What's a guy gotta' do to get a map around here?

Blog 4

I know the desire of the SF Hotel Council, the SF Convention and Visitor Bureau, and other interested parties is to see 2019 levels of visitors to the city. And they have worked tirelessly to achieve that goal, with Mayor London Breed even going to Europe for a vacation, er, um, I mean a promotional "fact-finding" tour. And as much as we want to ham-fist a round peg into a square hole, the pandemic has informed us that the normal we hoped for is not coming back anytime soon. No matter how many incentives and "good will" tours we enact. There are now lines for the cable cars, and Fisherman's Wharf is once again experiencing body-to-body crowds. But those bodies are passing in front of empty storefronts, and shuttered restaurants. Some of which, like the classic seafood restaurant Aliotos, closed forever after almost a century. In small, unperceivable ways, Covid is still dictating how you travel to one of the world's most popular vacation destinations.

It may seem insignificant in the age of smart phones, but people still use paper, analog visitor maps.

The question is where to find one. Most people use Google Maps to get from point A to point B, but for many traveling, a paper tourist map is sometimes preferable to some visitors for a number of reasons: They may be foreign nationals who do not have cell service in this country. They may be over 50 years old, and use the internet at home, but find it's easier to scan a paper map. They find swiping and dragging their smart phone more cumbersome than just taking out a map and looking at it. They may want to see where tourist attractions are, as they are usually prominently displayed on a tourist map. Pre-pandemic, every hotel, visitor information center, and tourist attraction frequently had a variety of tourist maps available. They may be single-sheet, tear-off maps, or they may be brochure style, but they were plentiful and ubiquitous in many parts of the city. In 2022 every company that made maps of San Francisco for visitors are all gone. As in out of business. I asked some of the five-star hotels recently what maps they are using, and they said the one's they don't produce anymore. One assistant manager of a prominent five-star hotel told me, "We just make Xerox copies from the few we have left in stock." There are helpful orange-jacketed ambassadors who pepper the popular destination of Union Square: they are there to give directions, and answer questions. They also distribute tourist maps of the city. One day, I happen to catch a glimpse of a group of 20 and 30-somethings descending on one of these ambassadors like a flock of gulls to a fish. The maps were being snapped up like free cookie samples, and when they left, I asked him for a map as I thought there were none left in the city. The map he handed me, which was the official San Francisco Visitor Map and Guide, was two years old. It may not seem significant, but the fact that these maps are still consumed, and the city is just cannibalizing their two-year old maps supplied from within, bespeaks the fact that we are not back to normal. In a city which used to welcome millions of people a year, procuring a paper map should be easy. In 2022, good luck finding one.

Finding maps of the city