2012-09-27
“San Francisco Is America’s Best City in 2012”
As long as chilly weather, walking uphill, and really expensive real estate don’t turn you off, San Francisco has no shortage of positive qualities. Though numbering fewer than a million people, this coastal city packs in so much—from world-class restaurants and museums to community fairs and music festivals, a large educated class, and an improving economy—that many proud San Franciscans will tell you that its finish at the top of Businessweek.com’s 2012 best cities ranking is well-earned.
“World class restaurants and museums?” [Citation needed]
Well, ok, I’m not really qualified to judge restaurants (although I will note I’ve started caring more about food since I moved here), but world class museums? No. SFMOMA’s not bad, and it may have a great collection, but its current home is relatively tiny and it can’t host the sort of exhibitions that MOMA or Tate Modern can. The de Young is a baffling grab-bag of western hemisphere cultural artefacts, American painting, and some modern art (with an annoying habit of concentrating on cash-cow impressionist exhibitions), while the Museum of the Legion of Honor is also tiny. The Exploratorium isn’t a bad hands-on museum, and the California Academy of Sciences is an adequate natural history museum, but I wouldn’t describe either as world class.
I will grant that the two Golden Gate Park museums do have wonderful buildings.
We looked at … educational attributes (public school performance, the number of colleges, and rate of graduate-degree holders)
Ah, so the fact that the state schools suck in the city can be outweighed by all those Google and Facebook PhD holders who commute down to the Valley and the fact that there’s a couple of universities here. Right.
Major professional league and minor league teams, as well as U.S.-based teams belonging to international leagues in each city were included.
What.
There’s no agreeing on which is the “best” city for you to live in. For that, family connections, occupation, lifestyle, and perhaps a lifelong devotion to a doomed sports team all come into play.
That sentence was going so well, until the final stanza. What.
There’s also the question that if there’s no agreeing, what are you doing publishing such a list? Oh, except for the pageviews from commentary such as this. Oops.
That, along with sheer breathtaking views, attracts about 129,000 tourists every day, according to the San Francisco Travel Association.
Given that London attracts about a third of a million, I’ll grant that that’s an impressive per capita ratio of tourists to locals. Let’s just hope they keep to Union Square and Fisherman’s Wharf, eh?
While cultural institutions such as the de Young Museum may house famous works
[Citation needed].
When I went looking for a list of famous works, I found a site that listed five paintings by American artists. Would it be unfair to use the word “parochial”?
As the city has grown wealthier, it has lost some of its legendary grit. Yet it has one of the largest U.S. populations of homeless people.
At least that factoid’s true.
2012-03-23
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Windswept, designed by Charles Sowers Studios, is a wind-driven kinetic facade that transforms a blank wall into an observational instrument that reveals the complex interactions between wind and environment. The design consists of 612 freely-rotating directional arrows, which serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon.
I think I’ll have to meander up the hill to have a look at this one. (Photographs: Bruce Damonte.)
2011-05-09
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The entrance to the NY Transit Exhibition, New York, 1976. The exhibition eventually became a permanent museum.
I love this (sadly no longer extant) signage. So simple, so fantastic.
Photograph: George Cuhaj, via nyscubway.org.
2011-01-06
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Dulwich: a small but perfectly formed gallery, a story at the Telegraph.
One thing I’m very pleased I got around to doing before I left London was pay a visit to Dulwich. As the article says,
Soane built an entirely new brick gallery and mausoleum, which opened to the public in 1817 (using brick rather than marble kept down costs). The elegant structure, featuring a sequence of five impressive display rooms awash with daylight, is often cited as the first purpose-built art gallery in the world. It continues to inspire museum-designers today.
If you’re in or near London, the place is well worth a visit. Dulwich itself is interestingly nice, too; a sort of mirror image of Hampstead, in some ways.
2010-10-19
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An Exploratorium sign at the back of a parking lot between the two piers needs only a 7-foot metal “O” to be complete. Photo: Lea Suzuki.
The tugboats are moving, the dredges are working, and today Exploratorium officials will host a groundbreaking ceremony on a $300 million project that will transform two huge piers on the Embarcadero into a new home for the hands-on science museum.
