel retains a certain Clark Gable-era panache and glamour, and Ghirardelli chocolate company offers iconic sweets to hungry tourists.

One thing San Francisco shares with most iconic cities is the close proximity within its boundaries between great wealth and humble poverty. The single-room-occupancy hotels and soup kitchens of the city’s gritty, poverty-beset Tenderloin district are little more than a mile away from the top of Pacific Heights and some of the richest people on Earth, where some of the houses have sold recently for north of $50 million. I think it is good for society when rich and poor literally rub shoulders in the course of living in a city.

When it comes to cities, San Francisco was my first and greatest love. My only significant time away from San Francisco was during my Army tour, and next to my own family, it was what I missed most.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works in San Francisco.

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