Long before I moved to (the outer reaches of) Noe Valley, I was aware of its safe, traditional, almost suburban atmosphere. 24th Street is a showcase for middle-of-the-road eateries, shoe shops, flavored lattes, and fleecy weekend wear. It’s also the site for one of the premier stroller derbies in the city, by which I mean the roaming dog and tot zoo that occupies the avenue any given Saturday. The surrounding neighborhood, though, is filled with charming homes, relatively quiet, walkable streets, and just enough protection from Twin Peaks to slow the onslaught of fog.

Situated amongst the mercantile pablum of 24th Street is Harry J Aleo’s wonderfully looney Twin Peaks Properties office, which still displays random conservative memorabilia featuring Reagan or Bush/Cheney through its front windows. He used to post handwritten notes in the front, railing against the liberal loonies and any other affront to his way of life. Harry was clearly a traditionalist.  He once said,

Tradition means a lot to me. We have to maintain some of that tradition for future generations.

Harry’s since passed on, but his beliefs still resonate with a cranky minority wary of changes to their neighborhood.

Like many areas in the city, Noe Valley is evolving. The demographic seems to be trending towards a younger population. Whole Foods moved into the old Bell Market, challenging established mom and pop shops like the 24th St Cheese Co and Drewes as well as several wine shops, flower shops, you name it. There is an invasive proliferation of real estate offices.

And most recently, a Pavement to Parks plaza was proposed for the intersection at 24th and Noe and it’s drawn a lot of ire. Certainly, there are people who are uncomfortable with any challenge to conventional street use. I attended the first community meeting about the proposed plaza and many of the opponents made plangent cries for how it would impact the ease of their drive…around the block. What  stood out to me most was the fury some individuals exhibited, indignant that the city could foist something like this on them and their neighborhood. It was every bit the Tea Party lunacy of the health care forums last fall.

Just consider the contempt shown by opponents to the plaza in this video, which features some of the same eccentricity as a Christopher Guest mockumentary:

One of the obstreperous persons shouting over the city staff in the video is Joel Panzer, “master property manager”, who’s responsible for possibly the tackiest signage in the city (at yet another local real estate office).

He’s also interested in preserving Harry Aleo’s storefront as a museum to traditionalism. After all, they were here first and they want to make sure others remember that.

Maybe all this change – even proposed, temporary change – is just too much for longtime Noe Valley residents, who demonstrated similar rancor when the city changed Army Street to Cesar Chavez Street. I don’t want to seem above nostalgia or historical preservation, but I don’t believe in traditionalism. This city and its neighborhoods are going to change, despite heroic attempts to freeze them in time. I have great hope that, in time, our streets and public spaces will be greener, more walkable, our city made more vibrant by designing for the pedestrian environment over the automobile, thus reintegrating islands of suburbia like Noe Valley into a cohesive urban fabric. The Pavement to Parks program is a great way to test different ideas while soliciting community input. As with health care reform, I trust that a very vocal, but misinformed minority won’t derail its progress.

We just never got the East Bay. There is no shortage of charming little enclaves with names like Elmwood, Piedmont, Kensington or Temescal; names that sound, with no small irony, like suburban developments. Yet, I don’t think a neighborhood defined by a three to four block stretch of a busy street has much soul or character, especially when it all but closes down by 7:00 or 8:00 at night. Yes, there are nice little streets and some lovely independent shops and restaurants in the East Bay, but everything is disconnected by great miles of road and swaths of homes.

Oakland itself is such a weird place, all sprawling and discombobulated, from the bay to the wooded hills.  Pockets of extreme wealth and pockets of turbulent poverty. Pristine homes and ramshackle neglect. Manicured front yards and makeshift urban farms. I often felt like a tourist without a map, trying to connect it all. I think it says something that my favorite open space there is an old cemetery: Oakland was once thriving but seems to be just barely breathing at this point. “There is no there there” as it’s been said and repeated ad nauseum. There is tremendous potential there, and perhaps that’s true of the East Bay as a whole, but I’m just not ready to live in suburbia.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back. Here’s a travelogue of sorts from the last 9 months of living abroad:

The Best

Amazing sunsets. Of course, living in the flatlands as most people do, the only time I got to see them was on BART or on the vertiginous trails and lookout points around Tilden. And it’s really those features in the distance – SF’s skyline and Mt. Tam  - that make it.

Urban Biking. For its myriad faults and self-righteousness, Berkeley’s forward thinking bike policy makes for an amazing network of bike-friendly roads. Does it also make for aggravated, insensitive drivers on the more trafficked roads? You bet. Pedestrians, watch your toes. Oakland’s bike routes, while not nearly as seamless or hazard-free, offer a landscape unlike any other. Pedaling from North Oakland through West Oakland to Jack London Square is like watching a reel of Le Voyage Dans La Lune on the set of Brazil.

Springtime. People like to rhapsodize about the better weather in the East Bay but the difference is pretty marginal. The biggest benefit of living there, for me, was watching the foliage change with the seasons. Yuppies sure love to landscape their yards and come March there is a riot of green shoots and flower blossoms. We moved in the dark of January and the transformation was shocking, waking up to literally find flowers budding overnight. I had forgotten, and missed, the natural theater of spring. Walking to BART felt like walking down the yellow brick road…a barren suburban road where people scurry from car to house, but still. Pretty.

