Photo: Matthew Roth

And who should they hang for granting variances permitting higher than 2:1 ratios, as happened last week when a two-unit home at 2626 Larkin Street in Russian Hill received permission from the San Francisco Planning Commission to build five parking spaces, one with a parking stacker for additional cars?

When these questions are asked of city planners and developers, like they were during the struggle to limit parking at 299 Valencia Street, advocates and political leaders are led to believe that it is impossible to finance new developments, particularly condos and non-rental properties, without the maximum parking ratio possible. Less parking, goes the developer refrain, banks will refuse to loan and the units will be impossible to re-sell.

Not all developers buy that argument, however, and some have buildings that disprove it.

"If you are doing a project next to BART or many buses, you really don't need to have a lot of cars," said Oz Erickson, Chairman of the Emerald Fund, Inc, a developer who has built more than 2,000 units in San Francisco. Emerald's newest development, a rental building at 333 Harrison Street in Rincon Hill, will be built with a .5:1 parking-to-unit ratio, even though the developer could appeal for a variance to build more parking.

Above all else, Erickson argued, a city should provide as much flexibility in developments as possible. "You really should be in a position where zoning laws do not require you to put in parking," he said.

Patrick Kennedy's Gaia Building in Berkeley has 91 units and only 35 parking spaces. Photo: jeremydw

Referring to cyclists and others who don't own cars: "I think it's important to provide them with an opportunity to live a car-free life if they choose to."

Photo: pbo31

As we documented on Streetsblog, over-reliance on LOS considerations by planners has traditionally led to widening intersections and roadways to improve the flow of automobile traffic at the expense of other modes. If the amendments made by Natural Resources stand and are formalized by January 1, 2010, the deadline for the changes, cities and counties around the state will have the flexibility to consider capacity metrics like LOS alongside other metrics that prioritize transit, pedestrians, and cyclists. The new rules would even allow city planners to walk away from LOS completely.

From the introduction to the proposed changes:

The intent of those amendments was to recognize a lead agency’s discretion to choose its own methodology for determining transportation-related impacts of a project while ensuring that all components of a circulation system are addressed in the analysis. The proposed revisions would refocus the question from the capacity of the circulation system to the performance of the circulation system as indicated in an applicable plan or ordinance. The proposed revisions also clarify and update language regarding safety considerations and other mass transit and non-motorized transportation issues.

In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom's Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the City Attorney have been collaborating with the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA) to replace LOS with a new metric for measuring the projected environmental impacts of a development or a project by the total number of new automobile trips it will generate (ATG). The city and county believe this new metric would move the focus away from how many cars move through a particular intersection to how many additional cars would be added to the total traffic picture. By default, this metric would prioritize transit improvements, bicycle infrastructure, and pedestrian safety measures, none of which would add automobile trips.

"This is a fantastic development with tremendous impact for transportation analysis in California," said TA Executive Director Jose Luis Moscovich in an email. "We are optimistic that, after two rounds of hearings and comments, the CEQA guidelines will drop references to congestion and automobile LOS. The Authority is proud to have worked hard with our partners at the Mayor's office and City Attorney's office to bring about this exciting reform."

Bicycle advocates in San Francisco, who have been waiting three years for the lifting of an injunction preventing the city to build any new bicycle infrastructure, in part because of LOS concerns, were equally enthusiastic.

"Together with SB 375... and other state-level direction for plan/ordinance/policy-based transportation evaluation, this checklist language puts us in a much better place for nurturing bikeways and livable neighborhoods in San Francisco and across California," said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Program Director Andy Thornley, who also noted that the important shift from capacity measurements to overall performance of a transportation network would by necessity prioritize transit and other modes in a network, not just cars.

In Oakland, LOS thresholds have been raised to thwart proposals for bicycle lanes on key corridors linking the bicycle network to BART and other transit nodes. "The most critical proposed change in the Transportation Guidelines is the removal of the word 'capacity,'" said East Bay Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Robert Raburn. "The concept of capacity has acted to guard and promote automobile traffic to the detriment of any other mode of travel. In place of this unhealthy fixation, we can look forward to an inclusive consideration of 'the performance of the circulation system, taking into account all modes....'"

In San Jose, where officials adopted a policy in 2005 that ignored auto LOS impacts [PDF] in sections of the city where they wanted to encourage transit ridership, increased cycling, pedestrian safety, and livable neighborhoods, the CEQA revisions validated the city's position.

"It is not a coincidence that the state's policy mirrors San Jose's flexible approach to reforming outdated, auto-centric LOS policies," said Hans Larsen, Acting Director of San Jose's Department of Transportation. "These proposed state policy guidelines give every city in California the opportunity to follow the progressive 'smart growth' direction that San Jose adopted in 2005."

