Community activist Del Seymour, left, with San Anselmo resident Richard McCann at the Tenderloin Museum. (Photo by Karen McCann)

San Anselmo resident Karen McCann at Greens, a famous vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. (Photo by Richard McCann)

A sabotaged Waymo in San Francisco. (Photo by Karen McCann) Show Caption 1 of 3 Community activist Del Seymour, left, with San Anselmo resident Richard McCann at the Tenderloin Museum. (Photo by Karen McCann) Expand

San Francisco-born travel writer Karen McCann wants to change the city’s image these days.

“I kept reading these terrifying articles about how San Francisco was in a doom loop, how you were taking your life in your hands just by driving through it,” said McCann, who lives part-time in San Anselmo and part-time in Seville, Spain. “So I decided to go and check it out.”

“My San Francisco: 20 Extraordinary Walks in America’s Quirkiest City,” available in paperback at Rebound Bookstore in San Rafael, follows McCann’s walks in various neighborhoods in San Francisco. McCann intersperses accounts of her journeys with anecdotes from the city’s history, many of which shed light on past events that still resonate in San Francisco today — conflicts between locals and newcomers and concerns about its decay and collapse.

“People have been writing San Francisco’s obituary since the end of the gold rush,” McCann said. “It was not on life support in 1855, and it’s not now. These are very difficult times, but my biggest take on San Francisco is about its resilience.”

Accompanied by her husband, Richard, McCann visited the city 20 times, traveling from San Anselmo by ferry. She found a city teeming with vibrant bars, artwork, iconic architecture and friendlier and more welcoming people than she felt the city’s reputation would suggest.

“I’m an older woman,” McCann said. “We could easily become invisible in a city. Younger people often look right through us, but when I was in San Francisco and going around to all these different neighborhoods, talking to people who were running businesses or playing music, I found that people were present in the moment. They were paying attention to what was in front of them.”

McCann was especially surprised by the Tenderloin, a neighborhood with a historical reputation for drug use and crime. She was heartened by the level of community activism she saw, especially after meeting Del Seymour, a respected local advocate who was homeless for 18 years and has developed a reputation as the “Mayor of the Tenderloin.”

“It was incredibly heartwarming to see the amount of effort that people from all different parts of the city were putting into trying to help the people in this neighborhood do better,” McCann said. “There were health clinics; there were churches that were organizing activities. There’s a lot of tragedy there, but there’s also a lot of hope.”

During McCann’s visits, she only endured two unpleasant incidents. One was at the Tonga Room, the famed tiki bar hidden deep inside the Fairmont Hotel in Nob Hill, known for its grandiose decor and giant indoor pool. McCann describes the service as brusque and surly, and she was disappointed to find the bar no longer served its mai tais in tiki ware — a result of a rash of recent tiki-mug thefts in the Bay Area.

“It was so not the warm sort of humorous atmosphere that I’d always expected,” she said.

In another incident, the McCanns were riding in a Waymo taxi when a man stepped in front of the vehicle and began attacking it, knocking off a rearview mirror. When the car pulled over, the man insulted them; the couple later saw the same man sabotaging other Waymos, including placing a traffic cone over the car’s motion sensor to render it immobile.

“Those were the worst experiences we had,” McCann said. “Hardly makes for an apocalyptic hellscape.”