Uphill Both Ways

Bradford Street

Day 71
Neighborhoods Covered: Bernal Heights
Streets Completed: Nevada, Prentiss

I didn't pick the hottest day of the year to traipse around Bernal Heights--that would've been Sunday rather than Friday--but it was damn close. And while you (if you are anything like me) might think of Bernal as a neighborhood with some gently sloping hills and one big crest with a radio (TV?) tower rising out of the top, allow me to correct you (and myself): it's all uphill, in every possible direction.

What I thought would be a simple walk in the sliver of time I had before a client meeting wound up feeling like a hike to the base camp of Mt. Everest. SO MUCH UPHILL. Needless to say, I was sweaty and gross by the time I was done--due in part to my overzealous layering before leaving home--though I'd like to think I managed to air out sufficiently before I reached my client's doorstep. To her credit, even if I did smell, she didn't complain.

One thing I noticed while walking constantly uphill is that Bernal is exploding with renovations and development. It's literally impossible to go a block on many streets without seeing at least one house being redone, and sometimes it's several. I also passed several workers doing some sort of sidewalk repair/creation/grading, including the fellow at the bottom of the steps leading down from the topmost block of Nevada Street (fine, fine: there was a bit of downhill) who cheerfully asked me to step around the concrete he'd just poured and told me that if I came back the following day, the sidewalk would be all ready for me. It all makes me wonder what's happened out in this neighborhood to spur such a fiesta of change and renewal.

I have much more of Bernal to do (and several people who've volunteered to do it with me; Scott and Dana, you're on the hook), but I've made a solemn vow that I'll wait for a crappy, overcast day to finish off the rest of the damn hills, leaving about six or seven blocks of Cortland to stroll when it's sunny.

Bayward

Dinghies near the Aquatic Park

Day 66
Neighborhoods Covered: Civic Center, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Fisherman's Wharf
Streets Completed: Van Ness

For much of its length, Van Ness is a markedly unexciting street. Pass Symphony Hall, City Hall, and the opera house down around Grove, head north, and watch as you slowly ascend (at a gentle grade) into boredom.

This is not to say that there's not a lot happening here. It is, after all, technically a freeway (Highway 101), and it has plenty of apartment buildings (and more going up all the time), stores, restaurants, hotels...even a few fancy-pants car dealerships. But perhaps because it's so wide and so busy, all of that kind of blends together into blah.

Stay with it past Lombard, though, where much of the traffic heads toward the Golden Gate bridge (and some toward the Not-Really-Crookedest Street in the City) and it livens up considerably. Not so much in terms of surroundings, though there's a stretch around Bay and Francisco that looks like it's been plucked straight out of Paris or Milan, so boulevard-ish is it; rather, it gets better because of what's ahead.

And what's ahead is the Aquatic Park, the municipal pier, and, beyond, the Bay, Alcatraz, Angel Island, and the hills of Marin. On clear days (like Sunday was), it's a pretty stellar sight.

I walked Van Ness to its very, very end--not North Point, not Beach, but the very foot of the pier--and then kept going onto that pier, which I'm really surprised is open, considering how decrepit it is: actual chunks of the wall have totally worn away, leaving exposed rebar and a clear view to the water beyond. But there it was, so there I walked, past people fishing and families picnicking, all of us being battered by the wind.

I didn't linger, both because I was getting tired of attempting to keep my hair from blowing straight up from my head and, more importantly, because I'd gotten the idea to go to the Ghirardelli store for a free chocolate square and was thus losing the ability to focus on anything else. I did linger a bit near the beach on the edge of the Aquatic Park, marveling at the fact that there were people actually swimming there (some of them without wetsuits--how and why, people??), but then was on my way.

I did the quick Ghirardelli walk-through (free square: chocolate and peanut butter--totally delicious) and then took North Point back to Van Ness, where I walked a few blocks and then got on the 47, which took me back south, and back to the bland.

At the Other End

If Walking San Francisco had a tree frog mascot, this would be it.

Day 61
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, NoPa, USF
Streets Completed: Hayes, Fell

April has been a completely nutjob month in terms of work-related happenings, which means that, while I may in fact be earning back the money I've just forked over to the US Treasury, I feel like I barely have time to do things like eat and bathe, let alone get out and do decent chunks of walking--or any chunks of walking, for that matter, beyond those that take me to and from Muni and my garage.

But on Tuesday, though I probably could've (and should've) put the time to better use, I figured I'd end my great walk-less streak by finishing off Hayes and Fell streets, seeing as they're fairly convenient to my front door.

