The 1865 image captures Telegraph Hill from Russian Hill in the earliest days of the city's rise. It's raw, spare, and full of possibility — a landscape that practically dares you to build on it. By 1894, Market Street at 3rd is already a recognizable urban corridor, bustling with cable cars and flanked by the Chronicle and Crocker Buildings. In under three decades, San Francisco had transformed itself from a frontier outpost into a legitimate American metropolis.

Look at those photos and try not to feel a pang of something — nostalgia, maybe, or frustration. In the late 19th century, San Francisco built iconic buildings, engineered cable car lines up impossible grades, and laid the infrastructure for a world-class city. They did it without environmental impact reports that take longer to complete than the construction itself. They did it without seven layers of review boards and a public comment process that stretches into geological time.

Today? We struggle to approve a single housing project in under five years. We spend billions on transit that somehow gets slower and less reliable. As one local put it, Muni ridership may be "back to high levels," but riders have developed an entire folk science around outsmarting the system — reverse-riding buses, memorizing stop IDs, and treating every commute like a chess match against an unreliable opponent.

The people who built the San Francisco in those photographs didn't have smartphones to track ghost buses. They had grit, capital, and a government that mostly got out of the way.

We're not saying we need to return to the 1860s. But maybe — just maybe — a city that could build itself from nothing in 30 years shouldn't need a decade-long permitting process to add a bathroom to a public park. The ambition is still here. The bureaucracy is what's new.