If you've spent any meaningful time walking the streets of this city, you've probably seen him — the man in full papal regalia, blessing passersby with a wave and a smile, a fixture of the urban landscape as iconic as the Transamerica Pyramid or the fog rolling through the Golden Gate. He wasn't ordained by the Vatican. He was ordained by the streets, and frankly, his approval ratings were probably higher than most actual city officials.

The Pope of San Francisco was one of those rare figures who transcended the usual categories we slot people into. He wasn't a political statement. He wasn't a social media gimmick. He was just there — a man who decided to bring a little absurd joy to a city that, let's be honest, desperately needs it on most days. In a town where everyone seems to be optimizing, disrupting, or protesting something, the Pope just walked around being the Pope. There's something deeply admirable about that.

San Francisco has always been a city of characters — the kind of people who make you do a double-take and then smile. Emperor Norton set the template over a century ago, and the Pope of San Francisco carried that tradition forward with grace and good humor. These aren't people the city manufactures; they emerge organically from the beautiful weirdness of this place.

We talk a lot in this space about what's going wrong in San Francisco — the spending, the bureaucracy, the public safety failures. That's our job. But it's worth pausing to acknowledge what still makes this city unlike anywhere else on earth: the people who live here and the freedom they have to be exactly who they are.

That freedom — the freedom to be eccentric, to be joyful, to be unapologetically yourself — is something worth protecting. It's not something any city program can create or any tax dollar can buy.

Rest in peace to the Pope of San Francisco. The streets are a little less blessed without you.