Entries Tagged 'The 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.

Public transit is an integral and multifarious part of any urban landscape. It moves great masses of people; it weaves stratified areas of the city together and links to areas beyond; it pushes us together in ephemeral communities that connect us in exactly the opposite way the automobile isolates us.

It can also be an ersatz homeless shelter. A fun-park ride for young children (for hours, I’m told). For me, it’s a continual fount of insight into the range and qualities of human behavior. Like a living portrayal of Walker Evans’ subway photos.

Undoubtedly, it is also one of the great venues for an improvised and surreal brand of entertainment, provided you are in the right frame of mind to appreciate it. iPods can be valuable tools when you don’t want to engage certain “entertainers”, but when the reincarnation of Ray Charles walks onto your train,
unplugged microphone in hand (no need for amplification when you’ve got spirit!), you know the night time, whoah is the right time, to take off your headphones and take in the gospel of city life and the community around you.

The big trucks are gone. The signage and business fronts restored. The last vestiges of 70’s era corduroy, denim and leather hang conspicuously not on film extras but the unselfconscious locals who never gave them up. But I find myself still daydreaming about the filming that took place just down the street from my apartment.

In the space of just a few weeks, most of them glum and rainy, one of my favorite filmmakers and his crew descended upon the Castro to film Milk - a biopic about Harvey Milk, the “Mayor of Castro Street” and the first openly gay man to win office just about anywhere. The film stars Sean Penn as Milk and while I’m not sure I ever caught Mr. Penn in action I couldn’t help but walk wide-eyed every day through the set, as it were, of Castro Street circa 1978.

The most enchanting part of the whole experience was participating as an extra in crowd scenes. I’m certain my likeness won’t amount to anything more on the big screen than one of hundreds of other figures, but walking down Market St in a hushed recreation of a candlelight vigil is a wonderful, if somber, memory to savor until Milk hits the theaters.

While the location shooting is over for the most part (there’s still a call for extras on March 9th) and the neighborhood reverts back to its same boring facades, there remains one spectacular part of the set left intact: the restored Castro Theater marquee. The neon is ablaze and even the letters blink their way down the sign. I don’t remember it looking this good…ever.

Only a couple years ago, Jessie St was a derelict side street with worn buildings literally disintegrating into the landscape. Over the past year that same street has transformed into Mint Plaza, a simple but urbane stent of sorts that aims to heal the disharmony between the druggy sclerosis of 6th and Mission and the glitzy consumerism of nearby Bloomingdale’s and Metreon. Sure, there will be trendy restaurants and luxury lofts (including the former drug dens above - hip!) but anchoring the whole project, at least in my mind, is Blue Bottle Coffee’s new cafe.

If you’ve ever had the superb coffee from those funny carts tucked into garages and farmer’s markets on both sides of the bay, there is now a fully-fledged structure beckoning converts and philistines alike. The austere interior is befitting a modern chapel for the coffee faithful. Its future-primitive array of chemistry lab-like curios stands ready to proselytize with the particular method of extraction/intoxication you desire. Espresso drinks, single-origin espresso, siphon coffee and what I assume is a contraption for decanting coffee concentrate.

I’m glad that Blue Bottle decided to go with a coffee brewer other than a Clover. They’re cool machines, to be sure, but I’ve never been too impressed with the coffee they produce. I’ll have to try more of this siphon coffee before I’m totally taken with it; at the very least it’s a more interesting process to watch. Still, as a part of both our urban and coffee landscapes, Blue Bottle’s cafe is a welcome beacon of renewal.

Update:
m’ladyfriend and I have made a weekly habit of breakfast and coffee at Blue Bottle. We also seem to have a knack for choosing venues that are the subjects of media coverage. Dig the video featuring P as she sits in the window in this gripping ABC7News story

keep your eye out for a possible cameo in an upcoming story on Pizzeria Delfina…
Update 2:
Oh, brother.  She might as well get her SAG card.  Now appearing on SFGate’s Pizza Friday

If you were casually reading the news in the last couple days, you might think that there were some playful hijinks afoot in that magnificent, if a bit tricky, shipping channel some of us call the Bay. It was initially reported that a pilot ran a 65,000 ton ship into the Bay Bridge, carving a gash in its side and spilling 140 gallons of oil. The number was eventually revised to upwards of 58,000 gallons and the oil is now spreading far beyond the impact site.

