Neighborhooding

Day 14
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Lower Haight, Duboce Triangle, Corona Heights, Castro, Mission
Streets Completed: Laussat, Walter, Pond, Prosper, Chula, Hoff

Where does one neighborhood end and the next begin?

That seems a particularly twisted designation here in San Francisco, where there are swaths of the city divided into seemingly random (and tiny) sections--cf. District 4, with Diamond Heights, Miraloma Heights, Sherwood Forest, Monterey Heights, and on and on and on--others where 'hoods seem to go on forever, and still others in which marginal neighborhoods that abut more preferable areas take on qualifying adjectives in an attempt to disguise their true natures. (Nope, nope, not the Tenderloin: it's Lower Nob Hill, please.)

I thought of this yesterday as, in a relatively moderate number of blocks, I managed to traverse pieces of six neighborhoods. Between leaving my house and arriving at my client's on 14th Street, I hit four of them. The other two lay between the Castro Muni station, where the client dropped me off, and 16th Street BART, where I got on a train for Berkeley.

My friend Scott, who moved here from Boston last year, found himself amazed at how much San Franciscans define others by where in the city they live. He happened to find an apartment he liked near Alta Plaza park, and in conversation after conversation, people would ask what neighborhood he lived in and then think they had him tagged when he replied, "Pacific Heights."

There's probably a solid kernel of truth in some of the neighborhood-based stereotypes we make--if you're living in Russian Hill, for example, there's a very good chance you don't have a strictly limited income. But the hard and fast assumptions just don't hold, especially because the lines between neighborhoods are so fluid. When you can cross a street and officially be in another section of the city altogether, how accurate can these divisions (and the ideas that come with them) really be?

To Map or Not to Map

Carmelita detail

Day 13
Neighborhoods Covered: Lower Haight, Hayes Valley
Streets Completed: Haight, Lloyd, Carmelita, Potomac, Germania

Before I left the house yesterday to finish Haight and a few peripheral streets, I considered taking a map with me. I specifically had in mind the Realtor's map I've been using to track my progress, which is one of your standard all-encompassing, fold-out, If I'm Looking at this, I Am Probably a Tourist map.

And for that reason, I opted to go map-less.

Even when I am a tourist, I hate looking like one. In other cities, even foreign ones, it takes getting severely lost for me to be willing to consult a map; I'd much rather get myself slightly lost and then rely on my sense of direction (usually, though not always, quite good) to get myself un-lost again. Plus, I dislike giving off the sense that I am not of a place, even if that would be wildly obvious were I to, say, open my mouth and not be able to choke out more than a few words of the local language.

Here in my own city, I'm especially loath to give off a tourist vibe, especially since a big part of the motivation for this walking project is to see all of the stuff visitors to the city (and, for that matter, most city residents) never see. I also don't want to put myself in the path of anyone who might seek out tourists as easy prey for harassment. So despite the fact that I might stop every other block to take photos and jot notes, I've been walking map-less.

Which, I must say, is sort of dumb. Being out sans map yesterday meant that I missed finishing a few streets that were broken up by a block because I didn't know they continued beyond what I could see. It also meant that I did some hackneyed backtracking at certain points to land myself where I wanted to be. Not exactly tragic, either of those, but just annoying enough to make me rue my occasionally-more-stubborn-than-is-truly-necessary nature.

Because, really, on the residential side streets of the Lower Haight in the middle of a blazingly sunny afternoon, there was little chance anyone would take me for a tourist, or care if I were, or bother to interact with me in any case. So having a map wouldn't have been a bad thing.

My compromise, then, will be to keep my petite NFT with me in my walking bag so I can at least consider planning where I'm going rather than just letting myself gambol.

West and Back

Haight Street at Steiner

Day 11
Neighborhoods Covered: Well, none
Streets Completed: See above

Yesterday saw me in Walnut Creek in the morning, then back to the city in the afternoon and straight to my client's apartment, with a paltry quarter-block of Jackson street covered. By the time I left at 6, I was so exhausted and so desirous of getting home that even taking a tiny detour to hit Bromley (off of Webster) was out of the question. So it was another day of walking to and from my garage, with little else in between.

