This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.

We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we’ve worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.

When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there’s a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.

We have a warehouse in SoMa. We’re a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky.

We’ve had a front row seat. “Silicon Valley” is a documentary. It’s a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.

The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.

It’s been gaining momentum over the last few years. It’s not just health, and it’s not just trying to have that edge.

There’s a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn’t drink; they’re already of that generation.

There’s a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, “I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we’re not going to succumb to distraction.” One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.

Those same people are taking other things. It’s more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca.

There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It’s like they’ve been let out of prison.

The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that’s in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we’re the contract bar that services that. There’s a social bonding aspect.

Mocktails are all the rage at tech events

More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that’s when we went into mocktails.

We work with a company that’s a household name. We’ve gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We’ll watch as the mocktail that we brought is the thing that everybody’s drinking. We’re happy to be there.

Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they’re drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It’s not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.

The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It’s similar to having a cool photo booth; it’s something people remember.

The business model hasn’t shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.

So far, companies are not fixating on: “Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol.” They’re asking: “Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?”

That’s what we see in the current landscape. It hasn’t slowed our business down.

(KRON)– An 18-year-old is dead, and several others are injured after an early morning crash on eastbound I-80, near the 7th street off ramp in San Francisco’s SoMa district, according to California Highway Patrol San Francisco (CHP SF).

The crash occurred around 1:00 a.m. between a tractor-trailer, a Recology truck semi, and a grey Chevrolet Camaro, according to CHP officials.

Police said the Camaro was traveling eastbound just west of 7th Street when it made an illegal lane change to the right, colliding with the tractor-trailer as it was approaching the off-ramp.

Both vehicles crashed into the sand barrels at the top of the 7th Street off-ramp, officials said. The tractor-trailer continued onto the offramp, where it came to a stop, blocking all lanes.

After hitting the sand barrels, the Camaro continued, launching over the off-ramp bridge railing, where it dropped 25 feet and landed in the San Francisco Police Department Impound parking lot beneath the off-ramp and hitting several vehicles in the impound yard, police said. The Camaro landed upside down on top of another car.

Police said four people were inside the Camaro. The driver, an 18-year-old man, had moderate injuries and managed to get himself out of the car, police said. The right front passenger, a 17-year-old male, suffered moderate injuries as well.

The two rear passengers, both 18-year-old men, suffered major injuries. One is being treated at a local hospital, and the other was pronounced dead at 1:50 a.m. at the scene of the crash, police said.

The other three passengers in the Camaro were wearing seatbelts, and the 18-year-old who died was not wearing a seatbelt.

CHP SF officials do not believe alcohol or drugs were a factor in this crash.

Inside a charred book, pages dotted in soot stains tell the story of how San Francisco rose to the epicenter of a gold rush. Barely escaping the 1906 earthquake, this book should’ve burned completely.

The city’s oldest continually operating library presumed it did. After all, almost 200,000 volumes inside the Mechanics’ Institute did. That was until Randall Schwed donated the book to the library in December. Fumbling around an online marketplace, Schwed found “Echoes of the Foot-Hills” listed for $35.

“What’s interesting about this book is that it’s a survivor,” Schwed told CNN. “I needed to send it home.”

Fires heavily damaged the city during the 1906 earthquake and other fires followed. While no one knows which fire the book survived, here’s what we know about the mystery around it.

Library Manager Myles Cooper has been racking his brain for an explanation of how the book found its way home. In a fire after the earthquake that destroyed 200,000 volumes, how could this book emerge more than a century later?

Was it checked out? Was it rescued from the rubble of another fire? Was it hidden somewhere?

Cooper is certain the book is from the institute in San Francisco, evident by a stamp and a date: Dec. 10, 1874. Schwed, a collector, said his first instinct was to research the owner.

Agnes Quigley is inked at the top of the book’s first page.
In 1898, a woman by the name Agnes Quigley posted an advertisement in the San Francisco Call and Post newspaper, Schwed said.

The advertisement is about a young woman and reads, “From East, wishes situation as chambermaid and carer of children.”

There’s no way to prove whether the two Quigleys are the same person, Schwed said. But he has two theories as to how Quigley could have gotten hold of the book. She could have checked the book out. Or Quigley somehow stumbled upon the charred book and inscribed her name inside.

Both theories are plausible, Cooper agreed. He added another theory: There was a “lot of looting in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake.”

“Echoes of the Foot-Hills” isn’t the sole survivor, though. Other volumes, like archival and reference materials, were in a safe at another location during the earthquake, Cooper said. Another book, “Marriages, Rights, Customs and Ceremonies,” survived and was in circulation until 2001.

Now, the soot-spotted book is unavailable for checkout. It is locked in a display case beneath an 1854 map of San Francisco that also survived the earthquake. Nearby, an oversize atlas bears drawings of the earthquake’s activity created by pendulums.

“It’s really kind of like a library fantasy,” Cooper said. “It’s really magical.”

In San Francisco’s Financial District, the Mechanics’ Institute stands two stories tall. The membership organization is home to the nation’s longest-running chess club, writers’ groups and classes.

In the 1850s, the institute was established to provide gold miners with an education. Decades later, in January 1906, the institute merged with the Mercantile Library to form what was the city’s largest library. Three months later, the Institute lost that title.

“Our library was destroyed in ways that many other buildings were not. I mean, it completely fell down,” Cooper said. “There’s only one remaining wall and really only one brick story left, and everything was burned.”

The institute, like San Francisco, began discussing a plan to rebuild, Cooper said. They collected thousands of dollars and books in donations. Many of those books are related to architecture, mining and railroads – the things San Francisco needed to rebuild.

“It’s definitely part of the DNA of San Francisco to rebuild and rethink things, and that we always have a place to save history, and people’s stories won’t be lost,” Cooper said. “We will be a place that can have the capacity to contain those stories.”

As a longtime San Franciscan, Cooper said the earthquake’s story is kept alive through word-of-mouth. Today, no witnesses of the earthquake and fire are alive.

The institute plans to put acid-free cardstock inside the book to explain its story. It’s common practice for an owner to write their name inside an old book. “Echoes of the Foot-Hills” has had three owners in its more than 150-year lifespan: Quigley, Schwed and the institute.