Back in the Day

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.

Running San Francisco

Day 33
Neighborhoods Covered: Hayes Valley, South of Market
Streets Completed: 10th Street, 11th Street

I may have neglected to mention in my original post covering the Walking San Francisco rules and regs that running the streets of the city serves the same purpose as walking them, if at a brisker pace and without the real possibility of stopping to snap photos. (Please. It's all I can do not to drop my iPod when I run; I would demolish my camera.) Crawling would probably count as well, though you would catch me dead (or severely inebriated) before you'd see me allowing my mitts to touch the DISGUSTING sidewalks of this city. (En route to a client's house last summer, I passed a mother and her young son on 22nd Street near Guerrero and was alarmed to see that the boy was barefoot. I mean, we all know I'm the farthest possible thing from parent material, but I would so unbelievably never allow a child to tramp barefoot through the hideous garden of glass, grime, and general grossness that is our sidewalks. What was she thinking?!)

Ahem.

Anyway, I decided to take advantage of this on Tuesday by knocking off two of the shorter numbered streets on a jog. It seemed a nice counterpoint to walking the interminable 3rd Street on Sunday. So I ran: down 11th, along what may be the most vile and poop-smeared stretch of Division (I know, I know: most of Division is vile and poop-smeared, and who am I to issue superlatives?), and back up 10th. It was, I'm sorry to report, a pretty boring run, but it did get the job done. Plus, my side butt has most definitely been in need of a workout more strenuous and side butt-engaging than walking, and this was just such a workout.

But I can't help thinking that I missed something interesting somewhere along my route. I mean, I wasn't exactly speeding along with such velocity that my surroundings blurred, but my attention and effort were much more focused on speed than keen, detailed observation. So I go back and forth here. Upside: two streets down in about half an hour. Downside: not much to report from the journey. Upside: less than a minute on Division. Downside: no chance to search for unusual visuals along the way.

Perhaps I'll save my runs henceforth for the streets I'm not so keen on walking--the remainder of Evans (yes, it goes on, and on) comes to mind. But even those, if I were to look closely enough, might toss out something I wasn't expecting to see.

Back to the Streets

Berwick Place

Day 10
Neighborhoods Covered: Civic Center, SoMa
Streets Completed: Birch, Ash, Redwood, Grace, Washburn, Dore, Sheridan, Ringold, Heron, Berwick, Gordon, Bernice, Isis, Kissling, Lafayette

Things cleared up a bit. It was an odd and difficult day through the mid-afternoon, and for much of it I didn't think the rain would actually let up. But it did, and by the time I got back from Trader Joe's it was hysterically windy but dry, so I put the car in the garage and headed out on foot.

I started by knocking off a few runty streets around Civic Center. Redwood was the tough one. It starts (or ends) at Franklin, dead ends into the back of a building, and continues on the other side of Van Ness. Per the rules of this insane venture, I had to walk this jag, and so I did...only to encounter a guy coming out of the apartment building that backs up to the alley. He had a bike and appeared to be off on a ride. I was on foot and appeared to be walking purposefully toward a concrete wall, only to discover--will you look at that!--that the street down which I was striding ends abruptly! I reached the wall, walked along it, and then headed up the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Bike guy watched me the whole time, no doubt (and understandably) assuming I was up to no good. Luckily, the whole jaunt took about 35 seconds and I was once again on my way.

I crossed Van Ness to finish Redwood (open-ended in this stretch, I'm glad to say) and then went south.

By this point, you may be weary (as I'm growing) of SoMa adventures. It is, to date, the most wildly over-represented neighborhood in this project, and I've barely scratched the surface. But unlike, say, the Richmond, where alleys don't spring from every single street, below Market those suckers are everywhere. I finished 12 of them yesterday, and hells if I haven't only just begun. The Mission has its share, too, but nowhere near the staggering preponderance of SoMa's.

And so it's sort of lather, rinse, repeat: oh, is this a vaguely sketchy one-block alley that clearly runs directly into an insurmountable obstacle (building, chain-link fence, combination thereof)? Don't mind me. And this one--it appears to be one street broken into chunks that require me to dash through traffic to complete en masse. Please, allow me. Over and over and over again.

All of this kvetching isn't to say, though, that there aren't delightful things to see and smell (not kidding!) down here. Berwick Place--which, believe me, you would never casually happen upon--is essentially one big, colorful, varied mural. In the middle stretch of Dore Alley, home to an annual Folsom-esque street fair (albeit on a much smaller and more focused scale, inasmuch as Folsom can be said to be unfocused, which it really can't, but I digress), the smell of baking cookies hit me so strongly I had to look around and wonder whether I hadn't wandered in the wrong direction and hit the back of the cookie factory on Folsom. (I hadn't. And yes, there's a cookie factory on Folsom.) On Division, in the shadow of the freeway ramps, where it's seriously imperative to watch your step should you not wish to make shoe contact with unpleasant substances of various stripes, the wind made the eucalyptus trees rustle and filled the air with their scent. I never even knew there were eucalyptus trees on Division.

William Styron once wrote an essay called "Time out of Mind" about his struggle with depression. For him, time out of mind was something not to be hoped for, something uncontrollable. But when I thought of that title yesterday as I walked, it had a different meaning. My time out of mind (and, equally importantly, out of heart) was "This American Life" on my iPod, the wind so strong it felt almost physically cleansing, and, for a little while, the need to do little more than put one foot down, and then the other, and try to take in what was around me.

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.

Slices of SoMa and a Bit of Hayes Valley

Hickory Street

Day 3
Co-Walker: Erik (partway, at least)
Neighborhoods Covered: Bits and pieces of SoMa and Hayes Valley
Streets Completed: Mary, Mint (yes, all 3 blocks, collectively)

Yesterday we went down to Mint Plaza to have coffee (while sitting down! inside!) at Blue Bottle. While in the area, we popped in to take a look at an apartment for rent in the Mint Plaza Lofts building (because, hey, why not?), which was quite lovely but also quite exorbitantly priced, then battled the crowds at the Puma and Apple Stores briefly before fleeing.

After Erik got on Muni to head home, I went back down to Mission to fork off onto a few of the little side streets there. Here's the thing about this part of the city: there's a lot of cool stuff, including a dizzying number of awesome old buildings, but it's also pretty grimy, fairly sketchy, and not entirely welcoming once the sun goes down. I happened to be there during daylight hours, but still. Here as elsewhere, is it worth the risks of living in a marginal neighborhood to score an unusual, really interesting house/apartment/condo? This skirts the whole topic of gentrification, but I'll save my full spiel on that for the Mission.

On my way home, I walked most of Hickory Street (save for the little tail that juts off of the west side of Octavia, which I'll hit this afternoon). Five years in Hayes Valley and I've only ever been on one block of this street before. Like Linden, though, it's one of the alleys that make this neighborhood what it is.