I tried to make up for that today.

Day 12
Neighborhoods Covered: Lower Haight, Upper Haight, sliver of Hayes Valley
Streets Completed: Page, Belcher

The business cards Jenn ordered for me from 4x6 have been languishing at their pickup spot (a Mailboxes Etc.-type place on Haight and Masonic) for weeks now. Since it was a fairly spectacular day and I had the morning free, I decided I'd go fetch them.

I headed west on Page and stuck with it to the end, then walked one block south on Stanyan and headed back down Haight.

Here's the thing about Haight Street: it is, of course, one of San Francisco's most famous and iconic streets, and it's undoubtedly colorful and lively and all of that, but I really, wildly don't love it. I'm not trying to make some hackneyed pun there (I don't love Haight, yuk yuk yuk); it's just not a street I'm inclined to spend a lot of time on.

Granted, it's not as bad during the day as it is at night, when the crowd is an all-too-perfect blend of street kids and bar-going kids, and walking it today wasn't actively unpleasant. But still. It's grimy and often odoriferous, and the watered-down and oddly materialistic hippie thing tires me.

I accomplished the card-fetching goal, though, and even had the baffling but delightful experience of being in the store at the same time a trio of parents (viva San Francisco) were getting their six-day-old daughter's passport photo taken and application completed. I've never before seen a baby so tiny or so red. She was 14 inches long.

At Fillmore I went south toward Safeway (needing to replenish my TP supply before the one roll I had at home ran out), taking a detour down Belcher before hitting the behemoth. I love sweet little Belcher Street, which I used to walk down daily when I lived in the Castro and had to take the N to get to China Basin for work. I was happy to see that it's the same as I remembered it.

On my way home, laden with TP, I finished off my final block of Page Street (between Laguna and Octavia), making it the first actual 5+ block street I've finished. A few more blocks of Haight tomorrow and I can add that to the list, too.

Back to the Streets

Berwick Place

Day 10
Neighborhoods Covered: Civic Center, SoMa
Streets Completed: Birch, Ash, Redwood, Grace, Washburn, Dore, Sheridan, Ringold, Heron, Berwick, Gordon, Bernice, Isis, Kissling, Lafayette

Things cleared up a bit. It was an odd and difficult day through the mid-afternoon, and for much of it I didn't think the rain would actually let up. But it did, and by the time I got back from Trader Joe's it was hysterically windy but dry, so I put the car in the garage and headed out on foot.

I started by knocking off a few runty streets around Civic Center. Redwood was the tough one. It starts (or ends) at Franklin, dead ends into the back of a building, and continues on the other side of Van Ness. Per the rules of this insane venture, I had to walk this jag, and so I did...only to encounter a guy coming out of the apartment building that backs up to the alley. He had a bike and appeared to be off on a ride. I was on foot and appeared to be walking purposefully toward a concrete wall, only to discover--will you look at that!--that the street down which I was striding ends abruptly! I reached the wall, walked along it, and then headed up the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Bike guy watched me the whole time, no doubt (and understandably) assuming I was up to no good. Luckily, the whole jaunt took about 35 seconds and I was once again on my way.

I crossed Van Ness to finish Redwood (open-ended in this stretch, I'm glad to say) and then went south.

By this point, you may be weary (as I'm growing) of SoMa adventures. It is, to date, the most wildly over-represented neighborhood in this project, and I've barely scratched the surface. But unlike, say, the Richmond, where alleys don't spring from every single street, below Market those suckers are everywhere. I finished 12 of them yesterday, and hells if I haven't only just begun. The Mission has its share, too, but nowhere near the staggering preponderance of SoMa's.

And so it's sort of lather, rinse, repeat: oh, is this a vaguely sketchy one-block alley that clearly runs directly into an insurmountable obstacle (building, chain-link fence, combination thereof)? Don't mind me. And this one--it appears to be one street broken into chunks that require me to dash through traffic to complete en masse. Please, allow me. Over and over and over again.