Parking Availability Under CEQA

Another significant revision to the transportation guidelines is the elimination from the environmental checklist of the guarantee that a project provides "adequate parking capacity," a rule that has made transit oriented development more difficult and has increased the supply of parking generally. Although a 2002 lawsuit against the City of San Francisco and the developers of the Westfield Mall clarified that the supply of parking is a social impact not an environmental impact, the CEQA guidelines had not been updated to reflect the ruling.

From San Franciscans Upholding the Downtown Plan v. City and County of San Francisco, "The social inconvenience of having to hunt for scarce parking spaces is not an environmental impact; the secondary effect of scarce parking on traffic and air quality is. Under CEQA, a project's social impacts need not be treated as significant impacts on the environment. An EIR need only address the secondary physical impacts that could be triggered by a social impact."

UCLA Professor Donald Shoup elaborated on the point in a letter to be submitted to Natural Resources:

No one knows how much parking is “adequate.” Adequate for what? Does “adequate” mean enough parking spaces so that everyone can drive to the project and park free when they get there? Providing so much parking that no one can say a project has “inadequate” parking capacity has done great damage in California.... In effect, urban planners treat free parking as an entitlement, and they consider the resulting demand for free parking a “need” that must be met. Off-street parking requirements create an abundance of parking spaces, drive the market price of parking to zero, and thus explain why drivers can park free for 99 percent of their trips. Off-street parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars.



Cities require off-street parking spaces because the market supposedly fails to provide enough of them. But the market fails to provide many things at a price everyone can afford. It fails to provide affordable housing for many families, for instance, and those who argue for affordable housing usually find themselves in an uphill battle. But cities have without a second thought imposed planning requirements to ensure affordable parking. Rather than charge fair market prices for on-street parking, cities require ample off-street parking for every land use. As a result, most of us drive almost everywhere we go.



CEQA’s parking policy makes this bad situation even worse. Rather than try to force up the parking supply and automobile trips, CEQA should focus on reducing automobile trips, or should at least not have a policy that will increase automobile trips.

Public comment on the proposed amendments to the CEQA guidelines closes on November 10, 2009.

POST UPDATED: 5:30 pm

Proposed CEQA Transportation Changes in Detail:

A generation ago, nearly half of all U.S. kids walked or bicycled to school. Today, less than fifteen percent do, with the majority arriving at school in private automobiles. It’s no coincidence, then, that studies show more than a quarter of San Francisco’s children are overweight. But a new program hopes to change that trend, while reducing greenhouse gas pollution and increasing fun.

With the help of a $500,000 grant from the federal government, San Francisco has launched its own “Safe Routes to Schools” program, aimed at encouraging students and parents to walk or bike to school.

At Longfellow Elementary last Wednesday, October 7th, students joined parents on a “walking school bus.” Although the date was part of International Walk to School Day, organizers plan group walks to school every Wednesday—with the ultimate goal of walking to school every day.

Stephen O'Brien has been coaxing an oasis out of a most unlikely environment for a long time: the small green patches at either end of the ground level Mission Street frontage of the Transbay Terminal. He started back in 1958, when the old Key System train tracks that used to bring East Bay electric streetcars to the Transbay Terminal were being torn out. The Transbay Terminal in those days was a crucial commuter hub, bringing passengers from all over the East Bay. If you've ever ridden the F bus from Berkeley to San Francisco, you've ridden on the descendant of the same-lettered streetcar that once transported you from downtown Berkeley to downtown San Francisco just a minute longer than BART does today!

O'Brien is having his last day working his gardens at the Transbay Terminal today. His company's contract with Caltrans has ended, and he has been transferred to the State Building or the PUC building grounds. He's almost 80 years old and if he doesn't like his new posting, he'll probably retire soon. It'll be hard to match the half century he's spent cultivating the quiet, almost invisible oases at the Transbay Terminal. I heard about O'Brien from my friend Susanne Zago:

"Every morning I step out of the Transbay Terminal, one of the ugliest places I've ever been, and I notice this small green space as I leave. Sometimes it was completely trashed, but the next day I'd look in and it would be restored to its pristine condition. I looked at the trees, surprisingly mature, wondering what was planned for them as they build the new Transbay Center. I started asking around, and no one knew. One day I met this man who was in the space and it turned out to be Stephen."

July 20, 1953, Key System train awaits on platform in Transbay Terminal. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

Passengers boarding Key System train, June 8, 1948.

A natural oasis at 1st and Mission.

Beneath this 45-year-old pine lies a hidden patch of nature, nurtured for a half century by Stephen O'Brien.

A garden flourishes in a forgotten corner.

