17th Street at South Van Ness
Day 43
Neighborhoods Covered: Pacific Heights, Civic Center, Mission
Streets Completed: South Van Ness
There are some markedly unlovely stretches of South Van Ness. In fact, it's probably not wildly unfair to say that much of the street is not actively, charmingly beautiful. But get beyond the freeway on-ramp and feeder lanes and beyond whatever we might call 14th to 19th, and lo, it's actually not bad. There are even some strikingly pretty and very stately homes, which the rest of the street certainly doesn't lead you to expect.
Friday evening's rain, which started as a drizzle and picked up heft as I walked, deterred me from pausing too long to check out these houses in detail, so I did the next best thing: finished off South Van Ness at a brisk clip, walked back up Valencia to Papalote to fetch a burrito, and went to Dana and Brad's to discuss the progressive sketchiness (or de-sketchiness, depending on which direction you're headed) of the north-south streets in the Mission.
First, though, an aside. You didn't really think I'd make it through an entire post without one of these, did you? At any rate, please, someone explain to me the preponderance of young, loud, obnoxious college kids at Papalote on Friday night. Where did they come from? There's no campus--excepting a non-residential City College branch--anywhere remotely near Valencia and 24th. Were they bused in from somewhere? How did they decide on Papalote? And does this mean I'll never be able to go there again on a weekend night without finding myself in the middle of a conversation being held, loudly, from one side of the room to the other, a conversation accentuated with the international "raise the roof" arm movements and other interpretative gestures?
But I digress.
Anyway, after waiting for approximately seven years for my burrito, I made my way to Virgil for wine and chatter. When I mentioned to Dana and Brad the few really lovely houses I'd seen on South Van Ness, Brad told me the street used to be a fairly posh one, until the 1906 quake happened and what had been a fairly undeveloped area became a magnet for rebuilding, broad and flat as the land down there was. So the richies hauled tail to Nob Hill, leaving their mansions behind. Some of those houses still stand, and several of what are now homes on the streets between the main thoroughfares were once carriage houses or other outbuildings.
What all of this doesn't quite explain is why streets like South Van Ness, Folsom, and Harrison are so bland and semi-industrial where the teen streets (13th, 14th, and so on) cross them but get (relatively speaking) much nicer toward the 20s. Was the destruction of the quake worse along the lower streets, and the redevelopment more dramatic? Were those areas always more industrial, with the residential sections huddled farther south? Or has there just been an invisible fire line of sorts somewhere around 19th, above and below slightly different worlds sprang up?
Neighborhoods Covered: Pacific Heights, Civic Center, Mission
Streets Completed: South Van Ness
There are some markedly unlovely stretches of South Van Ness. In fact, it's probably not wildly unfair to say that much of the street is not actively, charmingly beautiful. But get beyond the freeway on-ramp and feeder lanes and beyond whatever we might call 14th to 19th, and lo, it's actually not bad. There are even some strikingly pretty and very stately homes, which the rest of the street certainly doesn't lead you to expect.
Friday evening's rain, which started as a drizzle and picked up heft as I walked, deterred me from pausing too long to check out these houses in detail, so I did the next best thing: finished off South Van Ness at a brisk clip, walked back up Valencia to Papalote to fetch a burrito, and went to Dana and Brad's to discuss the progressive sketchiness (or de-sketchiness, depending on which direction you're headed) of the north-south streets in the Mission.
First, though, an aside. You didn't really think I'd make it through an entire post without one of these, did you? At any rate, please, someone explain to me the preponderance of young, loud, obnoxious college kids at Papalote on Friday night. Where did they come from? There's no campus--excepting a non-residential City College branch--anywhere remotely near Valencia and 24th. Were they bused in from somewhere? How did they decide on Papalote? And does this mean I'll never be able to go there again on a weekend night without finding myself in the middle of a conversation being held, loudly, from one side of the room to the other, a conversation accentuated with the international "raise the roof" arm movements and other interpretative gestures?
But I digress.
Anyway, after waiting for approximately seven years for my burrito, I made my way to Virgil for wine and chatter. When I mentioned to Dana and Brad the few really lovely houses I'd seen on South Van Ness, Brad told me the street used to be a fairly posh one, until the 1906 quake happened and what had been a fairly undeveloped area became a magnet for rebuilding, broad and flat as the land down there was. So the richies hauled tail to Nob Hill, leaving their mansions behind. Some of those houses still stand, and several of what are now homes on the streets between the main thoroughfares were once carriage houses or other outbuildings.
What all of this doesn't quite explain is why streets like South Van Ness, Folsom, and Harrison are so bland and semi-industrial where the teen streets (13th, 14th, and so on) cross them but get (relatively speaking) much nicer toward the 20s. Was the destruction of the quake worse along the lower streets, and the redevelopment more dramatic? Were those areas always more industrial, with the residential sections huddled farther south? Or has there just been an invisible fire line of sorts somewhere around 19th, above and below slightly different worlds sprang up?
1 comment:
The reason the character changes around 20th Street is that that was the limit of the 1906 fire, so many more older buildings survived south of there.
But even within the fire limits, the area around 13th and 14th was hit especially hard because that was the former bed of Mission Creek and therefore subject to more liquefaction than elsewhere.
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