Because they're both so close to me, and, in fact, unavoidable in terms of getting to the car or the underground, I walk stretches of them every single solitary day. But almost never do I find myself on their western stretches (which, for my purposes, is essentially anything beyond Buchanan) on foot; in fact, until a few months ago, I hadn't been on the westernmost end of Hayes Street ever--not in a car, not on a bus, not on foot. I sort of forget that it's there.

All of which made walking that stretch fairly fascinating. Hayes starts at Market Street, goes through a weird and bland corridor of multi-lane chaos for a few blocks, narrows a bit to become the (delightfully or maddeningly, depending on your perspective) main drag through Hayes Valley, heads uphill toward Alamo Square Park, drops down into the recently invented neighborhood of NoPa (North of Panhandle), and eventually starts to sprout a few stores and cafes and laundromats once it crosses Masonic.

But those businesses are so different from their counterparts here on the eastern end of things: no fancy shoe stores, no sit-down restaurants, no modernist furniture meccas, no wine palace. Just a storefront music school crammed with VHS tapes, a science-themed expedition company (Tree Frog Treks, whose mascot you can see above clad in what appears to be part of a polyester leisure suit), a pizza place, a cafe, a gallery, a cleaners that evidently does not accept infants for laundering, and a few other spots. [Belatedly, an aside: must a leisure suit by definition be made of polyester? Is the no-wrinkle fabric what makes it suitable for non-work pursuits?]

Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is how (relatively) unbelievably quiet things were out west on Hayes. At a time when things are pretty clogged at this end, I could count on two hands the cars that passed me between Masonic and Stanyan.

But then I turned onto Fell, where, of course, that quiet dissipated. And I can report that the western end of this street is just as insane as the eastern stretch, though much, much lovelier, if only from Stanyan to, what, Baker, where it runs the length of the Golden Gate Park panhandle. It ceases to be quite so alluring once it hits Divisadero.

Still, there's something satisfying to it as it rises to a crest at Fillmore and then dips back into Hayes Valley. I shot my final photos for the evening at that crest and followed the hill down, against the streams of traffic, back to the work waiting for me at home.

Cracked out

Krims Krams Palace of Fine Junk, Turk Street

Day 52
Neighborhoods Covered: Western Addition, Civic Center, Tenderloin
Streets Completed: Dodge Place, Olive, Myrtle, Hemlock, Ophir, Trader Vic Alley, Cosmo, Shannon, Isadora Duncan (Adelaide), Hobart, Derby, Elm

The Tenderloin may not be the most hideous neighborhood in the city (What is? Check back in December.), but it's definitely up there on the list. Though there are some lovely old buildings, a good smattering of mini parks, good cheap restaurants and dive bars, and several places to catch live music or theater, there are also many, many examples of what happens if you throw your life away and don't do much (if anything) to try and retrieve it.

On Sunday, I headed out from home and did a weaving back-and-forth on the short east-west streets running roughly between Van Ness and Larkin, then headed into the 'Loin. Although the parting of the clouds and the sudden, bright arrival of the sun made for some warmer strolling and some striking photos, the improved weather did nothing to help the neighborhood as a whole. It was still deeply, seriously grungy and overwhelmingly redolent of urine.

Perhaps because it was Sunday afternoon, I passed several families with small children as I was out and about, often right before I passed (or stepped around) folks weaving down the sidewalk or sprawled out on same, incoherent and messed up on something. At the corner of Hyde and Turk, I passed a woman and a man sharing hits off a crack pipe literally moments before I nearly walked into a couple pushing a stroller and leading two slightly older kids by the hand--and that just depressed me.

This might be a borderline Republican thing to say, but I have such limited sympathy for the inhabitants of the 'Loin who cause and then wallow in their own misery, and I feel so much for the people who make their homes in this neighborhood because, by and large and like it or not, it's where they can afford to live. There are complexities and subtleties to addiction such as it's manifest on these streets, and I don't dismiss them easily. But still, it's so incredibly frustrating and sad to see the polarities of existence in this grid of city blocks.

Eleven years in the city have shown me many things, and I've long been inured to most of them. On Sunday, though, long after I'd walked home and moved onto other things, the image of those two groups at Hyde and Turk stuck with me. I hate to think what those parents have to teach their kids not to see.

Back to the Beginning

Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden, Golden Gate Park

Day 48
Co-Walker: Jee
Neighborhoods Covered: Outer Richmond
Streets Completed: None, though we were one measly block away from knocking off Point Lobos

Last Wednesday I drove way, way, way out into the Richmond (as in 44th Avenue and Point Lobos) to walk and talk with my friend Jee. It had started out as an overcast and chilly afternoon, but by the time we reached the Great Highway, both of us had stripped off our coats and were wishing for sunglasses. That didn't last long--the wind picked up again a while later, and the sky started to cover over--but it was pleasant while it did.

