San Francisco - where beauty and brutality, cruelty and kindness are neighbours

A mural painted on a wall in Chinatown in San Francisco - the US city which has inspired songs, novels and art. Photo / Robert Alexander / Getty Images

Sharon Stephenson visits San Francisco and finds it bears little resemblance to the place her father sung of

When I was a child, my father's favourite song was San Francisco. As in, if you're going to.

He'd wander around the house, singing in his tuneless way about wearing flowers in your hair should you visit the city pinned to San Francisco Bay.

I'm not sure if my conservative father ever knew that song was the unofficial anthem of the 60s counter-cultural movement or if he just really, really liked the melody. It probably doesn't matter. Along with Sam Cooke's You Send Me and Dean Martin's You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You, that song was the soundtrack to my childhood.

Dad is in his 90s now and although he's seen a fair chunk of the planet, he never quite made it to San Francisco. If he visited today, the first thing he'd probably notice is the smell. Weed is everywhere, lingering in parks and streets, poking you in the nostrils in posh hillside neighbourhoods and graffitied alleys that look as though they'll do you mischief.

The first time I visit San Fran, I stay in the sort of hotel that thinks everyone wants to nick their shampoo and soap so they nail large bottles of cut-price products to the wall. (After washing my hair, it's matted for days.) In the communal living room, I ask the owner why weed is San Fran's aroma du jour.

"California actually prohibits smoking it in public areas," he says. "But either no one got the memo or they don't care," he adds, with a kind of "what you gonna do" shrug.

Another smell that could blow out Dad's olfactory neurons is human waste. There's no elegant way to say this but watch where you step in this city. Urine dries in alleyways, it hangs around parks and gutters and it surprises visitors with open-toed shoes.

If my father dropped by today, he'd be even more horrified by the sight of people defecating in public. One morning, my head groggy with the flu and jet-lag, I cross the road from my hotel to a Walgreens pharmacy. It's July, early on a Sunday, and the trees lining the park are filled with flowers my Kiwi tongue can't find a name for.

As I wait at the traffic lights, I see a homeless man drop his trousers and s**** on the footpath. I know it's rude but I'm so shocked, I can't stop staring. He looks at me with eyes the colour of milky tea and yells, "I have to go somewhere. They won't let me in stores and the public restrooms are all locked." He's got a point but his loss of human dignity startles me so much, I've never been able to dislodge it from my memory bank.

Woerner Cigar and liquor store in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Photo / Flickr.com / Jeremy Brooks

On another visit, in another dodgy hotel, the manager warns me to always turn left outside the front door, never right. He's German and extravagantly moustachioed; his heavily accented English belying the 30 years he's lived in America. In words that hint at racism but are so thinly veiled I can't be sure, he tells me about the Tenderloin, the forbidden land that lies to the right of his building.

"It's like a code-red sprawl of despair, where people wander around injecting themselves in plain sight and violence and trouble are never far away," he says of the 50 block neighbourhood that unfurls like a fraying ribbon on the southern slopes of Nob Hill.

He is and isn't right: in parts, the Tenderloin does look like something out of The Wire, with drug dealers and their customers hanging out on street corners. I've read that you can tell who's who by their shoes: the dealers have expensive, often hand-stitched ones, the addicts not so much. I try to scope out the footwear but it's hard to do so without looking like an outsider at best, a knob at worst.

A war veteran with one leg, his wheelchair festooned with so many American flags it's as though he covered himself in glue and raced through a Fourth of July celebration, is arguing with himself outside McDonald's. He's desperately trying to open a sachet of tomato sauce but no matter how many swear words he throws at it, the damn thing won't budge.

The suburb named after a cut of beef is also home to families, many of them immigrants, most of them trying to find a way into the American Dream. I watch a mother and her young daughter walk past a bloke passed out on a bench, a small trickle of blood on his forehead, to a grocery store where they calmly debate the ripeness of fat, yellow mangoes.

