The San Francisco I moved to in 1992 was less populous, less wealthy, cheaper, grungier, more criminal, but also more politically radical, counter-cultural and quirky. It was then the "Left Coast City" that still lingers in certain corners of the public mind.
That San Francisco was about 85% as populous as today's city, and it showed. Much of the city was fairly quiet. People didn't honk their horns then--I remember how odd that seemed to someone who had recently lived in Boston where everyone honked all the time. Rents were a pittance compared to today, but were still high relative to other cities I'd been living in. I took a big studio at Taylor and Geary for $785 a month so I could walk to work. Hookers plied the sidewalks at night and were very aggressive, even threatening. A large hotel on the corner sat dark and shuttered, as were several other shopfronts. There was a used record store on Geary a block and a half from Union Square. There were used book stores on a very sketchy Powell Street near the turnaround. There were no chain stores like Walgreens in the area, only local mini-markets.
A year later I moved to a quasi ghetto area, Hayes Valley, just a few dozen feet from the double-decker freeway under which even more desperate hookers and crack dealers plied their trade. The nearest occupied commercial storefront was a Black Muslim fish and chips shop that played Louis Farrakhan videos nonstop on the wall-mounted television. On weekends, the suited and bowtied gentlemen blocked off the sidewalk in front of their establishment and did not allow whites to walk on it. That was on Octavia Street (the "Boulevard" came much later, after the freeway was torn down) at Page, in what is today one of the most expensive and precious neighborhoods in the entire city.
I would walk South of Market on weekend nights with my friends to discover where the party was--rave parties. Usually there would be some girl dancing on a streetcorner, all dolled up, who would hand you a map to the party if you seemed like you knew what was going on. Warehouses, shops, even a Catholic girls' school gymnasium--all the parties were illegal and almost always eventually got busted. People really did take ecstasy (which was called "E" and never called "X") and when the parties didn't get busted they would last until sun up. That's why we brought our sunglasses. A local television station did a well-publicized "reefer madness" kind of report on the Bay Area rave scene--forgettable, except for their estimate that there were 30,000 people raving in the Bay Area at any given time between Friday night and Monday morning. Sundays on Lower Haight Street there were so many flannel-clad kids searching for a caffeine buzz and some weed that the crowds spilled into traffic. Many would eventually filter into Golden Gate Park to enjoy the weekly Sunday afternoon outdoor rave. And there were a shit-ton of bands, everywhere. Everybody and their brother had a band, and a flier for you!
The gay scene was diffused--the Tenderloin (tourists and old men), Polk Street (hustlers, middle aged men), South of Market (the "leather community" and a ton of sex clubs), the Bitchy Castro (twinks first, twinks second, twinks only), Valencia Street (lesbians). Bears hadn't yet established themselves, although they had a 'zine and an attitude about what they called "body fascism."
Local politics? Truly the conservative nightmare. There was the left and then there was the hard left, and they battled over control of city government. There were rumors of a bomb factory somewhere in the Inner Mission. Someone scaled the US Armory and painted "REVOLUTION" atop its 14th Street facade--the letters had to be eight feet high. It could be seen for blocks and lasted well into the decade.
That San Francisco was restive. There were protests almost daily, some of which grew past 100,000 people as with the Gulf War protests (which I attended while still living in the suburbs). We had a couple days of riots after the LAPD/Rodney King decision that included broken windows all the way down Market from Van Ness to Union Square, a nightly curfew, and subsequent large scale confrontations and mass arrests when the SFPD announced a ban on all protests for a week. There are youtube videos out there, somewhere, of San Franciscans up in the cops faces from those days, as well as from the gay riot that had broken out the previous year when the governor vetoed an employment anti-discrimination bill. This was a very, very different gay population from that of today--cornered, in a sense, after fleeing the oppression of less liberal places, clearly experienced in fighting for their interests privately and in public, fearless and uncompromising. Being gay in San Francisco in 1992 wasn't about commerce, it was about changing the world. And our straight neighbors had similar and parallel world views. Occasionally, suburban homophobes would burst the bubble, usually by getting out of a suddenly stopped car on Castro Street and bashing a couple nearby pedestrains before jumping back into the car and screeching off back to the freeway. One time a crowd of us threw newspaper racks through a windshield and flattened their tires so they couldn't escape. We were able to completely trash their car while they crouched inside before the cops showed up. Nearly set it on fire.
Physically, that city was dirtier and less developed. Obviously the Marina and Nob Hill were fine, but Market Street and much of SOMA and the Mission were a disaster, an open sewer, an addiction party. There was graffiti absolutely everywhere--some of it was really elaborate and beautiful, most of it was just tags. The old housing projects were dangerous and run-down. A lot of buildings even in nicer parts of town hadn't been painted in years and looked shabby. And there was clutter, everywhere--it was a local tradition to leave things out on the sidewalk for others to take--CDs, books, clothes, large pieces of furniture. There was no Mission Bay. There was no SBC Park. Noe Valley was considered 'off the beaten track.' Rich people famously didn't live "south of California Street." Muni ran horrible, unventilated Boeing LRVs that were prone to break down in the tunnels.
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