Second Summer: Local Secrets, Honest Stories & the Real San Francisco
Everyone who visits San Francisco gets sent to the same three places. Everyone who lives here knows those aren't the places.
I moved here from Denver in the summer of 2021, which if you remember the headlines was the worst possible time to move to San Francisco. I landed at SFO in a t-shirt, opened the car door on 9th Avenue and it was fifty-four degrees and blowing sideways, and I stood there thinking the weather app was broken. In my first year I said Frisco out loud in a bar. I went to the Mission at night in August in shorts. I kept a bag in my car. I thought Twin Peaks was where you go for the view.
Everything I actually know about this city I learned by getting it wrong, and from Bev, who lives downstairs. Seventy-nine, born on 26th Avenue, Lincoln High, thirty-one years at the phone company, same flat since 1974. The first thing she ever said to me was that I wasn't from here, and that I walked like it. When my job disappeared in 2023 and I was sitting on the front steps doing the math on going back to Colorado, she came out with two coffees and told me I had been here two years and still didn't know where I lived. Then she gave me a list.
This is that list, in her order, with everything I found out along the way.
What's inside
The fog rule, which runs this city more than the mayor does, and how to plan every single day around which of the two cities you are going to be standing in. Why September and October are the summer you were owed, and why locals call it second summer. The small hills with the stairs instead of the big one with the parking lot, and which one gives you the view everybody wants and nobody knows to ask for.
How to ride the N and the 38 without telling the whole bus where you are from. Ocean Beach handled the way it has to be handled, because it will not negotiate and it does not look dangerous. The burrito question, answered by a man who has to keep living upstairs from Bev. The parrots, the Wave Organ, Sutro Baths at low tide, the slides, and the tiled steps that everybody photographs and then walks back down when they should keep going.
Hardly Strictly and Fleet Week without losing your whole afternoon. Neighborhoods honestly. Rent honestly. The Tenderloin and the car windows honestly, not as a headline and not as a joke. And a chapter on why the stuff that sounds made up here turns out to be the true stuff.
The last chapter
The book ends at the spot in the Sunset that Bev took me to in my first September, when the fog finally lifted and I understood why anybody stays. Exact directions, the timing, and her rule about it, because she said that if I put the spot in without the rule then it doesn't count.
How it works
Instant download the second you check out. Reads on your phone, your tablet, your laptop or your Kindle. Nothing gets posted to you and nothing turns up late.
The city does not sit still. Roads close, ballots change things, places you loved shut and something better opens two doors down. Every time that happens the book gets rewritten and you get the new version free, for as long as you own it. No second purchase and no expiry.
I am not from here and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I am not going to tell you I grew up in the avenues and ate at the good place before it was the good place. What I can give you is five years of walking it, a neighbor who has been on this block since Nixon, and a book that does not read like it was written from a hotel room near Union Square.
Bev has read it. She had three notes. It is Bev with no e. It is not to sound like a pamphlet. And the spot goes in with the rule or not at all. All three are done.