Yet the following day the Chronicle’s headline was not “Environmental Catastrophe!” or even “Damn, That’s a Shit-ton of Crude!” but “Crunch!”, as if to highlight the mechanical spectacle of it all. Still, with all the pictures coming in and the news reports sitting at the top of the Most Emailed lists, it’s clear that the public, at least, is concerned. I can’t help but think of the environmental aftershocks of this event and feel like one of the surfers interviewed: superdepressed.

Maybe this isn’t the Exxon Valdez, but it’s not the first time an oil spill has spoiled the waters here. 40, 000 gallons in 1996; 420,000 gallons (!) in 1988; 26,000 gallons in 1986; and 20,000 gallons in 1971 when two oil tankers collided under the Golden Gate Bridge. Scientists and Exxon are still arguing about the health of Prince William Sound almost 20 years later. But it’s all too clear that in the 21st century, with our atmosphere warming, our natural resources dwindling, and our waters polluted, we are swimming in oil.

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.

M’ladyfriend and I were sitting on a motionless MUNI train recently, stalled underground as is more frequently the norm these days, when I was struck: we can dramatically increase efficiency in the transit system today by hearkening back to the rail days of yore. Say what? How?

The Handcar!

Picture it! You stroll out to Market St, a spring in your step, a tune in your head, body shaking with the ecstasy of breathing in the new day. Errrrrttt! Suddenly the rapture screeches to a halt when you see that Nextbus projects a wait of 35 minutes.

“NOOOOOOO!”

Just then a group of three suits pumping away at the lever of a handcar roll by.

“Hop on!” they say.

Soon you’re all 4 stoking the momentum, enjoying the scenery of mid-Market St, shouting a ‘Howd’ya do!’ morning call to the vagrants. One person jumps off at 4th and another at Montgomery. You reach your destination as another group steps on and starts see-sawing their way back up Market. Finally, a clean, green and streamlined transit machine.

I foresee the re-introduction of vintage handcars, a la the F-line, restored to their original condition like the beautiful San Diego car recently added to the system. C’mon Mr. Mayor, put down those bongos and get us some handcars. At this point, the best way to fix MUNI might be to let the people push themselves.

Street entertainment is part of what makes cities so fantastic to live in, to visit, to participate in. I remember back-flips on the subway in Manhattan, puppet shows in Paris; I distinctly recall the weird carnivalesque atmosphere of the Wharf, as a kid, walking by motionless figures on pedestals who were activated into motion by the drop of a coin into their can. Sure, a small town is apt to have its own brand of eccentric or two. And lord yes, there are those half-baked performances that just beg for a streetside gong. But I really love the unexpected serenades which play against the theater of the city street.

Arias on Maiden Lane. That killer jazz trio I caught outside Amoeba in Berkeley, banging out hard bop with a cardboard box kick drum and a broken hi-hat. Or fright-mystic raconteur Omer, stepping out of a doorway on Valencia St to scare rock the shit out of you.

One of my favorite buskers is a guy who seems to go by “T” or “Charles T”. I usually see him at the northernmost end of the Powell St station. His presence is striking: dark skin, white guitar, playing against the monolithic white pebbled surface of the station walls. It’s a bit like walking onto the set of THX 1138 and seeing Jesus. I say this because the man’s voice is a revelation. You can hear him long before and long after you see him playing. He has made this hall his studio and wrapped the corners of it with his voice. Where the plaintive soul of Al Green meets a meditative but slow-burning african guitar strum, T sings originals that will sincerely stop you in your tracks. That’s what his music always does to me.