Where Berry Street ends (more or less)
Day 127
Neighborhoods Covered: Civic Center, Mission, South of Market, China Basin
Streets Completed: 8th Street, Henry Adams, Trainor, Converse, Townsend, King, Norfolk
In 1997, BrainTrust was located down on Townsend, close to South Park, the site of the new Giants stadium, an RV park, a random smattering of buildings, and not much else. I'd found Braintrust online before I left Boston (which is to say, when the Internet was hilariously graphics deficient and less hilariously slower than slow), and it seemed like the best temp agency I was likely to come across in SF, aimed as it was toward, essentially, overly educated kids the agency could place in the dot-coms springing up like non-native plants all over the Bay Area.
When I came to San Francisco to visit in March of 1997, I took BART in from Oakland (where Jenn was good enough to host me) for the interview I'd arranged with BT. I so clearly remember walking from the Montgomery station down to Townsend, and being amazed by how much longer that walk was than I'd expected it to be when I consulted my map. There was south of Market, and then there was South of Market. This was the latter.
Fast-forward a few years to 2000. That BrainTrust interview begat a temp position in the Customer Care department of WebTV, which, despite my best attempts to hold out, became a full-time job with Microsoft. We were in Palo Alto for a while, then in Mountain View, and then, when I'd managed to get myself onto Sloo's team, awesomeness happened: he discovered that another division of Microsoft had office space in the China Basin Landing building in the city, and he arranged for Josh, Geoff, Eric, and I to work there.
Suddenly my commute shrank from a few hours to however long it took the N to get me from the Castro to China Basin. (Granted, that trip sometimes felt like a few hours.) Suddenly we went from an office park in Mountain View to the thick of things in San Francisco. Due in large part to the Interwebby money pouring into the area, SoMa and China Basin started to change, and we could see those changes on a fairly literal daily basis. But still, the RV park remained, there smack between King and Townsend. So did the vast parking lot that spread out before our building, and the equally vast swaths of empty land along the slough that pokes in from the Bay and stretches under the 280 on-ramp.
Over the course of our tenure at China Basin Landing, the pace of change quickened considerably. The CalTrain station got an overhaul. The RV park--somewhat unsurprisingly--was shuttered, and the land sold. The parking lot we could see from our windows filled with construction equipment, and for what felt like an endless stretch of days, we did battle with the sound of pile drivers sending supports for new buildings deep into the ground. New restaurants and shops and parking lots sprang up around the ballpark. Eventually, the division with whom we shared office space was transferred to Redmond. After a few quiet, eerie months in which we were the only ones there, we decamped to One Market to mooch off of another division, and I lost my main reason for keeping up with happenings in China Basin.
It will sound pat and overly obvious to say that the neighborhood now bears almost no resemblance to itself circa 1997, or even circa 2000. One thing hasn't changed: Townsend still offers no sidewalks between 7th Street and 4th Street. Beyond that, there's so little that's the same.
I walked around China Basin recently in something of a stupor. I've seen it since 2002, of course, and have seen the buildings spring from the ground as if they were nothing more than bamboo. But actually exploring things on foot made me realize the radical extent of the differences between then and now. It may as well be a different place altogether.
This will surely sound retrograde, and I can't argue with the need to put this land to use for housing and office space and what have you, but I have to admit to missing the old China Basin, if just a bit. Because for all of the neighborhood's current slickness, for all the appeal of actually having the sort of amenities (grocery stores, banks, restaurants) that were always, always in short supply anywhere south of Market, and for the ability to be there on a Saturday afternoon and see other people around, there's something empty and hollow about the place now.
It's a slippery slope, this ruing old San Francisco, or even not-so-old San Francisco. So much of what's changed here is for the good. But there's a tug, I guess, or a particular sliver of sadness when a part of the city that holds such strong memories of your personal history changes almost beyond recognition, or seems almost to disappear before your eyes.
Neighborhoods Covered: Civic Center, Mission, South of Market, China Basin
Streets Completed: 8th Street, Henry Adams, Trainor, Converse, Townsend, King, Norfolk
In 1997, BrainTrust was located down on Townsend, close to South Park, the site of the new Giants stadium, an RV park, a random smattering of buildings, and not much else. I'd found Braintrust online before I left Boston (which is to say, when the Internet was hilariously graphics deficient and less hilariously slower than slow), and it seemed like the best temp agency I was likely to come across in SF, aimed as it was toward, essentially, overly educated kids the agency could place in the dot-coms springing up like non-native plants all over the Bay Area.
When I came to San Francisco to visit in March of 1997, I took BART in from Oakland (where Jenn was good enough to host me) for the interview I'd arranged with BT. I so clearly remember walking from the Montgomery station down to Townsend, and being amazed by how much longer that walk was than I'd expected it to be when I consulted my map. There was south of Market, and then there was South of Market. This was the latter.
Fast-forward a few years to 2000. That BrainTrust interview begat a temp position in the Customer Care department of WebTV, which, despite my best attempts to hold out, became a full-time job with Microsoft. We were in Palo Alto for a while, then in Mountain View, and then, when I'd managed to get myself onto Sloo's team, awesomeness happened: he discovered that another division of Microsoft had office space in the China Basin Landing building in the city, and he arranged for Josh, Geoff, Eric, and I to work there.
Suddenly my commute shrank from a few hours to however long it took the N to get me from the Castro to China Basin. (Granted, that trip sometimes felt like a few hours.) Suddenly we went from an office park in Mountain View to the thick of things in San Francisco. Due in large part to the Interwebby money pouring into the area, SoMa and China Basin started to change, and we could see those changes on a fairly literal daily basis. But still, the RV park remained, there smack between King and Townsend. So did the vast parking lot that spread out before our building, and the equally vast swaths of empty land along the slough that pokes in from the Bay and stretches under the 280 on-ramp.
Over the course of our tenure at China Basin Landing, the pace of change quickened considerably. The CalTrain station got an overhaul. The RV park--somewhat unsurprisingly--was shuttered, and the land sold. The parking lot we could see from our windows filled with construction equipment, and for what felt like an endless stretch of days, we did battle with the sound of pile drivers sending supports for new buildings deep into the ground. New restaurants and shops and parking lots sprang up around the ballpark. Eventually, the division with whom we shared office space was transferred to Redmond. After a few quiet, eerie months in which we were the only ones there, we decamped to One Market to mooch off of another division, and I lost my main reason for keeping up with happenings in China Basin.
It will sound pat and overly obvious to say that the neighborhood now bears almost no resemblance to itself circa 1997, or even circa 2000. One thing hasn't changed: Townsend still offers no sidewalks between 7th Street and 4th Street. Beyond that, there's so little that's the same.
I walked around China Basin recently in something of a stupor. I've seen it since 2002, of course, and have seen the buildings spring from the ground as if they were nothing more than bamboo. But actually exploring things on foot made me realize the radical extent of the differences between then and now. It may as well be a different place altogether.
This will surely sound retrograde, and I can't argue with the need to put this land to use for housing and office space and what have you, but I have to admit to missing the old China Basin, if just a bit. Because for all of the neighborhood's current slickness, for all the appeal of actually having the sort of amenities (grocery stores, banks, restaurants) that were always, always in short supply anywhere south of Market, and for the ability to be there on a Saturday afternoon and see other people around, there's something empty and hollow about the place now.
It's a slippery slope, this ruing old San Francisco, or even not-so-old San Francisco. So much of what's changed here is for the good. But there's a tug, I guess, or a particular sliver of sadness when a part of the city that holds such strong memories of your personal history changes almost beyond recognition, or seems almost to disappear before your eyes.
