"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
Busy week at the radio station. Got off early tonight, and walked a little on Potrero Hill, up Mariposa and onto Utah, before getting in the car and driving across the bridge home. It was a beautiful, clear warm evening at the end of a beautiful, clear week.
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On north side of 16th, near Folsom. I’m new at the genre, but the two names belong to San Francisco graffiti artists.
Not that this is a natural segue–I find the sidewalk stencils and other street art I see around the Mission and Potrero Hill pretty arresting–but if you read a little into some local blogs (here’s an example, and here’s another) shit on neighborhood streets is a recurring topic. By shit, I mean shit–what the polite but not highbrow might call Number Two. I raise the subject mostly because in the last few weeks, I’ve occasionally found myself strolling through what appears to be a well established and frequently used open-air toilet on Harrison Street between 17th and Mariposa. And today, right by the Honda motorcycle garage on 17th near Folsom, a large pile of human excrement. Notable in the latter case was the presence of a wad of toilet paper. It’s comforting to know that even those with no other facilities, or who are perhaps moved to make a social statement of some kind, are still wiping themselves.
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Most days, I ride BART from Berkeley to the station at 16th and Mission streets in San Francisco. 16th and Mission is a tough corner in a tough neighborhood. When I was an editorial writer for the San Francisco Examiner in the early ’90s, I wrote a piece about an Irish immigrant who was beaten to death with a baseball bat at an ATM near the corner. That kind of mayhem is rare, I think, but a lower-level kind of chaos, characterized by drug dealing, purse snatching, prostitution, a large population of beggars hanging out, transient hotels, and hairy-looking bars and greasy spoons, is more typical. I’ve been accosted a couple of times in the past six months by women working the street. I spotted one trying to intercept my path one Friday night. She was in high heels, and I sped up to get past her. “Don’t walk so fast!” she shouted. “I’m not going to hurt you!”
For all that, the walk from BART to KQED is still pretty interesting and rarely induces uneasiness for the purposeful walker. In the daylight hours, the biggest hazard is red-light runners and stop-sign jumpers on the major thoroughfares I need to cross–16th, South Van Ness, Folsom, Harrison and Bryant. The walk is about two-thirds of a mile, and I use a route that avoids a vicious block of transient hotels and some very hard-looking dealer types. I wind up on 17th Street. To the west, it rises picturesquely to the Castro and Mount Sutro. Eastward–my direction going to work–it winds up in a knot of streets on the edge of the Mission before crossing a ridge and disappearing into the neighborhood at the northern foot of Potrero Hill. This part of town used to be warehouses and light industry, and today it’s a mix of real and pretend artist lofts, galleries, small theaters, and a few vestiges of the old workshops. Harrison Street, one of the main routes west and south out of downtown, seems to have become what passes for a prominent cycling thoroughfare. I see a few hipster-homesteaders (isn’t it tragic to go by appearances?) riding by every time I’m on the street.
Here are the pictures, to be added to later:
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Something there is about a street named after a state that I find pleasing. San Francisco has a bunch, on Potrero Hill and on both its eastern and western slopes. There’s an Illinois Street down by Third. And a Kansas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida. There’s a York and a Hampshire–the “New” dropped from both–and a Vermont and a Rhode Island. And Alabama, and many more.
(And, going parenthetical, this sign illustrates a conundrum for people trying to navigate San Francisco’s multiple clashing street grids. We’re at the corner of 17th and Alabama. Now in Chicago, if you were at the corner of a 17th and Anything, you could be reasonably sure what street numbers you would encounter going either way on Anything; on one side you’d be in the 1600s, and the other you’d find 1700s. It wasn’t always so easy, but that’s the numbering regime the city has today. In San Francisco, though, the numbered streets don’t bear a predictable relationship to the addresses at their intersections. Thus, 17th Street commences the 400 block of Alabama in one place, and some other block of numbers as you proceed east or west. To an outsider, it’s utterly illogical. I believe natives and denizens see it as just another one of the city’s charming quirks.)
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