All of this kvetching isn't to say, though, that there aren't delightful things to see and smell (not kidding!) down here. Berwick Place--which, believe me, you would never casually happen upon--is essentially one big, colorful, varied mural. In the middle stretch of Dore Alley, home to an annual Folsom-esque street fair (albeit on a much smaller and more focused scale, inasmuch as Folsom can be said to be unfocused, which it really can't, but I digress), the smell of baking cookies hit me so strongly I had to look around and wonder whether I hadn't wandered in the wrong direction and hit the back of the cookie factory on Folsom. (I hadn't. And yes, there's a cookie factory on Folsom.) On Division, in the shadow of the freeway ramps, where it's seriously imperative to watch your step should you not wish to make shoe contact with unpleasant substances of various stripes, the wind made the eucalyptus trees rustle and filled the air with their scent. I never even knew there were eucalyptus trees on Division.

William Styron once wrote an essay called "Time out of Mind" about his struggle with depression. For him, time out of mind was something not to be hoped for, something uncontrollable. But when I thought of that title yesterday as I walked, it had a different meaning. My time out of mind (and, equally importantly, out of heart) was "This American Life" on my iPod, the wind so strong it felt almost physically cleansing, and, for a little while, the need to do little more than put one foot down, and then the other, and try to take in what was around me.

Blame It on the Rain

Day 9
Neighborhoods Covered: Almost unspeakably small strips of the Mission and Pacific Heights
Streets Completed: None

Yesterday started out sort of overcast and, by mid-day, had turned hideous. In the later part of the afternoon, as I worked in the relative hush of a client's living room on the fifth floor of a Pacific Heights apartment building, I could see the rain battering the windows and hear the wind howling in the chimney. Not exactly pleasant walking weather.

And, indeed, I did almost no walking, except for the jags to and from my garage and then to and from my car: a mid-block to mid-block span of York Street while visiting my Shanti client, and a trail from Webster, up Buchanan, and onto Jackson to get to my client's.

Today may not turn out to be any better. For every slash of bright, clear sunlight, there's an equal and opposite pouring of rain, and I'm not quite sure I'm willing to risk being soaked sideways to knock off a few streets. But from my front window I can see a patch of blue, so perhaps there's hope. I could use some movement, and could seriously use some distraction.

Middle Earth

Irving, looking West

Day 8
Neighborhoods Covered: A minuscule, happenstance sliver of Pac Heights and a slightly larger sliver of (it's true) the Central Sunset
Streets Completed: None

My friend Mary lives on 33rd Avenue at Judah, well on the way to the ocean and far enough out that the city starts to feel like another place. (A few more blocks west, in fact, and it puts me in mind of a Jersey beach town in the shoulder season.) Mary and I have a running joke: she consistently tries to get me to believe that her bit of San Francisco is called the Central Sunset, and I retort that it's too far out to be considered central, though I will agree to call it Middle Earth.

Last evening I went out to spend some time with Mary, and before I left home I looked at my map to plot a few streets to walk before we met up. And there it was: a shaded portion of the city called the Central Sunset, encompassing 33rd Ave. at Judah. How right she was.

My stroll in the CS was brief and brisk (making it not so much a stroll after all, I suppose), but it was a beautiful time of day for it. I walked for only about 15 minutes, and in that time the sky went from riotous with a sunset to all but empty. That first part never seems to last long enough.

Dark and Rainy

Day 7
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Castro/Mission
Streets Completed: Landers, Harlow, Dehon, Sharon, Ramona, Rosemont, Clinton Park, Brosnan

By the time I headed out on my walk last evening, the sun that had earlier been making one last push from the west to crack through the cloud cover everywhere else was gone, and the rain had started again. But the air was milder than I thought it would be, and there was something calming about being out on foot at that time in the evening, when so much around me was happening in cars.

