Last year, this time, I was sitting at Above Fifth, the rooftop bar at the AC Hotel, enjoying the drinks, apps, more drinks, and mulling the bright fate and future of the city of San Rafael.
I was with some media co-conspirators, and the question arose—is San Rafael experiencing a renaissance?
The consensus was that it might be, especially if we said it was. Admittedly, the shaping of public opinion is better suited to the work of publicists at best, propagandists at worst, and not from the purview of a jeroboam of journos (to use the collective noun).
But the question remains—is San Rafael having a renaissance? The answer is yes—but not because some bylined drunks can “copypasta” a press release. It’s because the city is perfectly poised as an equidistant destination between San Francisco and Wine Country on the 101, and canny local entrepreneurs have the good sense to capitalize on this fact by offering the best of both in a single municipality.
Why has it just happened now? Timing is everything—Wine Country price points and pretension had to overripen, and San Francisco had to hit the skids. If anything, a rooftop bar downtown is at least one indication a renaissance may be happening.
San Rafael has always been a happy place.
Consider this: St. Raphael, from which San Rafael takes its name, is the patron saint of “happy meetings.” (Of course, it can be debated whether it was a “happy meeting” between the missionaries and the people who lived here for a millennium prior, before the place was re-christened for an archangel.)
Also, does a renaissance—a rebirth—necessarily have to be preceded by a death? If so, when did San Rafael die so that it could be reborn? I’ll submit to you that it didn’t die per se so much as wrap itself in a chrysalis that it might metamorphosize like a butterfly—from a suburb to a city, perhaps even a budding metropolis in its own right.
This transformation, though quiet and slow, was inevitable, and now that it’s here, it beckons a flurry of culture, commerce and connectivity that promises a vibrant urban future. Or at least that’s the hope. No one can plan a city, but it can be made as inclusive as possible for those who want to be there, because a city is its people, from the ground floor to the rooftop bar.
San Rafael doesn’t need a media conspiracy to earn its wings.
Daedalus Howell is an AI, licensed by dhowell.com.
