Plus Ca Change

Larkin and Broadway (-ish)

Day unknown (I have officially stopped counting; I do know the date, though: April 4, 2009)
Neighborhoods Covered: Civic Center, Tenderloin, Russian Hill, North Point, Polk Gulch
Streets Completed: Larkin, Polk

Preamble
Those of you with a keen sense of time by now have realized that my Quixotic plan to finish this Walking San Francisco project in a year became null and void approximately, oh, four months ago. There are big swaths of streets I've finished, but there are even bigger swaths I haven't even looked at on my map, let alone set foot on. So the walking continues.

And although I've been hideous about updating this blog for the past *cough cough cough* months, I have actually been walking during that time, though in random spurts. What appears below is the post I meant to put up, oh, 3 months ago. Following this one, I'll post another belated report (from June), and, finally, will get myself up to date by writing about today's walk. Thanks for sticking around.

April 4, 2009
Perhaps because it forms the heart of San Francisco’s Little Saigon, with more small stores and businesses in its southern reaches than its neighboring streets have, Larkin presents less of a Midnight of the Human Soul experience as it wends through Civic Center/the Tenderloin than do Polk Street, to its west, or Hyde, due east.

That’s not to say you’re unlikely to encounter the usual suspects (human and/or animal waste on sidewalks; staggering individuals, possibly dressed in a manner that allows for easy and rapid undressing; grime; &c), but, to Larkin’s credit, they’re slightly less abundant than you might otherwise expect.

As with so many of San Francisco’s streets, both Larkin and Polk hit the extremes of income and, if we might extrapolate, human happiness as they coast from one neighborhood to the next. One the one end, the ‘Loin, where unhappiness and things gone very, very wrong are often on display. On the other, Fisherman’s Wharf via Russian Hill, where you can almost smell the money in the air. (What you smell on the southern end is markedly NOT money.) Roundabouts Geary, things can go fairly rapidly in one direction or the other depending on, well, which direction you take.

My trip up Larkin and back down Polk was in sharp contrast to the last walk through the Tenderloin I did, which was, like the perennial 7th grade challenge, grosser than gross. This time around, things seemed fairly staid and normal. On Larkin, the most excitement I witnessed was a waitress literally running two blocks to hand back a sweatshirt a patron had just left in her restaurant. On Polk, I saw a line of tourists on Segways and mobs of Russian Hill dwellers spilling out of coffee shops and bars all along the street. In all, pretty tame stuff.

My only direct interaction with Polk Street’s seedier side was the young woman, clearly messed up on something, who took way, way too long deciding what kind of donut she wanted at Bob’s (for the record: my pick for best donut in San Francisco). When I finally reached the counter, the woman behind it sighed and said, “She’s not well.”

Luckily, and not surprisingly, the donut was worth the wait, and it made me happy enough that my return trip along lower Polk left me unfazed, standard ‘Loin miseries on display notwithstanding.

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.

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.