If the Super Bowl were about travel instead of football, then San Francisco would be a prohibitive favorite against Baltimore. I doubt there is a bookie between Las Vegas and Atlantic City who would take even-money action on a "best weekend away" showdown between the Bay Area and the Old Bay Seasoning State.
Though I have spent most of my life in Southern California, I spent five years living in the Bay Area and three years in southern Pennsylvania, where Baltimore was the place to go on the weekend. I know both cities well enough to make the kind of superficial, off-the-cuff comparisons that are common among Super Bowl prognosticators. I just keep it to sourdough vs. blue crabs instead of which Harbaugh brother is coaching the better team.
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So let's go to the depth charts. On the surface, a blowout for San Francisco. I am not going to claim a false parity between the two.
San Francisco is a world-class vacation city, the kind of place that people from around the globe pay thousands of dollars to visit. It's beautiful, urbane and cosmopolitan with a vibrant music scene and one championship already under its belt in the past year, by the World Series champion Giants. It has the Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate Park, cable cars, Ghirardelli Square, Nob Hill, Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf. It's a city of tourism all-stars.
Baltimore is often seen as that "other city" between Philadelphia and Washington. The one long past its heyday, which is somewhere more than 50 years ago. People on the West Coast get a lot of their ideas about the city from movies or TV, ranging from the loving ("Diner," "Tin Men") to the odd ("Pink Flamingos" and "Hairspray") to the hardscrabble and bleak ("The Wire"). A recurrent line in one of this year's best-picture nominees, "Silver Linings Playbook," is that if the lead character doesn't get it together he'll have to "go back to Baltimore," to the mental hospital where he spent time. If visitors know much of anything about Baltimore as a tourist destination, it's limited to a few hundred yards around the shops, eateries and sports venues of the Inner Harbor redevelopment that began more than three decades ago.
So San Francisco is the clear winner. Except the travel scoreboard would show the contest was closer than San Francisco boosters might like to think.
San Francisco's main weakness for me comes from its strength – it has been loved to death. Crammed onto a narrow peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water, it doesn't have enough real estate for all the people who dream of living there. So the people with a lot of money are forcing everyone else out of town.
In recent decades San Francisco sometimes feels more like an adult Disneyland than a real, working city. With the exception of some stubborn parts of the Tenderloin and areas in the southern part of the city, San Francisco has outsourced big hunks of its poverty to the East Bay. Along with Manhattan, it's the quintessential "nice place to visit but you'll never be rich enough to live here."
Baltimore, on the other hand, has no shortage of iffy neighborhoods. Knowing where you are going, especially at night, is a must. The city has lost a third of its population since World War II, with the suburbs sprawling ever outward. But around the Inner Harbor and over in Fell's Point, Baltimore is charming. Its Camden Yards baseball park is the original retro stadium, the template from which nearly every recent stadium – including San Francisco's AT&T Park – was designed.
San Francisco had the 1906 earthquake and fire, but Baltimore's civic martyrdom stretches from bombardment by the British in 1814 (Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner" while viewing the attack), anti-Union riots during the Civil War, workers riots in the 1870s and its own great fire two years before San Francisco's – in 1904. Prosperity came in fits and starts, but a long decline was signaled by the 1968 riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.
The starter kit of any Baltimore vacation is the Inner Harbor: The Marketplace stores and restaurants, the brilliant glassy wedge of the National Aquarium, Camden Yards and the Ravens football stadium. But those who are more adventurous can check out some of the 72 historic districts, many with the fantastic row houses that are Baltimore's main architectural signature. There's the oldest Catholic cathedral in the U.S., the Baltimore Basilica. The "other" Washington Monument rises above the fun Mount Vernon neighborhood. Little Italy is where House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the daughter of the mayor of Baltimore, grew up, and the neighborhood still has some great Italian restaurants. The San Francisco congresswoman is backing the 49ers. Fell's Point retains its nautical past and can be reached by a water taxi from the Inner Harbor.
Yes, there are a lot of areas in the east part of the city and portions of the west where you don't want to wander off. But there is a neighborhood texture that Baltimore holds onto, perhaps in hopes that one day its urban charms will bring the waves of gentrification that have turned around the likes of Williamsburg in Brooklyn or Pleasant Plains in Washington, D.C. Or even SOMA in San Francisco.
But that patchwork nature of the city means that prices are relatively modest when it comes to hotels and restaurants. Even excess luxury comes at a discount. A room tonight at the Four Seasons Baltimore starts at $299. A room tonight at the Four Seasons San Francisco is $535.
Bottom line – bet on San Francisco. But if you can get long odds on Baltimore as a travel destination, it would be a smart bet.
