Reinvention

Physical places, buildings, towns, cities, and even entire countries are always changing.  Sometimes the change is progressive and less noticeable, sometimes it's more extreme and jarring.  Near where I grew up is the town of White River Junction, Vermont.  When I was a child, the town was mired in hard times.  But it wasn’t always this way.
 
White River Junction was one of the most important railroad hubs in New England in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  In the 1940s and 1950s, as railroad travel began to decline in importance, the town’s purpose diminished.  Slowly, then faster, it became the kind of down on its luck small town you could find throughout New England, many of them having once been mill towns.  Of course, these towns all have charming bones and if you look carefully, you can see the traces of their prosperous past. 
 
Yet by the time I left Vermont for good in the late 1980s, White River Junction had the appearance of a place that would remain stuck in the tattered rags of its once vibrant past.  Until it wasn’t.  Sometime in the early 2000s, things began to change.  Indeed, today, this small town has the off-beat vibe of an artist colony, with a surprisingly international flavor, including a good Turkish and a good Vietnamese restaurant.  You could say the town has been reinvented.
 
There’s a parallel here for San Francisco.  It, too, needs reinvention.  Unlike White River Junction’s decades long journey back to health, San Francisco is likely to recover far more quickly.  It remains an important city, 7 square miles surrounded by water, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the capital of venture capital.  It is here that many of the most impactful technologies of our lifetime have been created.  It is here that many of the world’s brightest innovators live and work. 
 
But just as shifting travel habits caused White River Junction to falter, changes in how (and where) we work, have wrought economic destruction on San Francisco.  Of course, this city is no stranger to hard times.  It has risen from the ashes before (literally from the 1906 earthquake).  It has seen its share of boom and bust.  I, for one, look forward to its next chapter, to witnessing how it reinvents itself, to being part of what’s next.