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:
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.
1 comment:
I wish I had a good answer for you on the street names, but I don't!
The only useful information I can provide is that the east-west streets used to be more consistently named after countries (India, Japan, China, Brazil, Persia, Russia, France, Italy) prior to some renamings, but Amazon seems to have always been an outlier.
As for why Geneva can be east-west yet named after a city, the street started out as part of the grid west of Mission where the names seem to come from places in New York state, totally unrelated to the Geneva in Switzerland. Only later was it extended east across Mission to get mixed up in the European names.
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