I See Dead People

San Francisco Columbarium, Loraine Street

Date: May 16, 2009
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, NoPa, Lone Mountain, Upper Haight, Lower Haight
Streets Completed: Grove, Parsons, Willard North, Edward, Almaden, Loraine, Rossi, Beaumont, Lone Mountain, Oak

One of the things I've enjoyed most about this whole insane venture is coming across parts of the city I not only haven't seen before, but in fact did not know existed. Westwood was a prime example of that, and I experienced a similar frisson of excitement when I came across the tiny streets of Lone Mountain and the shrine to dead people therein.

You may know that, due to its relatively minuscule size, and to the fact that land values are freakin' sky high, the deceased are no longer buried in San Francisco, but are rather interred in Colma, the for-all-intents-and-purposes necropolis just south of the city. (OK, I just exceeded my quota of big words for this post, so henceforth--dammit, I mean from now on--I'll attempt to stick to nothing more than two syllables.) The only visitable cemetary I know of within the City and County of San Francisco is the one in the Presidio, which is reserved for veterans and which, I believe, is full. (As always, you are encouraged not to take my word as the last one on this or any other matters of official San Francisco history. But in this case, I might be at least kind of right.)

Anyway, here I was tooling around Lone Mountain (not, evidently, to be confused with either the Inner Richmond, USF, or Laurel Heights) when I noticed a dome poking out from the end of one of the tiny, single-block streets. I assumed at first that said dome belonged to the Greek church I'd passed while doing the Terra Vista loop a while back, but no. It turned out to be the San Francisco Columbarium--which, it turns out, is a place for the ashes of those who choose to be cremated. Who knew? (Clearly I didn't.)

Though I didn't go inside either of the buidings on the premises, I did spend some time walking around outside, which left me feeling ever-so-slightly creeped out (because, hey, death is death) but mostly pretty peaceful. It's a nice spot, though there's some sort of large-scale construction happening behind it, so who knows how long that'll last. For now, though, it seems a much more preferable option, should you happen to kick in SF, than burial in Colma. No offense, Colma.

I left after a while and kept walking, past baseball games in the nearby park, past a baffling number of classic cars (not gathered in a car show-kind of way, just intermittently parked), up and down the staircases and hills that justify the neighborhood's name. By the time I finally dragged myself to Oak Street to head home, I was exhausted, and the slog up (and down, and up, &c) Oak was, if I may, a pain in the ass.

But still. I thought about the walk, thought about what I'd seen, and remembered why this craziness still seems like a good idea: because sometimes, when I least expect it, I find a columbarium.

200, Baby!

Terra Vista

Day 85
Neighborhoods Covered: Western Addition, NoPa, USF
Streets Completed: Atalaya, Hemway, Loyola, Temescal, Chabot, Kittredge, Roselyn, Tamalpais, Annapolis, Nido, Vega, Terra Vista, Arbol, Encanto, Barcelona, Seymour

In my very earliest days in San Francisco, my friend Becca, a student at USF at the time, took me up to the school's Lone Mountain campus to show me the view from the top of the hill. Eleven years later, give or take a month, I climbed Lone Mountain again, this time in the middle of walking the streets that thread around the university.

From the top of the staircase, on a clear day (which Friday was) you can see a broad swath of the city's middle, dotted with landmarks (Sutro Tower, the spires of the USF cathedral, Golden Gate Park). I stood for a while looking at this vista and, after a few tries, gave up on trying to frame a photo of it. I'll let the pictures Becca and I took back in 1997 hold that view.

(A pause here: although the months following my arrival in SF were by no means halcyon, and there's a lot in them I don't miss, it's hard not to be struck by the occasional pang of longing for a time when everything about this place was new and fascinating and open to exploration in a way it could no longer be as I got to know the city better. There's so much I discover every time I walk somewhere now, but the tone and timbre of those discoveries are different, in hard-to-describe ways, from the experience of, say, seeing Ocean Beach for the first time. It almost feels like a romance: no matter how much, how profoundly, and how durably you may love someone, there's a bittersweetness to the fact that the particular headiness of your early days together can only last so long.)

I came down from Lone Mountain and did a gentle back-and-forth on the adorable block-long (though--hallelujah!--open-ended) streets staggered between Golden Gate and Turk, then headed slightly east to explore the egg-shaped neighborhood between Turk and O'Farrell and Masonic and Broderick.

It was here, as I marveled at how different in style this clutch of houses were from those I'd just seen steps away from USF, and at the crazily banked back (or was it front?) yards of the homes along the perimeter of the neighborhood, and at the loveliness of the geometric pastels of the architecture against a wildly blue sky--it was here that I finished my 200th street. Terra Vista, congratulations on that honor. (And, yet again, I am consciously avoiding any tabulations of the number of streets that remain.)

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.