Introducing Intersections SF
Short, life-changing San Francisco stories that take place at specific intersections around The City.
Coming Sept 9, 2026
Christian Routzen at Divis & Fell
Who are you,
where did it happen,
what happened?
I’m a San Francisco native and I love San Francisco. I guess it bears emphasizing for the benefit of non-natives that I still love San Francisco. Outsiders often try to get me to complain about how much SF has changed—wanting me to explain, I suppose, exactly how it’s not like it used to be. In some ways, sure, it’s not—but much moreso, San Francisco is exactly as it used to be, because San Francisco is, has been, and will always be one of the world’s great cities.
Why? Because geography, of course! I mean, why did the pioneers go West? Intersections is rooted in my own personal experience of San Francisco as a place to walk, bike, bus, and drive around, as a unique city of beauty, as a city of microclimates and micro-neighborhoods, a city of many cultures, a city of 43 hills, skateboarding, punk rock, burritos, and fog, a city of bars, hilltops, wind, water, streetcars, junkies, and lowriders, of the Great American Music Hall and the Immaculate Conception Academy, of the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre and SF Jazz, I dunno, Specs and the Big Four, the Li Po and the ‘Five, Ocean Beach, China Beach, Baker Beach, Crissy Field and the Golden Gate, the city where I grew up at Hill and Sanchez will always, to me, be like Castro and Market on Halloween night, wall to wall beef, with lights—and so much more.
Bowen at Franklin & Eddy
Intersections isn’t just about the stories—it’s about the places. Place is rightly rhapsodized in academia by cultural geographers, but place is also just your own sense of place, the feeling and meaning of a here—and of home. It’s the vibe, y’know—and I can’t imagine anything more important than the stories that are woven together, over time, to form the fabric of our lives, our culture, and out city.
The goal of Intersections is simply to celebrate San Francisco people, San Francisco stories, and San Francisco itself, this immortal City that we love.
You’ll find Intersections episodes here, as well as on the Intersections instagram, my Substack, and of course under Storied San Francisco in all the podcast apps. We’ll be alternating Storied and Intersections episodes every week starting Sept 9. See ya there!
The idea for Intersections first came to me back in November of 2025 while I was getting a massage—often highly fruitful for me from a creative point of view. I’d recently read Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, a book very much “about the power of language to shape our sense of place,”—of course it does, that’s why stories take place—but then again I’ve always been particularly geographically-minded. For me, everything happens on a map.
So I was lying there getting worked over, and I remembered wanting to suggest some sort of collaboration with my old Wired colleague Marla Aufmuth (VW Women). That got me thinking about photography and The City and people and then yet again about all of my stories from over the years in San Francisco, all of which happen in very specific…places. I had a clear image of an interactive map showing “…your favorite San Francisco intersection, the geography of the city and how that intersects with yours… it’s visual, it’s about San Francisco, it’s personal, it’s about geography, it’s about place.”
A few days later it occurred to me to dial up my friend Jeff Hunt at Storied: SF, who had invited me to be on his show way back in 2019. I explained the idea and not only did he get it immediately, he was down to develop Intersections in partnership with Storied!
Jeff at California & Larkin
As I tinkered with my prototype map of own stories, I realized pretty quickly that I wanted more than my own. I know a bunch of people. A lot of people, really—and I want to hear everyone else’s stories. I want to see those stories on the map. I want to see how they line up, and how they overlap.
Just one example from our first season is Chris Ryan’s story at Broderick and Hayes from the ‘89 earthquake that overlaps with my story about my landlord from Hayes and Lyon in ‘97 never cashing my rent checks—and my speeding ticket was “case dismissed!” due to the same ‘quake. Chris and I lived in SF at the same time and both drank Tornado in the early days, but only met five years ago and only figured out the coincidences when I got him to tell his story.
Chris Ryan at Broderick & Hayes
Those stories overlap in space and time with Christian Routzen’s story of opening his first San Franpsycho store at Divis & Fell in 2012 and Mani Niall’s love story from 2003 at Fell & Stanyan, just like Broke-Ass Stuart’s story of his first date with his wife at the El Rio overlaps with Stacy Horne’s story of some of the last dates with her husband, at the Rock Bar, overlaps with Marc Capelle’s story of playing music in the Mission… but Marc’s story overlaps with just about everyone’s San Francisco stories, including my own, by way of Margaret Cho, the Make-Out Room, and the old New Mission theater.
Maria Finn at Fort Point