Stephen O'Brien knows what's going to happen. His 52 years of nurturing these garden spots will be bulldozed with the rest of the old 1939 Terminal, making way for the new tallest building in San Francisco and a multi-billion dollar transit center. The project has been gestating for years. I once had an office at 37 Clementina, which is only about a block away, and I remember the original plan in the late 1980s to bring Caltrain into the city center at 1st and Mission in order to connect to BART and MUNI, establishing a true regional transit hub. The Caltrain extension was deep-sixed by transit planners. Years went by, during which BART was extended to the airport and MUNI extended its N-Judah by building waterfront tracks around to 4th and Townsend (massively subsidizing the Giants' "privately financed" stadium). Now they've resuscitated the Caltrain extension, in order to bring High-Speed Rail into the center of downtown. The profligate waste of resources is breathtaking. But as long as engineering firms and contractors and building trades workers are all keeping busy, it's good for the economy right?

Anyway, as we go through our daily lives it's easy to not see the little patches of nature struggling to gain a foothold in the aptly named concrete jungle. I spoke to O'Brien on Wednesday and learned a bit about his long service at this deeply layered historical site. He told me when he showed up in 1958 there were just brown patches where today there is dense foliage and tall trees. I went to look for old photos at the Main Library's online collection, and as you can see from these pictures, the spots that Stephen has been maintaining have always been "green," albeit nothing like what he's helped them become.

In this December 27, 1939 photo taken in the first year of the Transbay Terminal's operation, you can see the two garden spots laid out from the beginning. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

By August 10, 1964, Stephen O'Brien had been watering and attending this garden for almost six years. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

October 8, 2009, just months before demolition.

O'Brien has an interesting history himself. He's got an Irish name but on his mother's side of the family, he has an English grandfather and a German grandmother. His English grandfather once owned a dairy ranch on the western slopes of Mt. Tamalpais before selling it off for $500! O'Brien grew up in Tomales Bay, and as a young man he jumped at the chance to purchase a lot in the newly subdivided Inverness back in the 1940s: $25 down and $25 a month until he'd paid off the $1,000 price. Today his lot is the only one left in Inverness that hasn't had a house built on it.

He told me about the barber who used to have his business inside the Terminal. After helping him sink his plumbing O'Brien got free haircuts for a long time. There used to be three different restaurants inside too, including the James Gray Company restaurant, and shoeshine and shoe repair were also thriving businesses there. Continental Trailways bus service once used the station in competition with Greyhound, just as other train lines once ran across the Bay Bridge along with the Key System, until the Bay Bridge was converted to motorized vehicles only.

O'Brien was in the basement a few years ago and saw that the vast underground space was still as good as new. Nevertheless, it's all coming down soon. He noted that the rebuilding of the Fremont Street ramps from the Bay Bridge had probably saved his gardens for an extra seven or eight years. The gnarly pine tree closest to First Street was saved from a nearby State Building, when O'Brien transplanted it from a discarded planter. It's grown to be 20 feet tall and while it's oddly shaped there's no denying that is seems to be thriving with its roots in the ground! The twin pines at either end of the Terminal were planted more than 45 years ago and though they've grown rather tall, they're dwarfed by the skyscrapers that have continued the southward march from downtown. O'Brien told me about the various birds, LBB's, gulls, hawks, and pigeons that have made this mini-habitat a resting spot. Varieties of butterflies have found a home here too.

The eastern end of the Terminal plaza.

The Millennium tower dwarfing the 45-year-old pine tree at Fremont and Mission.

To the west, this ungainly monster dominates a hearty pine tree that was saved from a discarded planter by Stephen O'Brien.

Who remembers that the highrise in the photo above was built on the site of the old arcade known as "Fun Terminal"? The same "Fun Terminal" that gave its name to the seminal album by local rockers The Mutants back in the early 1980s?...

Fun Terminal! Right across 1st Street from O'Brien's Garden back in the 1970s-80s.

Stephen was philosophical about losing his half-century's work. It makes him sad, of course. O'Brien's gardens have survived in surprised juxtaposition to the changing neighborhood that surround them. Easy to overlook, his gardens are larger examples of the persistence of nature even in a highly built environment. For those of us who haven't noticed the garden spots as we've scurried by, preoccupied with the day's work or the domestic dramas ahead, their imminent disappearance (they will no longer be maintained, but should stand for a few months more at least) might serve as a cautionary note. Shouldn't we stop and smell the flowers? And shouldn't we honor the essential work of the invisible toilers in our midst, people like Stephen O'Brien who has selflessly and without ulterior motive kept these little patches of urban greenery flourishing for decades? Stop by today and say thanks to Stephen O'Brien!

In 1953, pigeons had the roost of the lawn... (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Going, going, ...

