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A white middle-aged couple stepped up. He had a ruddy nose, green eyes, and a graying goatee. His wan wife had a sharp nose and pale blue eyes. Both wore American flag pins on their lapels.
To my question, the man answered. "No, I don't think so. I've lived here all my life. I'm third generation. My children grew up here. We've lived in the same house, and my children have this anchor. That's so rare in this society. New York or Philadelphia or Chicago might have single neighborhoods that are as large as San Francisco. In San Francisco, it's pretty hard to stay isolated. You're on the end of a peninsula. You're bound to bump into someone." 
His wife was also from San Francisco and added, "I don't feel isolated. If you just came here and didn't know anybody, then maybe you would. A lot of people move here. Maybe they would feel more isolated than we who were born and raised here."
A twenty-something Asian man nearby told the diminutive Asian woman on his arm that Bridle Path looked like a photograph. So I asked if he meant that in a good way.
"Yeah," he nodded. "It's very nice." His pinstriped shirt was buttoned-up, and his short black hair parted on the side. "What other paintings did he do?" he asked. I described Nighthawks. "With Elvis and all the celebrities in it?" he confirmed. "I don't know a lot of paintings, but I know that one."
When I asked if he thought people here were isolated like Hopper's characters, he balked, "I don't. For a big city, San Francisco has people who are very friendly. People are more close in smaller towns. (I've been to Kentucky and places like that.) But it's inevitable in a large city. I've been in New York, and everybody's so busy and in themselves."
After they left, a girl with bright green eyes stared at Bridle Path, seemingly mesmerized. She bore black high-heeled boots, and a knee-length hooded coat hugged her small waist. Beneath brown hair dyed blond on each side, each ear had three piercings.
She averred that she did not see this painting as isolated. "I never would have guessed that this was by the same artist that did Nighthawks. This seems a little more social. I would say there's isolation amongst the neighborhoods here. San Francisco has a lot of very different neighborhoods, and they change in just a few blocks. They're very conscious of it too. There's not much mixing. It's a very culturally diverse city, but also it's a very separated city."
"I don't know if I really could compare it to any other city. This is a very small city. If you stay in the city, you run into familiar faces. At the same time, it has the big city feel. We all live in these huge apartment complexes [like in the painting]. We no longer know our neighbors."
A white-haired man sidled up, his shoulders draped by a sweater and glasses on a chain. When I looked into his earnest green eyes, I saw where she got hers.
"This is my dad," she explained and told him about my project.
"We came down for the day," he stated in a modulated, fatherly voice, "to visit our daughter. Getting here down to the city can really make you feel like you're isolated. So, are you asking, 'Does community exist without participation?' We used to do a lot more social activities in this country. I don't know if I notice or really feel isolation. Maybe that's part of the problem. Everybody wanders around in their own little world, thinking, 'We're not isolated.' But then they have to ask others, 'Who are you again?'"
The last person I interviewed in front of the painting was a broad-shouldered African American man, standing about six-foot-two and weighing more than two hundred pounds. He was dressed casually in a loose white cotton shirt, faded jeans, tennis shoes, and a cream-colored baseball cap.
"Communities?" he pondered. "Isolated? No. I think I'd have a pretty good idea. I was born and raised here, in Berkeley. San Francisco is a series of smaller communities that view themselves as part of a large city, a larger community, the whole bay area. I live north about thirty minutes from here. I don't get a chance to get over here that often. Only because I choose not to come here because it's too crowded and traffic is a pain."
"Is there a place in San Francisco where you can ride horses?" I inquired.
"Golden Gate Park, but you're not allowed any more. Just the police."
I headed over there. Like Central Park in Hopper's Bridle Path, Golden Gate Park was the city's gathering place and aswirl with human drama. 
People were making music, having picnics, or playing games of tennis or soccer with their families.
Instead of a bridle path, I found the police stables and a trotting track, a sand oval surrounding a polo field. Though I did not see any horses, there were fresh horseshoe prints, and the place "reeked of horse flesh."
Just off Golden Gate Park lay Haight Ashbury, famous as the home of 1960s counterculture. At the People's Café, the first man I saw had a gray ponytail poking through the back of a cap labeled "Haight-Ashbury." A rose tattoo graced his thumb, and the top of a butterfly tattoo sprawled across his chest and peeked above his T-shirt collar. He wore a single large black button as an earring, a leather jacket riddled with chrome buttons, and leather clogs. A hefty young woman sat across from him donned in knickers, thick black shoes, and a flowery red shirt.
"I wasn't here for the 1960s," he balked. "I arrived in the 1980s. I came here after studying Art at Michigan."