Oakland’s Ghetto Deco. I was familiar with the exquisite Paramount and Fox theaters, but looking at the beautiful tiled facades and ornate cornices of the old I Magnin’s, Breuner’s, and Sears buildings, as well as Flora and even the smaller structures in between (wait, that’s a wig shop in that gorgeous space?!), I felt like an archeologist uncovering a forgotten bustling city underneath the grime and mundane boxy office towers.

The Worst

BART. We were so naive. We thought we were trading a primitive, sloth-like MUNI for a more efficient transit system unencumbered by street traffic. Not so. It’s more like we traded plastic seats for cloth ones (all the better to hide mysterious stains, smells and booger collections.  See next.)

People on BART. So appalling, it deserves its own mention. Most of the passengers sleep or pretend to sleep so they don’t have to get up for pregnant women and the elderly. It happens every single day. BART doesn’t provide the same electric and amusing brand of psychotics as does MUNI, but the pathology is merely shifted onto the everyday passenger who treat the seats or aisles like their private powder room. Is it the long commute that makes people crazy? Also, what is it about BART that beckons nose-picking?  It feels like at times like I’m watching a first grade class loafing in Men’s Warehouse and Dress Barn attire.

Medieval sword fights. Dungeons and Dragons?  The knights who say “Ni!”?  I have no idea what these dorks playing with swords and shields in the Rockridge station parking lot are all about, but this kind of shit is soooo East Bay.

Markets. I really don’t understand where or how people shop for food over here. Everything closes early or closes on the weekend. The undeservedly famed Berkeley Bowl is a vortex of angry moms, trustafarian burnouts and mediocre food. And that’s just the parking lot. In other words, a classic East Bay clusterfuck. Monterey Market, while slightly calmer and offering some decent produce, is more warehouse than market and like most places in the East Bay, should require you to sign a release form before you enter the parking lot as a pedestrian or bicyclist. Market Hall is an overpriced bonanza for the banal. The Pasta Shop is fine, for fresh pasta particularly, but the average corner store in SF is better than Market Hall Produce Market which offers basics like milk at more than twice the cost you’ll find elsewhere.

Driving. The East Bay is a series of communities connected, if in no other way, than by roads.  Literal mazes of freeways, major thoroughfares, and endless residential streets winding every which way. Most EBers I know are more apt to drive anywhere and I can sympathize – the geography and lack of efficient transit seem to demand it – but it’s hard to connect to anyone from inside your car and I think the region as a whole suffers from the effects of too many cars and not enough vibrant public spaces.

Though it is spartan, even strangely adorned with vehicular impedimenta, I find this space very beautiful. It’s the drill court at the Armory, an incongruous building at 14th and Mission in a city that seems to celebrate such architectural discord.

The moorish castle-inspired building was originally built as a National Guard facility in 1914. It was empty for years, and always seemed like a bizarre fenestrated asteroid dropped on the neighborhood. Eventually, kink.com moved in and while I’m not privy to the exact goings-on, the word is it’s kinky. Nothing wrong with creative re-use. The best part is that they’ve leased the drill court back to an organization responsible for developing the space into a community center.  SPUR is leading a tour of the Armory on September 30th and other than crawling in a window, this is a rare opportunity to view this space until it’s fully developed.

Of the many amazing but forlorn buildings deserving renovation, the Hibernia Bank building on Jones and McAllister streets has always struck me as exceptional. It is a beacon for the mid-Market area, perfectly representing its squalor and stagnation, but also its tremendous potential for inspired urban renewal.  The stretch on Market St from 5th to Van Ness is desperate for revitalization, and ripe for it too, with many striking facades and shuttered theaters.

The old Strand theater, with the federal building looming behind it, defines the very discord of modern and historic that makes the urban landscape so appealing to me. The restoration of the nearby Book Concern building into incredibly tiny condos (250 sf?!) is not to my taste, but it does at least represent a step in bringing new life to the area.

The old Mint on 5th and Mission could be a good example of appropriate restoration and reuse of historic spaces.  The space is currently empty, but owned by the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society who envision a new cultural institution including a museum and visitor center. Meanwhile, Mint Plaza has literally sprouted up around the building to give the landmark new context in its urban setting.  As I’ve mentioned before, this was just another pee-smelling alley a few years ago. Now it’s a pee-smelling alley with plants and pedestrian amenities and restaurants.  In other words, a postage stamp size San Francisco!

Modern architecture can create inviting spaces in many forms, but there’s something really inspiring about these grand old spaces.  The style and accessories of their eras are charming, but part of the appeal for me is the very juxtaposition of the old and new in this city.  I hope that, to borrow an unfortunate phrase of my fellow mellow citizens, we can keep San Francisco’s architecture weird.

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 ripping up a boring section of grass and gardening in the City’s most stately plaza might inspire locals 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

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.

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.

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 interior is austere, as befits a modern chapel for the coffee faithful. What calls to your attention are the array of chemistry lab-like curios, 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 much 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.  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, where 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 urban landscape is mutable, even incapable of remaining the same. But in the name of change old theaters are torn down or turned into gyms. Ridiculous towers of glass, modeled after air filters, spring up with freeway views and plenty of parking. 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.

Change can be positive, but I think it’s important 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 to remind us of how beautiful this city once was are the photographs.

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