November 1965 view looking southeast over the Transbay Terminal. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

Terminal History

San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal was built in 1939 at 1st and Mission Streets as a California Toll Bridge Authority facility in order to facilitate commuter rail travel across the lower portion of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.  It was paid for by Bay Bridge tolls, which were then 50 cents per automobile.  At the time, the lower deck of the Bay Bridge was not only used for automobile travel, but also hosted two rail tracks on the south side. The rail portion was run principally through the Key System.

The Terminal was designed to handle as many as 35 million people annually with a peak 20-minute rate of 17,000 commuters that were transported in 10-car trains at headways of 63.5 seconds. In its heyday at the end of World War II, the terminal’s rail system was transporting 26 million passengers annually. After the war ended and gas rationing was eliminated, the Terminal’s use began to steadily decline to a rate of four to five million people traveling by rail per year. In 1958, the lower deck of the Bay Bridge was converted to automobile traffic only, the Key System was dismantled, and by 1959, the inter-modal Transbay Terminal was converted into a bus-only facility, which it currently is today.  (from the Transbay Center website)

Flickr photo: pbo31

The signs, two of seven the MTA plans to install around the city, are part of the SFgo program that will upgrade traffic signals on Oak and Fell by interconnecting them with fiber optic cables and controlling them by central computer. The MTA staff at the meeting presented the plan as part of the city's transit-first policy, but they acknowledged that the choice of Oak and Fell Streets makes that claim look less than sincere. They also offered little in the way of optimism that the new signals and signs might prevent last week's tragedy, when a motorist sped around a stopped car on Fell Street at Broderick and drove into Melissa Dennison, killing her instantly.

The tragedy prompted City Traffic Engineer Jack Lucero Fleck to join his staffer Cathal Hennessy at the neighborhood meeting. He was compassionate, echoing the sentiments of SFBC Program Manager Marc Caswell in pointing out that it's illegal and dangerous to move around a stopped car at an intersection and that a green light does not mean you have the right of way but rather that you may proceed if the intersection is free of pedestrians and other traffic. Police Lieutenant Lon Ramlan, on the other hand, was irresponsible, implicitly exonerating the motorist by stressing that "it's an accident" and asking people to be careful when they cross the street because there might be a car passing that stopped car.

Since the tragedy and the meeting, conversation in the neighborhood has centered around what can be done on Fell and Oak Streets to calm traffic and restore some of the safety and civility that the neighborhood knew before the last half century of work by traffic engineers to cram more and more cars through the neighborhood. Based on conversations with many local leaders, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi who represents the district, and transportation professionals, here are some ideas that might provide a consensus.

1. Forget the signs. They make the street look more like a freeway and less like a quiet neighborhood street that it once was and could be again. The Fell Street has the bona fide benefit of telling motorists when the Concourse garage is full (which frequently occurs on weekends) and directing them to the mammoth (and empty) garages at UCSF (which should have been used in lieu of the Concourse Garage in the first place, but that's another story). The Oak Street sign has no benefit, even for motorists.

2. Slow speeds to 18 mph or less. While state law prevents the city from reducing the speed limit to less than 25 mph (except on alleys), it does not prevent the city from timing its lights for very slow speeds. Arguably this would do more for pedestrian safety than restoring the streets to two-way operation, and it would almost certainly do more for neighborhood livability as slower speeds result in much quieter traffic. Portland, Oregon times its lights on certain downtown one-way streets for speeds as slow as 12 mph.

3. Use pricing at the freeway on- and off-ramps to reduce congestion at peak hours. The Transportation Authority's congestion pricing study was focused on preventing downtown congestion, when a fairer and probably more effective focus would be a citywide pricing scheme focused on the freeway on- and off-ramps.

4. Admit that even with pricing, and certainly before pricing takes effect, car congestion is a fact of life in San Francisco (and any city worth living in) and seek to manage it smartly. This is in contrast to dealing with it by increasing capacity at choke points, which just has the effect of moving the problem elsewhere. In the case of Fell and Oak Streets, this means different things for the morning and afternoon commute periods.

In the morning, the choke point is Octavia Boulevard, and backed-up cars on Oak Street divert to Haight and Page Street, important bicycle and transit streets. Using the signals to reduce capacity before it gets near the freeway will spread out the congestion and ease the movement onto the freeway at Octavia. This ought to be coupled with measures to reduce through automobile traffic on Page and Haight Street.

