San Francisco threw out its wokester mayor, London Breed, in favor of a more moderate alternative, and before that, its literally-Chavista district attorney, Chesa Boudin, raised by Bill Ayers, whose only interest was in prosecuting the police.
But the damage remains, and not just in the city's abundant bums on the street doing drugs.
This is what it's come to:
Look at all of these beautiful Christmas decorations at the Crocker Galleria mall in San Francisco. It’s 4:47 PM and everybody should be shopping and buying Christmas presents for their family, but nobody is in this mall.
— Thomas Hawk (@thomashawk) December 18, 2024
There are only three stores left that are open here.… pic.twitter.com/SvkAK2ImYK
Hawk is a noted photographer who documents just how far San Francisco has fallen since the wokester apocalypse -- bums, drugs, thugs, lowlife, sloth of government.
But he has lived there for years, and knows how beautiful it used to be. It was full of life, full of people, full of every abundance; its restaurants, for one, the greatest in the country. I lived there when it was good.
Which is why this scenery from the Crocker Galleria is so disturbing -- once upon a time it was full of people, full of wonderful mall stores I admit I probably blew a paycheck or two on.
It's located in the glitteriest part of the downtown financial district at One Montgomery Tower, or 50 Post Street, at the edge of the revitalized Gold Rush-era Crocker Bank building where guys like Mark Twain, Jack London, and William T. Sherman used to hang out.
In 1982, it was reborn into an Italian-style glass-domed galleria modeled on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. It housed 62 trendy high-end mall shops and some in the middle range. I was in my 20s at the time and worked at Brooks Brothers down the street. I recall going to the Companie Express and The Limited stores there, buying makeup some place there, too, and ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the Ralph Lauren store, only able to buy on sale. I know there were others I'd go to, too, and recall meeting intriguing people for lunch at the sleek restaurants on the roof.
Today, it's three eateries and someone who does beekeeping on the roof, amid all that grandeur and holiday decor (which must have cost a lot). The San Francisco Standard noted that one of the three establishments, the La Luna Cupcake shop, was always closed.
Currently, the Galleria’s only extant businesses are La Luna Cupcakes, Julie’s Kitchen and one of the Bay Area’s 10 locations of Ladle & Leaf. An employee at the latter said business had picked up, referring further inquiries to the corporate office. Ladle & Leaf did not respond to requests for comment by publication time. La Luna Cupcakes was not open at any time The Standard visited.
The pavilion is open until 5 p.m. six days a week, but both fast casual restaurants are only open for lunch on weekdays. So the mall is essentially a nonentity in the late afternoon and on Saturdays, its escalators running all but free of riders barely one block away from bustling Montgomery BART.
Yes, they will claim it was online shopping that did them in. But more likely, it was the presence of bums at the entrance, demanding spare change, going to the bathroom in the walkways, shooting up, pulling their pants down, and assaulting and robbing people. That, along with cops who have been incentivized to avoid any action to restore public order and thus, stay away, and the massive losses stores bear from retail theft is more likely why the galleria in the heart of downtown is now a ghost town.
Characters like Breed (and Gavin Newsom before her, a former San Francisco mayor) love to blame the pandemic and the internet for the demise of this kind of public space, but the ugly reality is, defunding and harassing the cops, taxing businesses up the wazoo, and failing to provide any quality of life for the public over the priorities of the bums and their mighty homeless industrial complex (which the city spends more on than it does the cops) is why you get an end result as sad and dystopian as this.
Breed and others may enjoy saying San Francisco "is back" but this mall scene tells another story. It's the end result of a thousand wokester decisions that have only empowered the NGO class and multiplied the public plagues. Until those problems are addressed, San Francisco isn't ready to have nice things down-culture, like open-air gallerias full of shops and restaurants.
That's a sad picture that wokesterism brought.
Image: Screenshot from Thomas Hawk video, via X
