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.”

To Map or Not to Map

Carmelita detail

Day 13
Neighborhoods Covered: Lower Haight, Hayes Valley
Streets Completed: Haight, Lloyd, Carmelita, Potomac, Germania

Before I left the house yesterday to finish Haight and a few peripheral streets, I considered taking a map with me. I specifically had in mind the Realtor's map I've been using to track my progress, which is one of your standard all-encompassing, fold-out, If I'm Looking at this, I Am Probably a Tourist map.

And for that reason, I opted to go map-less.

Even when I am a tourist, I hate looking like one. In other cities, even foreign ones, it takes getting severely lost for me to be willing to consult a map; I'd much rather get myself slightly lost and then rely on my sense of direction (usually, though not always, quite good) to get myself un-lost again. Plus, I dislike giving off the sense that I am not of a place, even if that would be wildly obvious were I to, say, open my mouth and not be able to choke out more than a few words of the local language.

Here in my own city, I'm especially loath to give off a tourist vibe, especially since a big part of the motivation for this walking project is to see all of the stuff visitors to the city (and, for that matter, most city residents) never see. I also don't want to put myself in the path of anyone who might seek out tourists as easy prey for harassment. So despite the fact that I might stop every other block to take photos and jot notes, I've been walking map-less.

Which, I must say, is sort of dumb. Being out sans map yesterday meant that I missed finishing a few streets that were broken up by a block because I didn't know they continued beyond what I could see. It also meant that I did some hackneyed backtracking at certain points to land myself where I wanted to be. Not exactly tragic, either of those, but just annoying enough to make me rue my occasionally-more-stubborn-than-is-truly-necessary nature.

Because, really, on the residential side streets of the Lower Haight in the middle of a blazingly sunny afternoon, there was little chance anyone would take me for a tourist, or care if I were, or bother to interact with me in any case. So having a map wouldn't have been a bad thing.

My compromise, then, will be to keep my petite NFT with me in my walking bag so I can at least consider planning where I'm going rather than just letting myself gambol.