In the afternoon, the congestion takes place mostly on the freeway itself, out of the way of city streets. The problem occurs when motorists enjoy the wide-open expanse of Fell Street after Octavia Boulevard, and especially adjacent to the park. Why does Fell Street need four lanes next to Golden Gate Park when only three lanes feed it? Fell Street along the Panhandle would be a perfect location for a cycle track. It would reduce the lanes to three, still plenty, and take fast-moving cyclists off the crowded mixed-use path on the Panhandle. Doing the same treatment on Oak Street would help the morning congestion problem, for that matter.

The SFgo program as originally conceived is definitely a product of the old Department of Parking (Lots) and Traffic (Congestion), and much of its focus now seems like the last gasp of the DPT, whose logo adorned the informational placard Hennessy brought to show the neighborhood audience. The technology could be used to promote safety and the city's transit-first policy as its proponents currently claim it does, but so far on Oak and Fell Street there is little evidence it is being used that way.

Famously, we live on a crack in the earth. The San Andreas Fault gets most of our attention, followed not too far behind these days by the equally ominous Hayward Fault. A major earthquake on either of these could alter local landscapes forever, and will certainly damage or destroy freeways, bridges, and the water system. That's one of our catastrophes waiting in the wings, and it's good think about preparing for such eventualities.

Less obvious, but just as much a part of our local natural landscape (largely obscured by asphalt and buildings), are the old waterways on which the city is built. The evidence for these underground waterways is in plain view as well as being represented in various public documents. Joel Pomerantz wrote "San Francisco's Clean Little Secret" a few years ago (first appearing in a book I edited "The Political Edge" City Lights: 2004) wherein he found in SF Water Dept. official reports the saga of the "Mighty Hayes River." Starting deep underground somewhere near Lone Mountain, the subterranean river flows southeast under Civic Center, and as you can see on this map, once surfaced around 7th and Mission.

1852 U.S. Coastal Survey Map of San Francisco, from Yerba Buena Cove at upper right to Mission Bay on right. Mission Plank Road is the long diagonal that clips the edge of the swampy wetlands at apx. today's 7th and Mission.

"With a hydromorphology not unlike Florida’s everglades, [the Hayes River] broadsides Market Street, encountering a long concrete subway tunnel that interrupts its gait. So copious are the waters of the Hayes that, to protect their investment from damage, BART runs “de-watering” pumps day and night in the Powell Street BART station. Removing, each week, 2.5 million gallons of tested, high-quality, potable groundwater (into the sewer!) the transit agency keeps the Hayes from flooding the tracks."

It's not far to the obvious subsidence at Natoma Alley just west of 7th where the street level falls at least 5 feet from the grade on the larger 7th Street.

Natoma Street, easterly, just west of 7th.

Same intersection of Natoma and 7th looking from east to west.

On Howard Street, a hundred or so feet south, two warehouses have been slowly sinking into the underlying marsh. Several efforts to cosmetically disguise what's happening have been implemented in recent years, but this latest version, painting the horizontal red boxes, seems to emphasize the effect.

Sinking warehouses on Howard Street opposite Langton Alley. Note the red horizontal boxes painted on the front of the darker warehouse... the second one noticeably angles downward. Note too how the stripes in the road indicate the dip.

Same warehouse straight on.

Extreme Pizza brick building on Folsom near Russ Street. Cracks in the facade have been patched, but there's no denying the building is slumping to the right, sinking into the marsh!

Just around the corner from the Pizza brick building, on Russ Alley, these cars highlight a sinking spot.

These buildings on Folsom between 6th and 5th show signs of subsidence too. The older ones are tipping back from the street, as the rear of the structures are sinking. Before a lot of new lofts were built in the 1990s in this area, many old warehouses were obviously sinking after the 1989 earthquake, on Folsom, Harrison and the alleys in between.

In an 1878 history by J.S. Hittell (History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of the State of California, cited in Nancy Olmsted’s Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay. San Francisco: Mission Creek Conservancy, 1986) the 80-100 foot deep marshes presented a significant barrier to surface transportation. The first road to cross them was the Mission Plank tollroad, but there engineering problems right away.

“Mission Bay’s slender connection to Gold Rush San Francisco is the Mission Plank Road. (today’s Mission Street), which opened as a toll road in 1851. Its three-and-a-quarter-mile length ran into trouble for the contractors where it crossed the line of Seventh Street (shown but not named on the map).

Here they projected a bridge built on pilings, “but that plan had to be abandoned, to the astonishment and dismay of the contractor; the first pile, forty feet long, at the first blow of the pile driver sank out of sight, indicating that there was no bottom within forty feet to support a bridge. One pile having disappeared, the contractor hoisted another immediately over the first and in two blows drove the second down beyond the reach of the hammer… there was no foundation within eighty feet… pilings were abandoned, and cribs of logs were laid upon the turf so as to get a wider base than offered by piles. The bridge made thus always shook when crossed by heavy teams and gradually settled till it was in the middle about five feet below the original level… the cost of the road was ninety-six thousand dollars, about thirty thousand dollars per mile… the plank road company obtained another franchise for a road on Folsom Street… in 1854 a high tide overflowed the [Folsom] road between Fourth and Fifth and floated off the planking.”

