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.”

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.