About a year ago I got the opportunity to do a media stay at San Remo Hotel in San Francisco but because of the circumstances at the time, I had to push it to this year. It’s truly amazing to me how much a year can change in terms of one’s circumstances. Since I’ve started working full-time, I’ve been figuring out how to keep a pre-established lifestyle while maintaining a 40-hour work week. Quite frankly it’s been difficult and the pace has been much slower, which I don’t mind at all. Working full-time has breathed new life into my routines that had been missing previously.

San Remo Hotel is a centennial time capsule. Just over a hundred years ago in 1906 after the earthquake and fire that destroyed most of San Francisco, Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini, constructed a new hotel on 2237 Mason St. just blocks away from Fisherman’s Wharf. The hotel has 62 rooms and was originally named the “New California Hotel” hoping to infuse optimism and rebirth after the fire into the city. The hotel ambiance is Old World: quiet rooms without phones or TVs, Victorian heirloom furnishings and hallways lined with historic photos. Guests share bath facilities, reminiscent of European pensione-style lodging.

Beginning in the 1930s, artists, musicians and poets found a home at the San Remo, some paying their room tab with a painting or two, most moving on when they could find a larger place more suitable for use as a studio. The easygoing environment at the hotel, a perfect fit for the bohemian North Beach lifestyle, attracted creative talent for several decades.

Local San Remo Hotel artists like Julius Hatofsky and Ernie Biggs were San Remo guests in the 50s. Hatofsky became an emeritus instructor at the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute after a long career as an artist, and Biggs gained a reputation in New York. Sometimes the less glamorous tenants needed a little looking after. Proprietor Nello Ragghianti, who operated the hotel from 1945 to 1972, would bank their monthly Social Security checks and dole out funds as needed so they weren’t squandered.

San Francisco itself is situated in the Silicon Valley and is home a diverse array of industries most famous for technological and biological innovation. Silicon Valley (abbreviated as SV or The Valley) is a region in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California, referring to the Santa Clara Valley, which serves as the global center for high technology, venture capital, innovation, and social media. San Jose is the Valley’s largest city, the 3rd-largest in California, and the 10th-largest in the United States. Other major SV cities include Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third highest GDP per capita in the world (after Zurich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to the Brookings Institution.

The word “silicon” originally referred to the large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers in the region, but the area is now the home to many of the world’s largest high-tech corporations, including the headquarters of 39 businesses in the Fortune 1000, and thousands of startup companies. Silicon Valley also accounts for one-third of all of the venture capital investment in the United States, which has helped it to become a leading hub and startup ecosystem for high-tech innovation and scientific development. It was in the Valley that the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and the microcomputer, among other key technologies, were developed. As of 2013, the region employed about a quarter of a million information technology workers.

Learn more about the San Remo Hotel: here.