I took Laguna to Market, and crossed Market at Church to walk Landers, a little two-block street between 14th and 16th that will forever be associated with Shayne and Daryl, who lived there for a few years back when all of our lives converged so heavily. (Shayne and D, I miss you, and think of you often.) After Landers I turned onto 16th and did a few of the one-block streets that sprout off of it.

Here's the thing with these tiny dead-ends: there's no way to walk them without looking slightly odd, or slightly lost. It's not like there's any doubt that they're longer than they seem from the main road, or that perhaps there's a secret way out on the other end (with the possible exception of a few of those Corona Heights streets that suddenly spring into stairways, but we'll get to those later). No. It's clear all around that they offer no outlet and won't suddenly grow in length. So I walk down them purposefully, perhaps pausing at the far end to contemplate the vista (junior high school cafeteria! heavy machinery in the back of the PG&E substation! parking lot!) before turning back. Not that anyone is watching me (that I know of).

I did a decent handful of little streets, some of which ended abruptly and some of which fed through to something else--such as Clinton Park, which between Valencia and Guerrero turns a corner and becomes (wait for it) STEVENSON! I walked the final block of Stevenson. Now I just need to go back and fill in all of the random 200-yard stretches of it scattered south of Market.

Up and Down

Day 6
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Western Addition, Japantown, Pacific Heights, Fillmore, SoMa
Streets Completed: Hemlock

I took yesterday's lunch meeting with the interior designer who's just joined the networking group I belong to as an opportunity to tackle decent chunks of Laguna (up to Washington) and Fillmore (back down to Hayes). The resultant pink lines on my Map of Progress are satisfying, though one of these days I'm determined to knock out, say, Geary in one swoop, so I can start highlighting and keep on going until I hit the blue of the Pacific.

(Total aside: the cadence of that last phrase reminds me of Neko Case's "Set out Running," the song by which I took her on as my musical patron saint back in 2004. It makes me sigh that the song feels relevant again; I thought I had moved on to something like "That Teenage Feeling.")

Anyway, the early part of yesterday afternoon was lovely walking weather: sunny, blue, not too warm, not too chilly. By the time I left lunch and headed south, though, the sky had started to darken, and within a few hours the temperature had significantly dropped. No rain, luckily, but by the time I passed through Hayes Valley and briefly stopped home on my way to Josh's, it had ceased to be a pleasant strolling day. So I took a more or less direct route to his house, detouring only to cover the block of Minna between 9th and 8th.

A note here about Stevenson: City planners, why insist on attempting to keep it one street? It runs from well downtown all the way to 14th Street, but it's almost impossible to walk more than one block of it at a time. It repeatedly dead ends into buildings, parking lots, other streets, what have you. Was it once an unbroken stretch of road, or has it always been such a jumble? Was there a Stevenson in SF history who was promised a street spanning x-number of blocks, obstacles be damned? It makes precious little sense.

North SoMa? Northern Mission?

Power Exchange

Day 4
Neighborhoods Covered: A bit more of Hayes Valley, plus whatever we might call what's directly south of Market and West of South Van Ness
Streets Completed: Hickory (last few blocks), Lily, Colton, Brady, Otis, Rose, McCoppin, Elgin Park, Pearl, Pink

Monday was overcast and chilly, which was perhaps the perfect weather setting for the blocks I walked. I finished off Hickory and did a whole mess of other little streets, including several in the odd neighborhood that sits in the crook of the elbow formed by Market and South Van Ness.

Here again, some truly interesting buildings and tableaux run up against a roughness that's not pretty or romantic, really, but just rough. On Brady there's a letterpress studio, a hair salon, an architectural firm, and a sign shop, and there's also a view of the ventilation fan for the Van Ness Muni station (or perhaps for BART as it runs under this stretch--hard to tell). I passed a few people who looked at me vacantly, and then we all went on our ways.

Down Jessie and Stevenson, in the shadow of the PG&E substation (or is it AT&T? I looked right through the signs), there are simple houses that look like they've come straight out of a c.1900 print of San Francisco: low, long, wooden, with a strongly Western feel. They were all dark and quiet when I walked past.

While I'm here, I may as well do...