J.S. Hittell observes that, although these marshy areas were called swamps, “They seem to have been for part of their area at least, subterranean lakes from forty to eighty feet deep, covered by a crust of peat moss eight or ten feet thick… When the streets were first made, the weight of the sand pressed the peat down, so that the water stood where the surface was dry before… More than once a contractor had put on enough sand to raise the street to the official grade, and gave notice to the city engineer to inspect the work, but in the lapse of a day between notice and inspection the sand had sunk down six or eight feet… heavy sand crowded under the light peat at the sides of the street and lifted it up eight or ten feet above its original level, in muddy riddges full of hideous cracks…it was also pushed sidewise so that houses and fences built upon it were carried away from their original position and tilted up at singular angles…”

The toll road to the mission probably would have gone out Market Street instead of trying to cross these soggy swamps, but in that era tall sand hills still dominated the terrain. The relatively flat Market Street we know today was blocked by an 80-foot sandhill between Second and Third Streets… What happened to all that sand? In the period 1859 to 1873, the "steam paddy" (or giant steam shovel—it was said to do the work of twenty Irish laborers at a single stroke) took south-of-Market sand to fill Mission Bay, establishing a century-long pattern of leveling hills and using the sand, rock, and soil to fill in nearby wetlands to "make land." It wasn't until the 1965 McAteer-Petris Act established the Bay Conservation and Development Commission that the pell-mell filling of the bay was halted.

Market and Powell are written in hand on this 1851 photo. This view is from apx. 2nd and Folsom. Note the very tall sand dunes to the left and in the distance. This is today's rather flat South of Market area!

This Oma-fiets (or, Grandma-bicycle, in Dutch) sits for sale at the Market Street storefront of "My Dutch Bike" while a typical "American" bike is pedaled by outside. Photo by Frank Chan.

Seeing an opportunity, Nasirian teamed up with Dutch husband Oscar Mulder to open up a new business to peddle Dutch pedals: My Dutch Bike on Market Street just east of Second Street. Their shop sells a few high-end Dutch city bikes, as well as the bakfiets, the Dutch answer to cargo bikes. Their sales are good enough to keep them in business, she says, although most of their business is online, and they will be moving soon to another location.

My Dutch Bike is just one manifestation of a veritable frenzy of marketing to the fastest-growing segment in the bicycle market: everyday, utilitarian bicycles. It sparks some interesting questions: What can we do to encourage the trend? What will the quintessential American, or San Franciscan, city bike look like?

In every country where bicycles are commonplace transportation, almost every single bike comes equipped with lights, fenders, a rack, and chainguard. In Germany, those items, plus a bell and a kickstand, are mandatory on any bike not sold as a stripped-down "sports bike."

David Baker's "Old Dutch" has all these elements, and the typical Dutch bike geometry - large (28") diameter wheels, very upright posture - that makes them especially elegant for urban transportation. "I have 12 bikes, but this is the one I pick when I go on most trips," Baker says. "It turns the act of riding into this very pleasant and restful ritual." Riding it feels like you're on a "great ship of state."

The fact that his bike is heavy and geared to a slow one-speed is part of the charm to him. He rides for exercise, so a highly efficient bike defeats that purpose. And the large wheels, while being heavier, have less rolling resistance, handle our rough pavement better, and provide more momentum. It helps he does not have to carry his bike up the stairs.

"If our city were serious about promoting bicycle culture, and meeting the MTA's goal of cutting car use in half by 2030 while doubling bicycling and walking, we have to find a way to subsidize new "city bike" purchases."

This is one of the reasons that Gary Fisher thinks that an American "city bike" has to be lightweight. Talking to me from the European bicycle dealers' show in Germany, Fisher explained that most bikes there stay on the ground floor. Also key, he said, is that people there dawdle around on safe bike paths. "In the United States you have to share the street with traffic and it feels safer to keep up a higher speed. In Germany, you just go your own pace."

Industry leaders are always looking for the next electric bikes or the next "mountain bike boom" and many are betting on city bikes for those purposes. Marin's Joe Breeze makes nothing but city bikes these days, and all the big companies have a line of upright bikes with commuting accessories.

Some think that electric bikes are the route to mainstream acceptance of city bicycling in the United States. In Europe, Fisher says, electric bikes "are the absolute rage," accounting for 30 percent of sales by value. Business people love them because their extra cost brings extra profit. From the user's perspective, the bike looks and feels like a regular bike; the lithium ion batteries kick in power only when needed to climb a hill or increase speed. These are not motorcycles; the rider still has to pedal. At an average cost approaching $1,300 each, however, electric-assist bicycles are not the people's bike.

