Jeanie Poling has been hauling a fiddle case up and down San Francisco hills since the mid-1990s.
She has played weddings in the Marina, bar gigs in the Mission, and street corners where tourists once dropped folded fives into her open case.
These days, she says, the case stays mostly empty.
The 54-year-old musician is not a politician or a pundit.
She is exactly the kind of person cities are supposed to protect: a working artist who stitches together a living from lessons, gigs, and the occasional recording session.
And she is furious, in the calm way of someone who has run out of patience rather than out of love. “I used to defend this city to everybody,” she said, sitting outside a café in the Sunset where the sidewalk tables are bolted down and the bathroom requires a code. “Now I tell people the truth.
The San Francisco I moved to for the music does not exist anymore.” What changed, in her telling, is not one dramatic event but an accumulation of small indignities.
The pharmacy that stayed open late closed.
A student canceled lessons because rent ate the budget.
A gig got moved to a venue where the stage is behind plexiglass, a setup she describes as “playing a jail visitation room.” Poling’s complaint is not really about crime statistics or city hall.
It is about the unglamorous arithmetic of daily life.
She runs the numbers out loud: gas to get to a gig across the bridge, parking, strings, a replacement bow, and the fact that a two-hour set now pays roughly what a single hour paid a decade ago. “I’m not asking to get rich,” she said. “I’m asking for the math to not be an insult.” She is also tired of the performance of concern.
She has watched tech workers step over sleeping men on their way to brunch, watched neighborhood meetings dissolve into shouting, and watched friends leave for Portland, Austin, and a small town in Michigan where one of them now teaches fiddle to farm kids. “Everybody says they care about artists until it’s time to pay for a parking space or put a bathroom in a park,” she said.
She has started recording old San Francisco tunes, the kind played in waterfront saloons a century ago, and posting them online.
She is trying to leave a record of what the city sounded like before the sound got priced out. “I don’t want a plaque,” she said. “I want a city that doesn’t treat a working musician like a nuisance between tech campuses.” The larger story here is not unique to San Francisco.
Every American city is running the same experiment: how much culture can you squeeze out of a place before it stops being a place at all.
Poling is one of the people who actually notices.
Final Thoughts
If a city can lose its fiddlers, its late-night diners, and its cheap rehearsal rooms without anyone blinking, then it was never really a city.