STORIES BY Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Sara Jaffe, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, Kevin Keating, Kevin Killian, Klipschutz, David Plumb, Lisa Rapoport, Michael Rawlins, James Tracy, Derek White, Maw Shein Win, A.D. Winans, & Sonia Worthy.

OK, so I was a couple of years too late. I’d spent the official Summer of Love on the east coast, and when I finally got to San Francisco all the real hippies had moved to communes in the country and Haight Street had been taken over by speed freaks and dealers.

It was a crisp, clear summer day in the old North Beach Italian part of town. I was taking a brisk stroll up Grant Avenue when I decided to make my way inside the Coffee Gallery, once the kingpin gathering place of the Beat generation. It was like taking a trip back into the past, seeing Bob Kaufman and Jack Micheline sitting at the bar rapping over two large steins of beer.

If it wasn’t for the dogs, Carlos and I would have been good neighbors. He kept three little yippers on his first floor back porch, two doors to my left, during the afternoon. The off ramp from the Bay Bridge swept around Guy Place just above the printing company on Folsom Street; the cars pumped downtown, but if you bent an ear, you could hear and then see the little yipper dogs spinning around their tails on the narrow wood porch, or just standing with their noses pointed and their yappers yipping to beat Jesus. It drove me crazy.

The union hall sits near the corner of Fremont and Harrison Streets on the down slope of the hill running toward the Financial District. One of those neighborhoods on the fulcrum of urban development, teetering between the upscale and derelict. A walk inside the massive hall reveals a space the size of a small basketball

Hurricane Hazel and I arrived in the cool gray city of love on Thanksgiving day, only to find a surly slacker in our bed.

Our host Dirk was a sweet pushover for lost souls–including newcomers like us, you understand–but the Gen-X whiner-dude occupying our room was not only obnoxious, but also singularly unattractive. His poor-me-I’ve-got-a-killer-cold-and-no-money attitude was even snottier than his dripping red nose.

“It’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t.” -Butthole Surfers We jammed together for the occasional moments of clarity. For the most part we sucked, but occasionally we struck a chord that made it all worth it. Since I was still learning the ropes, I had to focus so hard on

Do you ever need to get out of town? Not because you’ve been banished for, say, tying a police officer to a bear and throwing them in a canal, but just because you desperately need to go?

Always a city of transience and rapid transformation, San Francisco is also a city of ceaseless forced entries and evacuations. The eviction notice has been nailed to San Francisco’s door for a very long time. Below, find a street-by-street crash course in the ongoing land wars that have defined the development of Baghdad-by-the-Bay.

It was the end of the summer, and I was forced to admit that I still hadn’t read The Corrections, and might never do so, but had watched Lise Swenson’s Mission Movie almost as many times as I’d left the neighborhood – not counting work and a few desperate heat-wave excursions. A person who spends her days reviewing films like A Cinderella Story and She’s All That is unlikely to look to the cinema for psychic insights and life instruction, but I had to imagine the repeated rewindings meant something.

San Francisco is not known as a city of the cubicle. In a geography defined by beaches and bridges, we pride ourselves on freedom from constraint. We telecommute, we consult, we freelance. We work in lofts. If we must be enclosed, we import pool tables and bean bag chairs to elide the exact nature of our location. We go wireless in cafes.