A substation fire in San Francisco’s centrally located Mission district on Saturday left more than 130,000 residents without power as night settled in, turning one neighborhood popular among tourists into a lightless ghost town.
Haight-Ashbury, the West Coast mecca of the 1960s counterculture movement, draws millions each year to its edgy thrift shops, rainbow-colored street murals and intricate Victorian homes. But tonight, during the last weekend before Christmas, the only businesses welcoming guests inside were those that had miraculously avoided the mass power outage or that lit enough candles to stay open in dim light.
Without street lamps, traffic signals, or the glow of first-floor retail stores to illuminate me for drivers, I hastily jogged across Haight Street in search of cell phone service and, if I could find one, a kitchen still in operation…