[the Misanthropist]

As much as I love downtown SF as it is now I wish some of those neo-Gothic and Italianate buildings had survived.

It's also interesting how the mainstream ethos of the city has changed. That looked very much like a city at work, and one full of churches, patriotic parades and vigilante committees, while it now projects itself as a hedonistic city and a militantly secular, politically radical one. I guess that could be said of any city to a certain extent, but it's particularly noticeable in San Francisco's case.