Slips and Tangles

Franconia Street

Date: July 4, 2009
Neighborhoods Covered: Mission, Bernal Heights
Streets Completed: Mistral, Treat, Franconia, Brewster, Macedonia, Wright, York

Here’s what I think happened: when, in the course of San Francisco’s development, it came time to lay out Bernal Heights, a bunch of city planners got together and got wasted. Soused. The sort of drunk that makes things that aren’t especially funny seem hilarious, and that seriously impairs logic and good judgment. And then they planned the streets.

Because how else can we explain the fact that streets like Brewster and Franconia begin and end multiple times? I’m not talking starts and stops and gaps in between; that’s true of many streets in the city (I’m looking at you, Stevenson). I mean they possess more than one “End: Brewster” sign and tangle around madly from start to finish. (Generally, streets begin with “000: Street Name” and terminate in “End: Street Name.” Just once.)

I had a map as I walked yesterday, but really, fat lot of good it did me. What took me into Bernal in the first place was my desire to finish Treat Avenue, which starts (ingloriously) in back of Best Buy and ends halfway up Bernal Hill. Accomplishing this required me to take a detour onto Folsom to cross Cesar Chavez, and then walk along Precita for a block or so. But wait: not the Precita I’d already walked, the Precita on the other side of Precita Park. For the record, I eventually finished this version of Precita, too, even though I am not officially required to walk both sides of a street. (If I were, I’d never, ever be done. Ever.) Because, hey, it was there, and it took me where I needed to go.

Anyway, I got Treat out of the way and then took a look at my map. I noticed a few small streets feeding off of Alabama a few blocks up and headed toward them. First block and a half of Mullen: all good. And then the Franconia steps appeared. A quick glance at the map suggested that I could walk up them, finish off Franconia fairly quickly, and return to where I’d started on Mullen.

In short, I was wrong.

The reality is that Franconia and its neighboring and intersecting streets splinter off in crazy and totally unpredictable ways, as if the drunken city planners decided their routes by tossing a bunch of broken Pick-up Sticks in the air and then tracing around them wherever they landed.

A while back, an astute reader, in response to my perplexion around Stevenson Street’s multiple starts and stops, noted that there was a good chance it was once an unbroken stretch of road, and that the development of the areas through which it runs could likely explain its now-fractured nature. But it seems that the same can’t really be true of the streets in Bernal, because geography gets in the way. It’s not possible, given the rises and falls of the hill, and the patches of forest in between, that, say, Franconia was ever one (even relatively) straight line that was broken up by the arrival of houses. So why maintain the charade of it being a single street? I’m mystified.

At any rate, I made it out of Bernal Heights eventually, and finished a small handful of streets in the process, then reveled in the straight shot that is York Street. (Of course, it’s a crazy tangle in Bernal, but smoothes itself out once it crosses Cesar Chavez.) Through the Mission, I walked to the whines and pops of fireworks, though it was still much too light to actually see them. By the time York ended at Mariposa, though, things went fairly quiet, so it was the strains of X’s “Fourth of July” on my iPod that led me home:

“Dry your tears and, baby, walk outside/It’s the Fourth of July.”

Unexpected

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?

Clarion

Clarion Alley

Day 16
Neighborhoods Covered: Castro, Inner Mission
Streets Completed: Reservoir, San Carlos, Sycamore, Lexington, Clarion, Wiese, Caledonia, Julian, Woodward

It's true that the Mission can be scruffy, scuzzy, sketchy, creepy, dirty, call-it-what-you-will. Caledonia, for example, is currently tops on my list for Alley Most Teeming with Human Misery, and it forks right off of the lights and crowds and action of 16th Street. And let us not even discuss the stretch of Mission from Division to 18th.

But for all of its roughness at times, the neighborhood does have an insane number of amazing murals, many of which you'd be unlikely to see were you not to duck down a few of those less-than-inviting streets. (Even Caledonia has murals, though I didn't study them in too much detail.) I was especially blown away by what I found on Clarion Alley.