Day 5
Neighborhoods Covered: None to speak of, though I guess I could count a minuscule slice of Civic Center
Streets Completed: None, alas

Late on Monday, a bit of my world exploded. On Tuesday I was barely functional, though I did manage to walk to the Civic Center post office in an attempt to mail a package, only to turn around and leave after seeing a long, immobile line and only one clerk actually dealing with things other than stamps and money orders.

So I walked in the rain to my car, drove to a client's in Russian Hill, then later drove back through the rain to the PO at Potrero Center. Once home, I was in for the night, my body heavy and weak like it'd be drained of a bit too much blood.

And now a new impetus: walking as distraction. Walking to forget. Walking because my legs can still move, and I achingly need that movement.

Slices of SoMa and a Bit of Hayes Valley

Hickory Street

Day 3
Co-Walker: Erik (partway, at least)
Neighborhoods Covered: Bits and pieces of SoMa and Hayes Valley
Streets Completed: Mary, Mint (yes, all 3 blocks, collectively)

Yesterday we went down to Mint Plaza to have coffee (while sitting down! inside!) at Blue Bottle. While in the area, we popped in to take a look at an apartment for rent in the Mint Plaza Lofts building (because, hey, why not?), which was quite lovely but also quite exorbitantly priced, then battled the crowds at the Puma and Apple Stores briefly before fleeing.

After Erik got on Muni to head home, I went back down to Mission to fork off onto a few of the little side streets there. Here's the thing about this part of the city: there's a lot of cool stuff, including a dizzying number of awesome old buildings, but it's also pretty grimy, fairly sketchy, and not entirely welcoming once the sun goes down. I happened to be there during daylight hours, but still. Here as elsewhere, is it worth the risks of living in a marginal neighborhood to score an unusual, really interesting house/apartment/condo? This skirts the whole topic of gentrification, but I'll save my full spiel on that for the Mission.

On my way home, I walked most of Hickory Street (save for the little tail that juts off of the west side of Octavia, which I'll hit this afternoon). Five years in Hayes Valley and I've only ever been on one block of this street before. Like Linden, though, it's one of the alleys that make this neighborhood what it is.

Stepping Out

It started like this: last fall, on the day of what I think was the SF marathon (but what may have been some other road race), Erik and I took the N out to the Great Highway and started walking. We headed north to the Cliff House, then up into Sutro Heights and east along Geary and Clement.

As we walked, it occurred to me that although I had been on many of the same streets in cars or buses at some point, I'd never before experienced them on foot. Doing so that afternoon meant seeing those streets in entirely different ways, and I figured it'd be interesting to repeat that experience throughout the city.

So here it begins: as of yesterday, my goal is to walk every street in San Francisco by the end of the year. This includes both streets I've walked hundreds of times already, like Octavia and Valencia (portions of which officially made the Walked list as of last evening), but also those I've never been on, and currently have no idea actually exist. I want to see familiar streets in a different light, and experience unfamiliar ones for the first time. Moreover, I want to get a deeper, broader sense of the city I've called home for the past 11 years.

Herewith, a few guidelines:

• My definition of "every street in San Francisco" includes alleys, dead-ends, and those tiny slips of roads that seem barely consequential enough to bear names. This definition doesn't include freeways (101 over the Golden Gate Bridge being the only exception) or major roads that don't have sidewalks.
• Any street I've walked before yesterday doesn't count. I'm starting with a clean slate.
• I plan to track my progress on paper maps, unless someone more technologically savvy than I can figure out how to customize a Google map to make my steps trackable online.
• I'll be taking photos and notes of interesting things I see, eat, drink, and experience along the way and posting them to this blog.
• If I can get on the ball, I may buy myself a pedometer so I can also tally my actual steps.

I'd love company on any portion of this quest. If there's a part of the city you've always wanted to explore, a street or two you've driven down a few times but haven't experienced on foot, or a favorite neighborhood you'd love to show off, please let me know. It would be great to have you along.

Check back often for updates on where I've been, what I've seen, and who's been along for the walk.

Onwards!