Hotels, Strip Clubs, and Tender Loins
So for the first leg of the trip, while we were in Santa Clara for the MySQL convention, we stayed at the convention hotel which was a Hyatt. Pretty conventional Hyatt — very nice, no complaints, boringly upscale. Of course there was this, but that wasn’t really a shock so much as just a funny example of typical. They provided our lunches as part of the convention, which was your ordinary mediocre upscale hotel buffet food — uber fancy dishes that completely whitewashed any ethnic influence (ergo, flavor) from the recipes the meals were supposed to represent. Yawn, but it was food. We did also eat at the hotel bar there once for dinner, which I regret — $15+ for a perfectly ordinary cheeseburger and fries, when there was a plethora of Korean restaurants just down the street on El Camino Real? Oh well. Wasted opportunity, but we really were exhausted that night and I suppose convenience won out.
Accommodations for the San Francisco leg of the visit presented a more interesting opportunity. I had three nights to book, and wanted to find something old & charming, a place that would feel like part of a proper San Francisco bohemian experience, and not just a stay in a corporate chain room that could be the same corporate chain room in any city in the country. Well, I found what looked like the perfect place, a joint called The Metro Hotel:
I went by to look at the place when I got there and snapped that photo, and I really got the vibe that the place was perfect — a funky little rehab smack in between the Haight/Castro area and downtown proper. Supposedly the rooms were tiny (not much bigger than the bed), but waddaya want for <$70 in such a perfect location? Unfortunately, I made my reservation through an agent, and the hotel called me later that day to tell me they couldn’t accept it because someone else booked up the whole place earlier that day. Fuckers.
So, I had booked a second choice reservation at a place called the Hotel Layne. Of course I also ran by that place the first day (this was before heading to Santa Clara for the conference, so still days before the actual reservation date), and, well, as I alluded to in the “notes” post — yikes. The hotel itself looked reasonably nice, but as it turns out, it was on just about the seediest block in the seediest part of town.
It’s a part of town known as The Tenderloin. There seem to be several stories as to how the area got it’s name, every one of which points to it being a pretty nasty part of town. Now that said — my liberal guilt and street-punk background have sort of joined forces to convince myself that I actually didn’t mind the area as a whole. It was certainly no worse than the Ft Lauderdale neighborhood where I once lived — but there’s a big difference between a bad neighborhood where you’re a regular, and one where you’re a tourist dragging around a suitcase. In any case I certainly loved Little Saigon, and the Geary & Mason area where we went for late night eats, and even the area around the O’Farrell weren’t too bad, all of which were technically part of the Tenderloin. In fact, after Chinatown, it just might have been my favorite area — I mean this is where the real seeds of the underculture lie, where the rent is cheap and the artists can survive — this is today’s Height-Ashbury. But as for the block that held the Hotel Layne? Well, here, how ’bout we let the San Francisco Chronicle clue us in:
Lovely, eh?
Needless to say I had new reservations elsewhere soon thereafter. I wound up in a pleasant place called the Cathedral Hill. It was an older place, not without some charm but ultimately a pretty generic hotel, something between one of the nicer Days Inns and and older Hyatt. Right on Van Ness between Geary and O’Farrell, one might argue it too was still part of the same neighborhood, but it was on a main artery on the westernmost fringe of the district. A pretty good location actually, sort of in between the Civic Center and the parts of Tenderloin that I liked. My only real complaint was the tiny bathroom with the shower head oddly placed at a height of about 5′, which made showers logistically interesting.
If I get to go back, there were several places further east along Geary into the Tenderloin that I would consider that did seem to have the old-school charm and low-grade inner city grit that I wanted. Basically I would have felt OK from there up into the heart of Little Saigon, just not much farther east of that. Mike spent a night at The Monarch, a perfect example and actually one of the hotels that I’d had as a maybe in my research. Lessons learned I suppose.
Oh, and I mentioned The O’Farrell (the strip club owned by the Mitchell Brothers and formerly managed by one Hunter S. Thompson*)? Well as it turns out I did feel OK whipping out the camera during daylight hours:
* The wikipedia article says this is incorrect. Thompson’s own writings (see Kingdom of Fear) say otherwise. As near as I can tell the truth seems to be that he actually was hired to be the night manager, but the position was invented for him and entailed little or no actual work.