As our bicycle culture develops, will we too get a quintessential American, or San Franciscan city bike, in the same way that the cultures of the Netherlands, Denmark and China, all have bikes so typical of their respective countries?

That's doubtful. Like this city and nation, our city bikes will be probably be diverse.

It does seem important, though, that we usher in the era of the city bike. Nobody has to carefully think through what kind of lights, trunk, and fenders go best with their automobile when they buy it! Nobody has to tuck in their pant legs or adopt an aggressive, athletic posture when they step in their car or walk to the bus. The same has to be true for bicycling if the movement to put the bicycle at the center of urban transportation systems can expect to be successful.

A woman rides a city bike in Amsterdam. Flickr photo: Amsterdamize

Also, let's be honest, they won't be cheap. An adequate bicycle with all the "city bike" accessories will cost at least $500; a good one costs more. That's less than a car, sure, but it's more than a year's worth of transit passes and a prohibitive expense for vast numbers of people.

Here's the answer to sparking that new market in city bikes: government subsidy.

If our city were serious about promoting bicycle culture, and meeting the MTA's goal of cutting car use in half by 2030 while doubling bicycling and walking, we have to find a way to subsidize new "city bike" purchases. We already subsidize transit passes at a cost of several million dollars a year. A one-year program to match the transit subsidy with a bike subsidy - let's say that's $2 million - could provide $250 coupons for the first 8,000 residents to qualify. Measures could be built in to the program to ensure the bikes actually remain in the possession of the intended coupon recipient and not sold for a profit, but even if there's "fraud," the program will promote city bikes and urban bicycling.

Such a program, which we could dub "Cash for Cycling Eco Stimulus," would work better at the national level, of course. Even a tiny program, say, using the $123 million not claimed from the $3 billion "cash for clunkers" auto purchase subsidy program, could provide $200 coupons for 615,000 people, close to the 700,000 who claimed some cash for their "clunker." Even that absurdly small program would be a huge boost to the American bicycle industry, whose sales hover around 13.4 million units annually today.

Cities don't stand still. Going back at least to WWII, U.S. cities have been radically altered again and again. Economic restructuring has been part of it, as urban areas have shed manufacturing in favor of the so-called service sector: FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) and Tourism (restaurants and hotels plus retail and entertainment). Transportation changes have played a big part too, with the suburbanization of the 1950s-60s fueled (literally) by the interstate highway system and intraurban freeways, and the inexorable expansion of private cars at the expense of public transit. The populations that occupy various neighborhoods in cities, once relatively stable for generations, have moved away, leaving behind spaces whose character has changed with the arrival of new city dwellers, whether from other countries or just elsewhere in the U.S.

It's a long story, and every neighborhood in every city has its own tale to tell. During the past generation a populist opposition to urban gentrification has emerged. It probably starts with the bitter struggles to prevent the 1960s "urban renewal" programs from displacing whole populations (in San Francisco's Fillmore it became known as "negro removal," a precedent well-remembered by those now opposing the Redevelopment Agency in Bayview/Hunter's Point). But during the real estate booms of the 1980s and again during the dotcom boom at the end of the 1990s, right through the historically unprecedented housing bubble that finally popped in 2008, many progressives have worked to confront the forces of gentrification.

Gentrification as a term tends to conflate different "facts on the ground" though. Sometimes it defines a process of social displacement, usually class- or race-based, wherein a poorer population is forced out by rising prices and the steady influx of new residents who can pay those prices. To acolytes of the market, this all seems perfectly reasonable and fair, and the idea that there should be some kind of social restraint on such "efficient" "self-organizing" market mechanisms is anathema. To leftists and housing activists committed to defending the downtrodden and the poor, this system is a thinly disguised process of ethnic cleansing most of the time, and when the outcome isn't blatantly racist, it's still another chapter in a long saga of the rich screwing the rest of us.

Those of us who lean towards this latter way of seeing things are enjoying some schadenfreude today as the Lembi Group, one of San Francisco's most notorious landlords and exploiters of tenants, is sinking under a mountain of debt it incurred during the frenzied market conditions that only recently subsided.

Anti-Google, anti-gentrification graffiti popped up around the Mission a year ago or so. This is on 18th near Dolores.

