How can one complain when the San Francisco sky is unaccountably blue? In fact, I noted this just a moment ago, staring idly out of the writer’s window, as one does. And as I learned under remarkably similar conditions in London 50 years ago, one must make hay while the sun literally shines. So, you can count on my emergence from this cloister out into the brighter meteorological world, forthwith.
No question that it has a dampening effect, the summer fog. And the summer cold. My nephew from Seattle, a young urban planner, came for a visit two days ago and we made the most of it. Chris and I share a passion for the urban project. And Jane can be persuaded in that direction too. So I signed us up for a neighborhood tour. Dogpatch being the target. The trip was organized by SPUR, 100-year-old civic organization, San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal or something along those lines. And I mean, of a Saturday morning, it really takes a collection of urban planning nerds to start wandering around a neighborhood talking about permeable pavement and “quoting” building surfaces and water gardens and the wheelchair appropriateness of decomposed granite. But I was happily among them. In fact, I had literally surfaced.
To gain some perspective, follow me back about 40 years. That is when I begin taking the Southern Pacific commuter train up and down the San Francisco Peninsula. Within a decade this line had morphed into Caltrain, which it still is, still hauling people between San Francisco, San Jose and the intervening suburbs. So for four decades I have been riding trains through San Francisco’s 22nd St. station, the first stop southbound from the terminal at Fourth Street. And for 40 years I stared at the concrete walls of 22nd Street’s station which is in a deep viaduct…while idly musing about what might lie beyond. The platform is down 30 feet of stairs from 22nd St., making it one of the most wheelchair-hostile stations in the area.
But damned if I didn’t find myself touring the very neighborhood the station serves. And suddenly I understood why all those young professionals are hopping off the train here. They get to work at Google, Facebook, Apple or wherever, then come home to this forgotten 19th century corner of San Francisco, a warren of oddly tilting streets, wooden Victorian houses built at cockeyed angles to each other. This area used to be the site of slaughterhouses, canvas sail-making companies, rope manufacturers, and other now quaint enterprises. The city formally abandoned the entire neighborhood in the 1800s, vowing not to pave the streets, let alone build sewers and so on. And now it’s all picturesque and very much in demand, a neighborhood of streets without curbs, roads that look more like gullies…interspersed with new glass and steel software offices and engineering firms, wine bars and chocolatiers.
So all these young urban planning pioneers are desperately rushing to keep the 19th century oddities of the neighborhood while making it livable and, fortunately, wheelchair accessible. It’s a race against time on all fronts. The pandemic economy isn’t over. And all this old stuff is surrounded by acres of faceless warehouses, truck yards, bus storage facilities, and all the stuff that has always been in this fringe area of San Francisco, wedged between the Mission District and the Bay. Not to mention interstate 280 marching on huge concrete pilons overhead.
Still, SPUR’s urban planning crowd was inspiring. They noted that Potrero Hill which abuts the neighborhood to the west, has a geologically interesting cliff hanging above the railroad tracks. It’s a vein of serpentine rock that emerges on a southern slope of Mount Tamalpais across the Golden Gate Bridge, then makes a deep dive underwater, only to resurface here in this neighborhood. And the local planners are gradually building steps, pedestrian only access from the train station and commercial area of Dogpatch right along the edge of the rock formation. With a wheelchair path that zigzags beside. Not only pedestrian-friendly development but close to pedestrian-only.
Summer in the city.