Being out here again sent a few pangs knocking around inside me, because it was here at the western edge of the city, here on streets that I'd never before set foot on, here with my (then-) boyfriend at my side, that the idea for Walking San Francisco was born. I could've imagined at the time (and did) that I would actually adopt the cockamamie plan that was brewing in my head as we walked east from Sutro Heights in search of the pizza restaurant we never found, that I would indeed hoof it all over the city. What I couldn't have imagined back on that brilliant fall day (and, in fact, did not) was that with one brief and shining exception, that boy would opt himself out of my walking project, among other things.

So it was weird to be out at the edge of the world telling Jee the whole breakup story while simultaneously juggling memories of the pre-breakup world: that time at the Cliff House, that time at Sutro Baths, all of those sweet photos from Land's End....

But, of course, we don't live in the world of Memento, and I'm not relegated solely to returning to those memories I already have; I also get to collect new ones. So there's the nascent memory of Jee's hilarious and delightfully Jee-esque response to my claim that sometime soon I'll hoist myself back into the dating pool (a response that's unprintable here). There's the mental image of the bottom button of her jacket undone over her swollen belly. (Another boy!) There's the sweet thought of the Queen Wil garden explosive with tulips--a limited time offer.

And, as always, there's the sense of calmness and steadying I got--that I always get--as I looked out over Ocean Beach, past the surfers poking around in the waves, out to the unbreaking, unchanging line of the Pacific.

In the Land of Jesus and Anthropomorphic Foodstuffs

Royal Baking Company, Mission Street

Day 47
Neighborhoods Covered: Excelsior
Streets Completed: Baywood, Bannock, Gloria, Amazon, Italy, France

What are we San Franciscans referring to when we describe a location as being "way, way the hell out there"? We may well be referring to the Excelsior.

Along with Visitacion Valley and Park Merced, the Excelsior is as far south as you can go and still be in San Francisco. In fact, walk far enough on a few streets and you'll seamlessly stroll into Daly City--and unless you're paying extraordinarily close attention and/or very carefully studying a map, you won't know it.

As it happens, I was paying extraordinarily close attention and studying a map, so I managed to keep myself on the SF side of things (an effort abetted by the fact that I walked mainly east and north). From the Balboa Park BART station, I headed down a markedly unbeauteous stretch of Geneva (with a few quick detours down one-way streets and back) until I hit the European Union: a passel of streets named for countries and cities located across the pond. Well, except for Amazon, one of a handful of streets given South American place names. Why so few? I have no idea. (But I bet Eric Fischer does. Eric is also undertaking to walk every street in SF, and as you'll read on his blog and in the comments he's left here, he actually makes serious attempts to tie in facts about things like city history and urban planning, which I'm much too lazy to do.)

Anyway, I did a few residential streets (Amazon, Italy, France) and then took Mission north, intending to walk only a few blocks and then hop on a bus. But then I just kept walking, and by the time I finally gave in and hobbled onto a 49, I was essentially at the tail end of Bernal Heights.

An aside here: the buses along this stretch of Mission were, at least while I was there to see them, amazingly punctual and frequent. I would estimate that either a 14 or a 49 (two of the major routes that run from this end of the city to downtown/Fisherman's Wharf, respectively) passed me every 4 or 5 minutes. This never seems to be the case the closer they get toward the city center: they thin out markedly. I can understand the forced slowing as Mission Street gets significantly more crowded and difficult to maneuver above Randall, but it's almost like half of the buses that start out on these routes give up halfway through. Yet another Muni mystery.

ANYWAY, allow me to summarize the parts of the Excelsior I saw:

• Jesus. Lots and lots of Jesus. Also some Buddhists (or at least supplies for them).
• Several signs involving anthropomorphic (and possibly cannibalistic) foods.
• Many, many, many bars.
• Clear views into both the exotic hinterlands of Daly City and downtown San Francisco.
• A pervasive fried chicken scent radiating several blocks in seemingly every direction from the Popeye's at Geneva and Mission.

I can't say I was as smitten with this neighborhood as I was with Westwood, but it seemed like a sweet place, with kids playing baseball in the park and houses with miniature lawns and an odd number of 1950s Chevy pick-ups. I'll be back: I have many more cities and countries to go. I may even dip a toe south of the border into DC.