"You're an artist?" I asked. "A painter?"
"I carve ancient ivory," he muttered. "I was in the hoity-toity art world. The older I get, the more I've had a change of heart about what represents art."
When I asked his opinion of Hopper, he said he had none, then grumbled without further explanation that Hopper was racist. As he answered, his watery blue eyes peered out above a gray beard, bent nose, and small lips.
"When I moved here, there were always people selling things and musicians on the sidewalk. Now you can only buy boutique stuff. I don't need to buy used clothes; I have used clothes; I need new ones."
"There's a lot of broken hearts and broken people in this town," he rued. "There's a lot of recovering people in this neighborhood. A lot of people in San Francisco and in this particular neighborhood are cyclical. A lot of people move away because they get priced out. But they always come back. The neighborhood is where people feel a community. For years, I lived out of my van down at the park. I've been renting from the neighborhood's biggest drug dealer. Normally, I wouldn't have anything to do with this guy, but it's hard to find a good place to rent."
"You get to know your roommates well in this town," the girl finally chimed in, "because the living spaces are so small. The neighborhood used to have a lot more character, a lot more soul. San Francisco was invaded by dot-commers who made it much less spontaneous and fun. Now they're all leaving again."
I caught a cable car and headed to some of the famous sights. The car was so full that I actually had to stand on the runner board, something I love doing anyway. I transferred where cable car lines met, right by the Hopperesque "Cable Car Diner." The next car I got on was empty, so I asked the driver if he thought that San Franciscans were isolated. He was a large, round-shouldered African American with a wiry beard growing from pitted pores on his cheeks. He had on a black baseball cap, blue fleece coat, and big black gloves that performed an intricate dance of lever-pulling and -pushing to keep the car on track.
"Not at all," he crooned. His voice was as smooth and steady as the flow of his cable car. "I grew up in the Twin Peaks area here. When people think of San Francisco, they think of it as culturally diverse, so everybody knows they're kind of in for that here. It's a very warm city. It's not like New York. There, they'll bump into you and not say, 'excuse me.' They won't look you in the eye."
He let me off at one of the least isolated places you could imagine: San Francisco's Chinatown is one of the densest populated places on earth. Its famous alleyways were a solution to allow more housing when anti-Chinese sentiment restricted the community to a six-block area. The smell of vegetation and fish assaulted me as I wandered past dried shark fins and full-length eels sliced open at the belly with one single move, and I thought of the Chinese caricatures that Hopper painted. 
I interviewed two Chinatown shop owners: a short woman, maybe forty, and a chubby man about fifty. Both claimed that their community was not isolated. But neither spoke much English. Nor were they interested in answering when I tried to follow up with more questions.
San Francisco is associated with Beat poets, and their flagship bookstore City Lights is still here. Some Beats claimed a Hopper influence. San Francisco is also associated with gay culture. I passed several shops where I could have bought a bridle similar to the one in Bridle Path.
I took an architecture tour to see the best sampling of this town's many Hopperesque homes. Hopper was 22 and just out of art school the year of the great San Francisco earthquake, 1906, that created room for such houses. Many of its old Victorian houses were built in New England and then shipped here around Cape Horn. The tour started from the Hopperesque Haas-Lilienthal House. 
. A nearby apartment building proclaimed itself "…an attitude not an address." Real estate is a major economic force here, where the attractive topography and weather attract people. From gold rush through banking to venture capitol dot-coms, San Francisco has never had much in the way of industry. It's not a very urban urban center; not Hopperesque in that way.
Downtown in San Francisco I visited an institution that, like Hopper's paintings, blurred the lines between art and everyday. Gump's department store boasted that everything in the store was for sale. I found this verified when I approached an employee at her desk, which also happened to be a dining room table. It made this workplace seem like a home.
The petite woman had an elfin chin and short auburn hair lightly touched with gray and parted in the middle. She wore pale pink lipstick, a pink frosted sweater, and a blue coat with yellow braiding.
"I grew up here," she began, "so I don't feel that people here are isolated. I see a bunch of people I know everywhere I go. I live in the Portrero District, which is the most diverse. There are Philippines and Blacks, and it started off Italians. If you go down the block, every single home changes ethnicity by its owner, and I like that diversity. Now, I don't know any of my neighbors; none of them speak English. I like the buffer zone, the anonymity of not having to say hello to everybody. When you're in a city, you can't say hello to everybody. It would get daunting or overwhelming. If someone comes up to you and says hi, they usually want something--usually money, but occasionally directions. San Franciscans are used to being nice and offering directions because so many people come to visit. But San Franciscans are not as friendly as they used to be. There are a lot more scary characters on the street now."
