Entries Tagged 'Livable City' ↓

In the literal, if not geographical, center of the city, Beaux Arts facades and dour gray buildings project a great vanity upon the Civic Center Plaza, which is oddly homely. I walked through the plaza back in February and was struck by the lifelessness in the landscape.

Pollarded trees, like tumorous scarecrows, stood guard over the dismal grass and concrete expanse. Even when these ridiculous trees finally grow leaves, as they have by now, there’s still a vast space with little to invite people to stay.

At a time when the City is cutting funding across all departments, not least Parks and Recreation, is there any way to turn this space into a vibrant landscape that engages the community? One potential answer - let the people grow food.

The paradigm is already at work elsewhere in the city through established neighborhood Victory Gardens and other local efforts. Alemany Farm grows organic food for residents of the nearby Alemany Community public housing. Even a median strip in Bayview was transformed into a garden whose offerings are freely available to the residents.

So I was excited to learn that a Civic Center Victory Garden will establish roots in just a matter of days. I can’t wait to take part and watch it grow. Not to get biblical on you, but the garden is where it all begins. As Michael Pollan said in his New York Times Magazine article “Why Bother?,” in the garden

you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen.

The Civic Center garden will transform a mundane space into an active, engaging, truly alive environment. On a fundamental level, it has the potential to instruct as well as nourish, bringing local, seasonal food to an under-served area. Perhaps most important is the example it sets for ecological sustainability. This is just one garden, but in ripping up a boring section of grass and building it in the City’s most stately plaza, hopefully locals will be inspired to do the same in their own backyards and communal spaces. The bees will be happy. More people will have access to fresh food. We just might reverse the effect of greenhouse gases one urban garden at a time.

Check out:

SF Civic Center Victory Garden Planting - July 11

Like Mike Waters (River Phoenix) in My Own Private Idaho, I am a connoisseur of roads. Whether on foot, by bike or on transit I love to wander through neighborhoods, observing how the character of a city changes from street to street.

I don’t mean to be daft, but the worst part of traveling on or around roads are the cars. One has to be vigilant to share the roads with traffic, but outside of personal safety there are environmental effects like the heat island effect, runoff and noise which shape the experience of a city-goer. More than perhaps we’re willing to acknowledge, cars have a tremendous impact on our enjoyment of city life. Walking across the Golden Gate Bridge these days can feel more like walking across the tarmac at SFO.

Saturday was a lovely clear day, the first in what felt like weeks. After the farmer’s market we high-tailed it out of the city to Mt. Tam. It didn’t matter that it was mid-day and we might be two out of hundreds of people with the same idea. The goal was a hike, the incentives were sunshine, fresh air and a different view than the glum, obscured mess from our apartment’s moist windows in the winter.

We ended up choosing a loop from segments of Matt Davis, Coastal, Cataract and Old Mine trails. It was one of the best hikes we’ve ever been on, certainly one within 20 minutes of our apartment, but that’s an unnecessary qualifier. The ground was soft and fragrant with downed douglas fir and bay leaf branches; the waterfalls were many and active; the vistas were extraordinary and clear; and strangest of all, only a handful of people appeared to share the mountain with us that day. I think we saw more hawks and falcons than other hikers.

Each time I go to Mt Tam I find it more remarkable. There are seemingly endless ways to traverse its slopes whether on foot or bike, as a backpacker, beachgoer or run of the mill nature-jerk. And though the concept of ‘the Bay Area’s backyard’ doesn’t inspire faith in its preservation or pristine-ness, I think the more people that get out of their cars and onto trails, the more politically viable reclaiming open spaces becomes.

If I asked you where Mt. Olympus was, would you ever guess San Francisco? Given that, would you ever be able to find it?!
This is a snapshot of a part of San Francisco that doesn’t exist anymore. Stunning isn’t it? Many of the city’s stairways lead up to incredible views, but the stairs up to our own Mt. Olympus put one in the middle of a suburban-seeming cul de sac.

The view is mostly blocked by on all sides by condos.

And all that remains of the “Triumph” of Mt. Olympus is its pedestal. As if to cover up this egregious act, trees circumscribe the entire hilltop perch.

At one time the statue, gifted by Adolf Sutro, marked the center of the city. If you had the audacity to scale its hill, you were rewarded with the striking drama of the urban panorama undulating around hills (we have over 50), green swaths of Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, and the proud red bridge pointing to the mountains beyond.

The landscape around us is changing - that’s inevitable. Theaters are torn down or turned into gyms. Incredibly hideous towers of glass are springing up, with freeway views and modeled after air filters. We may wake up one day to find that, yes, they did actually pave over paradise and put up a parking lot.

Ok, sorry about that last one. But Joni’s right, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

So it is really incumbent upon all of us to preserve SF’s peculiar metropolitan-meets-natural beauty. Because once the hills are topped with homes and the waterfront stacked with towers, all we’ll have left are the photographs to remind us of how beautiful this city once was.

• Where we were:
  San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection
• Where we’re headed:
  SF Planning: Better Neighborhoods
  SPUR
  Save the Neighborhood Theaters

It’s been a strange week for this urban dweller.

A weekend walk through Hayes, Civic Center, Russian Hill and elsewhere turned into, first, an ambush of bodily humours, and then a scatological scavenger hunt.

“Is it animal or human?”
“Projectile or pre-meditated?”

The nose gives you information your head wishes to forget.

