One of the funniest writers I've ever read and the reason I bought a subscription to The San Francisco Chronicle at the tender age of 17 many years go is Herb Caen (1916-1997) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_Caen.
His column was an almost daily rapid fire barrage of witticisms and insight into one of my many homes SF.
And he gave The City one of its most well-known nicknames – "Baghdad-by-the-Bay" – in several of his columns. The name caught on and is commonly used as SF's alter-ego. Unfortunately "Crazytown USA" never did...
Baghdad-by-the-Bay is a decidedly 1001 Nights related nickname and from its uses below one can easily still imagine Haroun and co. wandering around Polk and Pine getting into all sorts of Nights-esque problems.
From October 1940:
"The inner excitement of Stockton tunnel, as the jampacked F-cars
wiggle noisily through, autos somehow squeeze past, and school kids run
excitedly along the inside walk; and North Beach, with its 1001
neon-splattered joints alive with the Italian air of garlic and juke-box
wail of American folk songs. . . The dismal reaches of lower Market
after midnight; the city within a city that is the deep Mission
District, and the bittersweet juxtaposition of brusquely modern Aquatic
Park against the fortresslike jumble of red brick where Ghirardelli
makes its chocolate.
The crowded garages and the empty old
buildings above them, the half-filled night clubs and the overfilled
apartment houses, the saloons in the skies and the families huddled in
the basements, the Third Street panhandlers begging for handouts in
front of pawnshops filled with treasured trinkets, the great bridges and
the rattletrap streetcars, the traffic that keeps moving although it
has no place to go, the thousands of newcomers glorying in the sights
and sounds of the city they've suddenly decided to love, instead of
leave.
...This is Baghdad-by-the-Bay!"
"Hello, Visitors!
By Herb Caen
Greetings and welcome to San Francisco, city of the world, worlds
within a city, forty-nine square miles of ups and downs, ins and outs,
and going around in circles, most of them dizzy. A small “d” democratic
city run by big-buck conservatives, a place where the winds of freedom
will blow your mind and your hat off, where eccentricity is the norm and
sentimentality the ultimate cynicism. Cable cars and conventions,
boosterism living uncomfortably with sophistication, a built-in smugness
announcing simply that we are simply the best. The only city better
than San Francisco today was San Francisco yesterday–maybe. Remember,
visitors, that you are lucky to be here. Have fun. Spend money. Marvel
at our giddy combination of Kookville and High Kultur, busyness and
booziness, millionaires stepping daintily over passed-out winos,
hot-pantzed ladies of the night throwing themselves at your passing car.
Enjoy yourselves, but don’t stay too long. Parking is such street
sorrow.
Years ago, this wide-eyed kid from Sacramento dubbed it
Baghdad-by-the-Bay, a storybook city of spires and minarets, gay banners
fluttering in the breeze. A viewtiful city, he called it, a
Saroyanesque pastiche of lovable gamblers and boozy bohemians spouting
half-aphorisms in saloons run by patrician publicans. The most beautiful
bay in the world–only superlatives were accepted–was breasted by
ferries that looked like Victorian mansions with sidewheels. Then came
the greatest bridges in the world–“the car-strangled spanner” of the bay
and Joe Strauss’s suspenseful “bridge that couldn’t be built.” We
looked around at the wonderful, funderful city and we were proud to be
San Franciscans, the envy of all.
San Francisco, Queen City of the Pacific (the title was once
non-ironic), gleaming jewel of the West Coast, surrounded on three sides
by water and on the fourth by Republican reality. Occasionally a
Republican mayor sneaks in, but it is essentially a city that votes the
straight Demo ticket. I don’t even know how they get people to run for
mayor: who wants to be Chief Kook of Kookville? We have a city father
who is an unmarried mother of two and a gay seat on the Board of Supes,
as befits the new demographics. San Francisco has a large gay
population, and it keeps increasing, although exactly how gays multiply
has not been explained. Nothing is ever explained in San Francisco.
“The city that was never a town.” There’s a thought that appeals to
San Franciscans. Will Rogers may or may not have said it, but the phrase
does conjure up a flash of the crazed and crazy place that was born in a
Gold Rush and grew up overnight to become a fabled city. Tip to
visiting journalists: “The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer in
San Francisco” was one of the best lines Mark Twain never wrote, but
who cares. Whoever said it was accurate enough.
Welcome visitors, to a city as confusing as the Democratic party. If
you drive, don’t drink, but the driving will drive you to drink. We are
casual about street signs, but you might find one if you look hard
enough. Directions? Forget it, and don’t ask whatever looks like a
resident. He won’t know either. If you keep going on a one-way street,
you will soon come to another one-way street with traffic coming right
at you. That’s what makes us colorful and our insurance rates the
highest. Don’t worry about traffic lights. Green and red both mean go
like hell; in fact you cross on the green at your own risk. Another tip:
No Parking Any Time means park any time, usually on the sidewalk and
sometimes on a pedestrian. There are a lot of tow-away zones, so check
the signs. It is maddening to pay $60 to ransom your car from a towing
company whose slogan is “Discover San Francisco”.
San Francisco, a city for all seasons (sometimes four in one day) and
various reasons. A city that thinks nothing of spending $60 million to
rebuild a cable car system that was obsolete a century ago and even less
of letting drunks lie on the street as long as they aren’t in the way
of the cables; “a sociological, not a police problem,” unquote. A city
of soup kitchens and two thousand restaurants, some of them excellent
and most of them crowded. A place where whites are a minority and “the
largest Chinatown outside of the Orient” is no longer large enough. The
mayor and both congressmen are Jewish women; do we need a Yenta Control
Board?
So welcome, dear visitors, to Crazytown USA. You will either be crazy
about it or become as crazy as the rest of us. Either way, may you all
return safely to your funny country, that large land mass slightly to
the right of Baghdad-by-the-Bay."
