Tourists! Lock up the women and children!

Tourist season is upon us again and you can feel North Beach filling up like a specimen jar at the local urologist.

Actually, tourists don't bother me all. There's always a lot of bitching and moaning about them -- how they crowd the locals out of table space at their cafes and trattorias; how they intrude on our existential angst by asking stupid questions; how they're, somehow, not cool -- but I've never bought any of it.

They've gone to the trouble of coming here, presumably to see something they don't get to see at home, and I hope they leave feeling like it was worth the time. Curious human beings are interesting human beings, by and large.

More interesting, at any rate, than the howling bridge-and-tunnel frat boys who infest our bars on Friday and Saturday nights. Doesn't anybody under 40 know how to get drunk, fer crying out loud?

But I digress. The subject today is "touristii americanus." (Pardon me. Is my Latin showing?)

Look, love 'em or hate 'em, you gotta live with 'em. Tourist season never really ends anyway. There used to be a definable tourist season here: roughly Memorial Day to Labor Day. The town was empty by mid-September and, yeah, it was nice. Kind of peaceful, you know?

But that was also when we all had jobs to go to that didn't involve being tied to the tourist trade. When there were real jobs in town, like sheet-metal workers and longshoremen and greengrocers. That was before we chased the working class out of town and began selling ourselves as a "destination." Now we all sit at computers growing fat and bored -- talk about your existential angst -- or we work in the tourist industry.

In other words, no tourists and we starve.

So the next time a guileless face toting a camera asks you where Coit Tower is, don't just point at it. OK?

- - -

Remember all the blood that was spilled (figuratively, mostly) in that epic battle to obtain the "triangle," that  wedge of concrete across Mason Street from Joe DiMaggio/North Beach Playground?

You know, that little slice of heaven bounded by Columbus, Mason and Lombard that, four years later, remains a parking lot?

Well, the eminent domain fight is over, the city has the land and, lo, the wheels are slowly beginning to turn. Decisions are threatening to be made at last.

A meeting is scheduled for Wednesday evening (the 28th, in case you've lost count) at 7 at the North Beach Library to kick around designs related to bringing the triangle into some kind of meaningful relationship with the park. Will they close that block of Mason Street to end its Devil's Island-like exile? Will a new North Beach Library rise on the site? Will the city, with an ironic sense of humor, propose that luxury condos be built there?

Given the passions that were stirred back in 2004, I'd expect the room to be overflowing.




Topics: North Beach