Clarion runs between Valencia and Mission and 17th and 18th. I literally can't count the number of times I've walked past it--that stretch of Valencia is one I walk all the time, and have for years--but yesterday was the first time I actually walked down it.

As with Berwick South of Market, pretty much every inch of every wall on Clarion is covered with art. Each panel is by a different artist, so no matter what your preferred style (or even, to a certain extent, medium), you're bound to find something interesting. (And if you don't, well, perhaps you have better things to do with your time than meander down random alleys and check out street art.)

Somewhat surprisingly, the murals are relatively tag-free, whether because taggers are satisfied with mailboxes, blank walls, and street signs, or because they actually have some respect for the amount of love and effort put into these works, I wouldn't know. But it's refreshing nonetheless, as it's not unusual to see even the most beautiful and elaborate murals elsewhere in the neighborhood and throughout the city defaced with unrelated graffiti.

Awesomely, it appears that Sycamore Street--one alley over--is headed for the same mural-rich fate, although there are a few houses that front it, so perhaps there will be a few gaps in the action. In my book, that's such a great thing to see, and if you go during daylight hours, take your time, and watch where you step, alleys like these make for some pleasant strolling.

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?

Blame It on the Rain

Day 9
Neighborhoods Covered: Almost unspeakably small strips of the Mission and Pacific Heights
Streets Completed: None

Yesterday started out sort of overcast and, by mid-day, had turned hideous. In the later part of the afternoon, as I worked in the relative hush of a client's living room on the fifth floor of a Pacific Heights apartment building, I could see the rain battering the windows and hear the wind howling in the chimney. Not exactly pleasant walking weather.

And, indeed, I did almost no walking, except for the jags to and from my garage and then to and from my car: a mid-block to mid-block span of York Street while visiting my Shanti client, and a trail from Webster, up Buchanan, and onto Jackson to get to my client's.

Today may not turn out to be any better. For every slash of bright, clear sunlight, there's an equal and opposite pouring of rain, and I'm not quite sure I'm willing to risk being soaked sideways to knock off a few streets. But from my front window I can see a patch of blue, so perhaps there's hope. I could use some movement, and could seriously use some distraction.

Dark and Rainy

Day 7
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Castro/Mission
Streets Completed: Landers, Harlow, Dehon, Sharon, Ramona, Rosemont, Clinton Park, Brosnan

By the time I headed out on my walk last evening, the sun that had earlier been making one last push from the west to crack through the cloud cover everywhere else was gone, and the rain had started again. But the air was milder than I thought it would be, and there was something calming about being out on foot at that time in the evening, when so much around me was happening in cars.

I took Laguna to Market, and crossed Market at Church to walk Landers, a little two-block street between 14th and 16th that will forever be associated with Shayne and Daryl, who lived there for a few years back when all of our lives converged so heavily. (Shayne and D, I miss you, and think of you often.) After Landers I turned onto 16th and did a few of the one-block streets that sprout off of it.

Here's the thing with these tiny dead-ends: there's no way to walk them without looking slightly odd, or slightly lost. It's not like there's any doubt that they're longer than they seem from the main road, or that perhaps there's a secret way out on the other end (with the possible exception of a few of those Corona Heights streets that suddenly spring into stairways, but we'll get to those later). No. It's clear all around that they offer no outlet and won't suddenly grow in length. So I walk down them purposefully, perhaps pausing at the far end to contemplate the vista (junior high school cafeteria! heavy machinery in the back of the PG&E substation! parking lot!) before turning back. Not that anyone is watching me (that I know of).

I did a decent handful of little streets, some of which ended abruptly and some of which fed through to something else--such as Clinton Park, which between Valencia and Guerrero turns a corner and becomes (wait for it) STEVENSON! I walked the final block of Stevenson. Now I just need to go back and fill in all of the random 200-yard stretches of it scattered south of Market.