A friend who’s lived in San Francisco’s North Beach since, well, the old days, called me last night all in a swivet. She’d stopped in at Tosca, a longtime neighborhood hangout especially for arty types, which had just been re-opened after new owners from New York took over and made some changes.
She was fine with the modest décor upgrades, fine with the addition of real food, but she was outraged that the signature House Cappuchino, featuring chocolate, booze and no coffee, had doubled in price, from $6 to $12. Yes, yes, all the ingredients are now listed with high-end brand names, but still…who needs a $12 drink? So much for hanging out at Tosca with the old crowd.
It’s just one more example of the “there goes the neighborhood” phenomenon, in which big money, usually from out of town, comes in and destroys cities and their artifacts in order to save them. As the distribution of wealth continues to migrate into dumbbell-shaped graphs, global capital is gobbling up formerly pleasant places to live and turning them into rich-guys’ preserves.
This is not a new story. It’s what ruined Greenwich Village, and indeed most of Manhattan, not to mention a lot of London, and many other places. But the pace at which it’s proceeding, and the number and variety of urban settings which are being cannibalized all over the world are accelerating.
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