San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears
is said to be seen in San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city and possess
all the attractions of the next world.

We bore round the point toward the old anchoring ground of the hide ships, and there, covering the sand hills and the valleys... flickering all over with the lamps of its streets and houses, lay a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. The dock into which we drew, and the streets about it, were densely crowded with express wagons and handcarts... Though this crowd I made my way, along the well-built and well-light streets, as alive as by day, where boys in high-keyed voices where already crying the latest New York papers. When I awoke in the morning, and looked from my windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses, towers, and steeples; its courthouses, theaters, and hospitals, its daily journals, its well-filled learned professions, its fortresses and lighthouses; its wharves and harbor... when I saw all these things, and reflected on what I once saw here, and what now surrounded me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at all, or the genuineness of anything.

The old San Francisco is under attack to the point where it's disappearing

Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

It’s like these mostly Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics who worked construction, on the docks, and in the police and fire departments never existed, were never part of the scene. In modern San Francisco’s self-conception, there were the Native Americans who had the land stolen out from under them—then fast-forward to the hippies, the gays, the hipsters, the techies, and the oligarchs. American California isn’t merely gone; it never was.

San Francisco is terrifying. And it’s hilarious to me because the business community there wants to put lipstick on a pig. They want to put out this $4 million ad campaign pretending as though everything in San Francisco is all hunky-dory. It’s not hunky-dory. San Francisco is a nightmare.

Usually no one sees the city of his birth until he leaves and then returns to it with new eyes, but, ridiculously proud of my brand-new press badge, I was discovering San Francisco as though it were a strange city. I began to realize the city's many hills, as if they had been erected only last month. You go up and down those hills by cable car or auto, and a dozen times a day you catch your breath in the suddenness of beautiful vistas—water, ships, wooded hills across the bay . . . and sea gulls, no matter where the neighborhood, never once letting you forget the nearness of the ocean. They really dominated the Embarcadero, that long stretch of San Francisco's beautiful harbor. On one side were brine-encrusted piers, their pilings creaking against the sides of ships with exciting cargoes from all parts of the world. Across the way were shabby marine stores, pawnshops, tattoo parlors, bedraggled flophouses, and seedy bars. The constant calling of the sea gulls often had to compete with the sirens of police cars. <small>pp. 112–113</small>

They’ve vanished, we’ve managed to get ahold of them and then we spoke to them wanting some answers and they vanished into thin air

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

San Francisco, I believe, has the most disagreeable climate and locality of any city on the globe. If the winter be not unusually wet, there is some delightful weather to be enjoyed. If it be, you are flooded, and the rainy season closes to give place to what is miscalled summer — a season so cold that you require more clothing than you did in January; so damp with fogs and mists that you are penetrated to the very marrow; so windy that if you are abroad in the afternoon it is a continual struggle. Your eyes are blinded, your teeth set on edge, and your whole person made so uncomfortable by the sand that has insinuated itself through your clothing, that you could not conceive it possible to feel a sensation of comfort short of a warm bath and shower. . . . What sort of end the unfortunates, who spend their lives there, can expect under such circumstances, one does not easily foresee.

It had been the winter of 1835-6 that the ship, Alert, in her voyage for hides on the remote and almost unknown coast of California, floated into the vast solitude of the bay of San Francisco. All around was the stillness of nature. One vessel, a Russian, lay at anchor there, but during our whole stay not a sail came or went. Our trade was with remote missions, which sent hides to us in launches manned by their Indians... Over a region far beyond our sight there was no other human habitations, expect that an enterprising Yankee, years in advance of his time, had put up, on the rising ground above the landing, a shanty of rough boards, where he carried on a very small retail trade between the hide ships and the Indians. On the evening of Saturday, the thirteenth of August, 1859 (I again sailed into) the entrance to San Francisco, (now) the great center of worldwide commerce.