Later in the week, I was on my bike when a driver refused to accept my existence and hit me. It was more of a lovetap - one that I could have avoided if I heeded the advice of a witness waiting at the bus stop and “stayed the hell of the road”. But my parents raised me to share my toys and I think the roads are for everyone to enjoy.

Every day is a golden day for a MUNI story. Yet, strangely, I don’t have much to take from this week other than the same slow crawl of a city bus. The bus stops, picks up passengers, waits for traffic to pass by, lurches forward, stops, picks up passengers, waits for traffic to pass…This week we learned that by shifting roadway priority to MUNI’s streetcars and buses on just 10 corridors, 3 out of 4 riders (out of a daily 600,000+) would see a speedier commute.

But to do this, you have to change the way the average person sees the city street.

It’s not a freeway…

It’s a fantastic walkway and a thriving marketplace for local foods.

It’s not an offramp…

It’s a neighborhood.

It’s not a parking space…

It’s a PARK(ing) space

So it can be done. Convincing people of the value of the land in an urban landscape may be as slow-going as MUNI, but a paradigm shift is possible.

The first farmers market in SF appeared in 1943 at Market and Duboce. In a story that reminds me of a particular film noir, it began as a way for farmers to subvert the predatory distributors, sell directly to the customer and reap a fairer reward for their labors. While the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market is no doubt a decidedly lavish version of that first market, it still represents a vital marketplace for the farmers and a boon to consumers.

Many of the producers grow on vestigial pieces of land in Sonoma and Marin counties, where continuing suburban sprawl and centralized food processing threatens not only the agricultural heritage of this land but its rich and dynamic ecology.

I had the opportunity this past weekend to visit Marin Sun Farms which tends an amazing piece of land inside Point Reyes National Seashore. The farmer/rancher, David Evans, led us from chicken hatchlings to turkeys to hens to goats (with cattle roaming the hills in every direction) all the while connecting his family’s long history in West Marin, the realities of ’sustainable’ and ‘organic’ labels, small family farms, feedlots and more, to the way he and his family currently manage Marin Sun. For me, the tour really confirmed an interdependence of farmer and consumer, ecosystem and food. The more informed and connected we are to our food sources the more sustainable and healthy our food sources can be.

Getting my produce fresh-pulled from the ground and talking to the farmers at the market establishes a valuable connection with what I eat. Reading about the relationship of sun and grass, grazing and fertilizing in say, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, can further elucidate the link. Actually witnessing this relationship on a farm, and in a small way, participating in it makes me want to consider each time I eat, Where did this food come from? Who grew it? How did they raise it? I’d show you the chicken I bought at Marin Sun but I’m not sure everyone is as ready for head and feet on their food as I am. Might I suggest a farm tour to get you better acquainted?

Biking home from work a couple weeks ago, a couple of guys in an Olds with a ‘God Bless America’ sticker ran me off the road. They both got out of their car near a busy intersection and one ran towards me shouting ‘Get a car, you homo!’

There seems to be something about driving that can turn reasonable people into impatient, even obnoxious jerks. I definitely notice the tendency in myself on the rare occasions I’m behind the wheel. For a small group of individuals though, driving appears to trigger sociopathic tendencies. I’ve been run off the road many times. I’ve had trash thrown at me. A mom revved her car behind me while her young kids flipped me off from the back seat. I’ve even been head-butted - ok that was as a pedestrian.

A column on Monday reported that an angry swarm of Critical Mass bikers attacked a minivan while children were screaming away inside. No journalistic inquiry into the provocation. No eyewitness commentary. Just the driver’s account of a vicious mob acting inhumanely. Maybe it’s my own experience, or just say, common sense, but I was quite skeptical of this scenario. Over the last couple days a broader picture has emerged and the details are not surprising to me. A reporter at the Bay Guardian was present at the incident and gives his account

A driver gets angry and impatient after getting stuck in Critical Mass and tries to drive through the crowd (which is stupid, illegal, and dangerous). To prevent injuries, the standard practice in such cases is for riders to place themselves and their bikes in front of the car. She hits said bicyclist (sure, maybe not hard enough to produce an injury, as you pointed out, but contact is contact) and then keeps driving forward. The rest of the bicyclists urge her to just stop driving, please, which she refuses to do because at this point she’s agitated and indignant. They pound on her windows, pleading with her to stop driving into a crowd of hundreds of bicyclists with her deadly object. Pretty soon, a bicyclist loses it and smashes her window

And here’s a television interview with some women who also witnessed the incident.

This kind of reportage and the actions of this driver and many others stem from the same asinine, but thoroughly ingrained idea: a car has the absolute right of way on the road. Bicyclists and pedestrians in America make up a fraction of those on the road but suffer 11 to 36 times higher fatalities than car occupants. And yet there remains this perception by some that, golly, drivers have it tough out there. Hooey.

People are so bent on getting from point A to B as fast as possible they neglect the repercussions of their behavior. Unsafe streets, riled up commuters, pollution. The automobile has been a major negative force in public health, climate change, urban planning, not to mention sucking away the funding and infrastructure for decent public transit and high speed rail. Now is not the time to crack down on “rogue” bikers, but a time to push for education and real policy towards improving the safety and health of everyone. A city with more bikes, more pedestrians and for the love of jesus, a better MUNI is something I think most of us can agree is a positive thing.

So to those good ol boys in the Oldsmobile and others, I say: Get a bike, you 20th century troglodyte. It’s good clean fun.

The title of this post, by the way, is from friend to the people, Willie Brown, who shook his Italian-tailored cuff at the bikers in Critical Mass back in the day.