How the Other Third Lives

Pocket Park, Steiner and Eddy

Date: October 24, 2009
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Lower Haight, Western Addition, Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights, Laurel Heights
Streets Completed: Perine Place, Cherry, Jordan, Commonwealth

To a degree that I don't think is true in other cities, the neighborhoods in San Francisco weave into and out of each other with amazing (and sometimes alarming) ease, their boundaries so elastic as to all but disappear entirely in many cases.

For example, from the park pictured above, you can walk north on Steiner into the heart of several public housing developments, south on the same street toward Alamo Square (with its iconic Painted Ladies and hilltop park), east on Eddy into more public housing and, ultimately, the all-too-human heart of the Tenderloin, or west on same past beautifully maintained, no doubt pricey Victorian homes.

And so it is that on my walk last Saturday, I saw three totally different worlds in the course of a few hours and a few miles. From the hipster, urban, well-off-but-not-insane world of Hayes Valley, I passed through the Lower Haight (more of same, roughly speaking), the eastern side of Alamo Square (wealthier, but still not exorbitant in San Francisco terms), the slightly worse-for-the-wear stretches of public housing in the Western Addition, the getting-richer southern end of Pacific Heights, the no-holds-barred, you-can't-be-serious real estate explosion in Presidio and Laurel Heights, and then that sequence in reverse.

It was, in a word, surreal.

Granted, the Western Addition's cramped projects aren't exactly cheek-by-jowl with, say, the house at Jackson and Cherry that--no joke--takes up the majority of the block. There's a geographic divide between the wealthiest and the least well off, but it's not a huge one. I can't and won't say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

At any rate, while I'm so used to living amidst the two lower thirds of the city's wealth spectrum that neither the public housing nor the "middle class" homes (I use that term very, very loosely: we're talking about SF, after all, where it's entirely possible for a 1-bedroom condo to run you $799,000), I was stunned by the houses in the collective Heights, and by the neighborhoods themselves.

If, like me, you're accustomed to the look and feel of things in the parts of San Francisco that don't have "Heights" in their names (Bernal being the one exception), it can be jarring to spend time in those lofty neighborhoods. Not only are the houses large (sometimes ostentatiously so: see above) and fancy, but they actually have things like yards, and walls that are not in contact with--or even in proximity to--those of their neighbors' homes. Furthermore, here in the heights there's an almost suburban vibe, with far fewer people on the sidewalks, much less noise, and far less visible activity.

And then there are the holiday decorations. During my tour, a week before October 31, the homes in Presidio and Laurel Heights were what I can only describe as lousy with Halloween decorations. Seriously. Every third house had at least a few token pumpkins or fake gravestones on the lawn, and many of them had enough festive gear to keep those weird Halloween pop-up storefronts in business. It was amusing at first, then slightly bizarre, and then back to amusing. But still a little bizarre. I'm all for holiday spirit; I'm just totally and completely unused to seeing it expressed with such vigor and in such profusion, at least not for this holiday.

Of course, as soon as I headed east on California Street, the decorations (and the giant homes, and the yards to decorate) all but completely fell away. Walking south on Pierce, I glimpsed a few construction paper pumpkins and the like taped to windows, but nothing more elaborate. Though I looked out for festive bits and pieces in Hayes Valley, I saw precisely none.

By the time I was in my own neighborhood once again, I felt like I'd just been jumping around wildly in space and time--from the heart of a city in 2009 to suburbs somewhere else entirely 20 years ago and then back to here and now.

I came home oddly tired.

Backwards

Franklin Street

Day 101
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Western Addition, Pacific Heights, Marina
Streets Completed: Gough, Franklin

I see more of Gough and Franklin streets--significant one-way south- and northbound thoroughfares, respectively--than I necessarily care to, leading as they do to places I want or need to be in the northern parts of the city and then back to my trusty if crumbling garage. They're often clogged with traffic, and Franklin is notorious for being a Street on Which There Always Seems to Be Some Damn Thing or Other in One or Both of the Curb Lanes. When I'm in my car, they hold very little mystery or allure.

I've also walked bits and pieces of both of them before, but when I set out heading toward the Bay--i.e., north--on Gough last Sunday, it occurred to me that I couldn't recall walking either street against traffic. For some reason, I'd always gone with the flow, at least for stretches of more than a few blocks. So when I turned myself around, everything changed.

I know it'll sound pat and overly simplistic to say that seeing Gough from the opposite direction, and then repeating that experiment on Franklin, was eye-opening and fascinating, but that's the truth. There was the usual pleasantly jarring effect of seeing on foot what I'm only ever used to seeing from a speeding car (in which I'm at the wheel and should really not be gazing at the scenery)--all much slower, all much more detailed--added to which was the tweak of seeing things normally unviewed by all but the back of my head.

So I saw the clutch of houses on Gough near Vallejo that still appeared to be fully decorated for Christmas: garland, wreaths on the doors, lights hung. (Hello, luvs, it's MAY.) I saw street art on Franklin that would be utterly invisible were I not on the sidewalk and not heading south. I saw minute details of buildings that I never knew existed, even though I pass them on a thrice-weekly basis.

And perhaps because it was Memorial Day weekend, with light- to nonexistent city traffic, or because I was sort of lost in my own world for a while, or because I was oddly focused on how the late afternoon light kept shifting between flat and grey and huge and golden--perhaps because of any of those things, or maybe because I was taking things backwards, it seemed for the tenure of my walk that there were almost no cars out. So for a while, with those distractions gone, two streets I know perhaps too well showed me things I never would've guessed.

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.

Up and Down

Day 6
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, Western Addition, Japantown, Pacific Heights, Fillmore, SoMa
Streets Completed: Hemlock

I took yesterday's lunch meeting with the interior designer who's just joined the networking group I belong to as an opportunity to tackle decent chunks of Laguna (up to Washington) and Fillmore (back down to Hayes). The resultant pink lines on my Map of Progress are satisfying, though one of these days I'm determined to knock out, say, Geary in one swoop, so I can start highlighting and keep on going until I hit the blue of the Pacific.

(Total aside: the cadence of that last phrase reminds me of Neko Case's "Set out Running," the song by which I took her on as my musical patron saint back in 2004. It makes me sigh that the song feels relevant again; I thought I had moved on to something like "That Teenage Feeling.")

Anyway, the early part of yesterday afternoon was lovely walking weather: sunny, blue, not too warm, not too chilly. By the time I left lunch and headed south, though, the sky had started to darken, and within a few hours the temperature had significantly dropped. No rain, luckily, but by the time I passed through Hayes Valley and briefly stopped home on my way to Josh's, it had ceased to be a pleasant strolling day. So I took a more or less direct route to his house, detouring only to cover the block of Minna between 9th and 8th.

A note here about Stevenson: City planners, why insist on attempting to keep it one street? It runs from well downtown all the way to 14th Street, but it's almost impossible to walk more than one block of it at a time. It repeatedly dead ends into buildings, parking lots, other streets, what have you. Was it once an unbroken stretch of road, or has it always been such a jumble? Was there a Stevenson in SF history who was promised a street spanning x-number of blocks, obstacles be damned? It makes precious little sense.