The loss of SF Weekly — gradually, then suddenly — is incalculable

Many years ago, my Aunt Rita decided to return to her childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn. Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can’t go home again — but, really, sometimes you just shouldn’t. 

At that time, New Lots Avenue wasn’t looking very new. Any number of the erstwhile mom ‘n’ pop shops had crumbled into disrepair. Vagrants had taken over many of them, which were illuminated from within by trash-can fires. 

In related news, SF Weekly’s owners on Friday announced they are pulling the plug on the paper indefinitely. San Francisco, a realm of unfettered inequality and obliviousness and corruption — perhaps the city that most needs a robust and functional alt-weekly newspaper — will now have exactly zero. 

We live in a profoundly dispiriting site. But we’re not alone: Alt-weeklies are melting away like polar ice across the country and in Canada, too. Every time another one disappears, it’s a Kurt Cobain moment: You’re shocked but not surprised. 

And, of course, you’re dispirited. But what’s perhaps even more dispiriting than the death of yet another alt-weekly was its painful demise. The edifice had become hollowed out and glowed from within. But what was burning wasn’t trash but the paper’s legacy and its overworked talent. 

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