The big pay cheques of the tech boom are changing the City by the Bay as Twitter and Google millionaires take over its bohemian haunts. Could this be the end of the city as we know it?
By Zoë Corbyn
The Guardian - February 24, 2014
Poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti came to San Francisco in
1951 because he heard it was a great place to be a bohemian. He settled
in the Italian working-class neighbourhood of North Beach with its
cheap rents and European ambience. And before long he put the city on
the world's counter-cultural map by publishing the work of Beat poets
such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But despite his status as world
and local literary legend, the 94-year-old co-owner of the renowned
City Lights bookshop and publishing house doesn't feel so at home in the
City by the Bay anymore.
He complains of a "soulless group of
people", a "new breed" of men and women too busy with iPhones to "be
here" in the moment, and shiny new Mercedes-Benzs on his street. The
major art galley in central San Francisco
that has shown Ferlinghetti's work for two decades is closing because
it can't afford the new rent. It, along with several other galleries,
will make way for a cloud computing startup called MuleSoft
said to have offered to triple the rent. "It is totally shocking to see
Silicon Valley take over the city," says Ferlinghetti, who still rents
in North Beach. "San Francisco is radically changing and we don't know
where it is going to end up."
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