Views of "downtown" San Francisco

Several times over the years people here in France have asked me how big a city San Francisco is when they found out I used to live there. When I tell them, they are surprised. "Only 800,000 people?" is the reaction. SF is so well known that people assume it is a lot bigger than it actually is. On the list of the biggest cities in the U.S. by population, SF is only no. 13. And it's not a capital of a state or country; it's basically a provincial city. But it's a spectacularly scenic one... when the sun is shining.

The land area occupied by Paris is 105 km² (just over 40 mi²). The land area covered by SF is 120 km² (47 mi²). So there's not much difference between them, area-wise. But the population of Paris is about 2.2 million. The population density of Paris is nearly 22,000 people per sq. km. Of SF, it's 7,300. So Paris is very crowded by SF standards. The atmosphere is totally different. In SF, 60% of the land is given over to single-family houses. Not in Paris! It's all apartment buildings.

These are again 20 year-old-views of "downtown" San Francisco. I took the photos on Dec. 31, 1998, with my first digital camera. Again, you can see how nice the SF weather can be in wintertime. It basically never snows there, and the temperature very seldom goes down to freezing. That only happened once during the 17 or 18 years that Walt and I lived there. A lot of big outdoor plants were killed. We couldn't get our apartment warmer that 55ºF for several days. No insulation!

These weren't the views we saw from our house in SF. We were on the south slope of the hill I was standing on when I took the photos. I was looking north from the other side of the hill called Diamond Heights, about a kilometer from our house. I was on Beacon Street, not far off Diamond Street,  in an area called Billy Goat Hill. By the way, SF doesn't have much wintertime weather, and it doesn't have much summertime weather here. The temperature basically stays between 5º and 15ºC year-round. That's between 40º and 70ºF. There are very few cold days and very few hot days. We never had air-conditioning in any place we lived out there. But our heat would come on every morning, even in summertime, and even with the thermostat set at just 65ºF. The whoosh of the furnace coming on (it was forced-air heat) in our house on Congo Street served as my alarm clock.