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?