If Dad visited San Fran, he'd be equally mystified by the swanky party I attend while on a work trip where someone else picks up the tab for a hotel that has sheets with a high-thread count and no one cares if you steal the toiletries.

We're in the bowels of a conference centre attached to a Hilton or a Four Seasons, I can't remember which, and it's wall-to-wall tech bros, many of whom don't look old enough to shave. I'm there with a local friend but feel as out of place as I did in the Tenderloin – the conversation swirls around me, thick with words like disruption and cryptocurrency. Everyone, even the waiters, seems obsessed with the property market. At least the canapes are good and I get so drunk on the free mojitos I tell one bloke to stop being a dick. He just laughs at my accent.

They say if you really want to know San Francisco, let your stomach lead the way. Dad most certainly would not be led to the cafe in poncy Pacific Heights, where they charge me NZ$40 for a few salad leaves. And I let them. He'd be more at home in the Mission District, one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods and certainly one of the most interesting, where it's practically a by-law that you can get a decent taco for a few bucks. Settled by Spanish missionaries in the late 18th century, the Mission was, in its day, quite palatial. Sadly, its day has long since passed, yet its faded charm is what draws the eclectic mix of dot-com millionaires, tattooed hipsters and migrants cooking up a cheap and cheerful taste of home.

San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge. Photo / Getty Images

Dad, who lives in Australia's sunny Gold Coast now, would also not be impressed with San Fran's weather. One of the reasons he fled Wellington was because of its erratic temperatures and in the Bay area the weather is as unpredictable as Donald Trump's Twitter acount. This is a city where one minute fog snatches at you, turning your hair into a frizzy mess, the next bright sunshine and where you never leave the house without at least three easy-to-shed layers.

Dad would, however, be tickled pink that the fog is such a feature of San Fran it has a name – Karl – as well as its own Twitter and Instagram accounts. Yeah, I know.

If my father visited today, I'd tell him not to walk too quickly down Columbus Ave in Chinatown, because he might miss Mr Bing's, a dive bar beloved by Anthony Bourdain who said, after visiting, "If you can't find it in your heart to immediately recognise that this is a fine drinking establishment, there's no hope for you." I'd suggest Dad fight his way through Chinatown's collision of languages and dialects to the dimly lit bar where he could sit where the late, great chef sat and see what he saw.

To be honest, I'm not sure if Dad was a fan of Bourdain - or if he even knows who he was - but like Bourdain, he'd love Chinatown's cheap, tasty eats, the noisy parade of locals going about their business. Always a sucker for tat, he'd easily be parted from his money at one of Chinatown's tiny shops where he could fill his boots with everything from Golden Gate Bridge fridge magnets to velvet wall hangings of Madonna (the religious one).

Yet he'd no doubt be grumpy with me for spending so much time in Haight Ashbury's consignment clothing stores. This grungy neighbourhood - part nostalgic Summer of Love, part ridiculously expensive Victorian real-estate - is ground zero for San Francisco's vintage clothing and record stores. Clustered around Haight St, which drifts towards Golden Gate Park and, eventually, the Pacific Ocean, are many, many pre-loved stores that I've lost whole afternoons to. One of my best buys - a grey, practically new Stella McCartney cardigan I pay NZ$50 for – even earns a gushing compliment from the female Customs official patting me down at San Francisco Airport on my way home.

Dad would rather spend his time ticking off the tourist attractions: the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, a cable car ride, a rubbery chowder at Fisherman's Wharf. He'd also appreciate a visit to the city's painted ladies, the immaculately preserved Victorian row houses that sit high above the city.

Today's San Francisco might not be the one of his favourite song and he'd be hard pushed to find many hippies with flowers in their hair but he'd agree with me that America's 15th largest city is a place of many parts, of beauty and brutality, of cruelty and kindness, of the sort of contrasts that makes it one of the most fascinating places on the planet.