San Diego, Oct. 28.
Some final thoughts on San Diego…
Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with a panhandler. He asked for my name and gave his as “Pothead.” Pothead is mid-40s and mentioned that he’d slept on concrete the night before. This wouldn’t be unusal for many people I see on the streets here in the Gaslamp district, the equivalent of Gastown in Vancouver. Pothead has a quick wit and is pretty knowledgeable. It would seem he’s living on the street as much by choice as circumstance.
Pothead asked me what I thought of San Diego. I said I didn’t find it very interesting as cities go. That got his attention. Pothead is from New York, but he’s a proud San Diegan now. He asked me pointedly what I meant by “not interesting.” I mentioned the lack of diversity, the focus on middle-class tourism, the absence of any cultural interest. To each of these he demanded, “what do you mean by that?” He wanted explicit examples. I summed up by offering San Francisco as a counter example. That hit a nerve. “San Francisco is full of faggots,” he told me. “If that’s what makes a city interesting you can have it.”
I can’t decide how I feel about this city, which, as Pothead informed me, is the eighth largest in the US. Bigger than San Francisco, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Boston, and many others. (This is based on city limits. Pothead and I debated whether this technical definition of a city’s population – under which Vancouver’s would be about 600,000 and Calgary’s over a million – was meaningful. He was adament that if you included suburbs, there would be no end to the limits in places like NYC. I had to accede to that point.)
Like the rest of Southern California, San Diego has lots of indigent people like Pothead. The climate is suitable for a life lived outdoors. It also appears that many of the people here living on the street were drawn here and seduced by the easy living “charm” of Southern California. They came for the beach scene and the good times and never woke up from that dream. They just scaled down their expectations. In any case, they seem less desperate than the street people who live in our northern climate.
The Gaslamp district has elegant old buildings and was once the heart of this city. Now it’s merely the centre of the city’s tourism/entertainment district. At ground level, those beautiful buildings all have bars and restaurants open to the street. Most are filled with TV screens hanging from ceilings and walls. And playing on TV? NFL football and the baseball World Series, of course. Pro sports is the glue that binds this country together. Trying to find a bar for a beer and maybe some conversation with locals without being assaulted by big screen sports is impossible here. This city has very little urban sophistication. It’s too easy-going, friendly and (I have to say it) immature for that kind of coolness. But there’s not a lot wrong with that.
Just for the record, NYC does not have suburbs that go on forever! The metropolitan area is a clearly defined area of about 20 million. To the north there are the Catskill mountains, to the west there are the Poconos mountains, to the east there is the ocean, and to the south there is farmland (New Jersey tomatoes, anyone?)
Yes. But his point was that a city’s population should be taken from it’s civic boundary not from its metro area. I disagree, but I saw his point. NYC was perhaps a bad example in support of that.