On the other hand, folks fighting the displacement dynamics of the real estate markets in cities have sometimes fallen into a weird cul-de-sac where they seem to think keeping things seedy and decaying is a good thing, as if that were a way to ensure community stability. I can't cite anyone's public declarations to this effect, but I've certainly heard many friends and comrades tsk-tsking disapprovingly when they see someone painting their building, or putting in sidewalk tables and flowerpots, or any of a number of street-level neighborhood improvements. The sidewalk depaving and gardens I wrote about in January earned that response from some radicals I know too. I suppose the feeling is that if such improvements begin, it's only a matter of time before the Devil of Displacement rides in behind the ferns and wrought-iron ornamentation.

David Byrne, the New York musician (once of Talking Heads fame), has a new book out called "Bicycle Diaries," in which he travels to many cities around the world and the U.S., bringing his bike to help preserve his mental (and physical) health while touring. In his "Diaries" he ruminates on many interesting questions of the role of art, history, urban design, and decries the role of freeways in destroying inner cities and waterfronts among other things. But in one curious part he visits Pittsburgh, PA and has this to say about a clear-cut process of gentrification:

"About four years ago when I was here, [a friend] told me how the Heinz family was intent on bringing life (and eventually urban living) back into the downtown of this former industrial giant. Sometimes a rebirth can be started in one neighborhood and then it spreads to the surrounding areas--if they're not cut off or isolated. Artists move into a former factory district and soon cafés and grocery stores follow. A music club opens, a gallery and a bookstore. Developers turn the warehouses into luxury condos and the process begins again, somewhere else."

In other parts of the book Byrne is quite critical of the dynamics of modern capitalism and the results of unfettered market life on the quality of living it leaves in its wake. But here he embraces the building blocks of gentrification, a version of a life-cycle for urban neighborhoods. True enough, this has happened in many places, sometimes aided by the participation of the poorer residents who struggled to clear vacant lots and start community gardens, or who started street festivals when times were harder that have since become charming ethnic attractions.

To my thinking, the problem is not the efforts people make to improve their physical spaces. Of course there's always an issue of "taste," and what is cool and chic for some is cheezy and offensive to others. Some folks might be glad to see an influx of new cafés, while others would prefer the neighborhood remained forgotten (and thereby open to exploration and unmediated interventions) and "unimproved." The real issue is the right of folks who live in an area to make it their home, to have a sense of stability and comfort in their own communities. In the U.S., and in San Francisco, if you don't own property, you have no stability. With the property-trumps-all logic always hovering over city neighborhoods, tenants and the poor are regularly displaced when inflationary dynamics begin, especially if there is no rent control to stabilize their right to remain.

Conflicts arise predictably though, when an incoming population of hipsters, artists, gays, etc., are openly hostile to the population that is being displaced simultaneously to their arrival, often poor, black or latino, and dependent on the underground economy to sustain themselves. The wealthier new arrivals are naturally targeted for harassment and sometimes crime by those who see them as both invaders and insensitive boors with a disproportionate sense of entitlement.

I'm part of the CounterPULSE art/community space at 9th and Mission in San Francisco, where I curate public Talks on three Wednesdays a month. When we opened in 2005, the neighborhood had a lot of vacancies in the wake of the post-dotcom bust, and we felt lucky to find a place we could afford and get a long-term lease near to BART and transit. Within a block there are also numerous public agencies serving the transient poor and homeless, and the corner in front of CounterPULSE has a bus stop for both the always exciting 14-Mission, as well as several SamTrans lines, mostly used by working class commuters. By 2007, our place had been tagged countless times and our windows had been thoroughly wrecked by teen vandals with etching acid they used to graffiti the glass. Homeless addicts were often sprawled on our sidewalk, at or near the bus stop, for hours during the day, and our front doors were open toilets during the night. We worried about our vulnerability, especially at first, but over time we realized that there wasn't much actual danger, just the day-to-day reality of living in a central city area with a lot of down-and-out folks living on the streets.

CounterPULSE is at 1310 Mission, the turquoise and windowed facade to the right.

A couple of years ago in September we set up out front to enjoy PARK(ing) Day and were joined by dozens of neighbors from the buildings on our block. Together we decided to launch a neighborhood association (it has since gone into limbo) called "Planktown Neighbors," a name we chose to signify the fact that we were on a stretch of Mission that had originally been a plank toll road in the early 1850s. In our discussions we struggled to define our goals (to make our streets more beautiful, more comfortable, and safer, esp. vis-a-vis the car-dominated 9th and Mission Streets), but to be as inclusive as we could be. We were in no position to solve the homelessness drama on our two-block stretch of Mission, but we didn't want to be another NIMBY-ish group of small businesses and cultural organizations who called the police to shoo away "undesirable people." So for starters some of the group decided to invest in large planters to help beautify the block, and we all vowed to put more effort into cleaning the sidewalks and getting to know the people in and around our buildings. We all thought it would be smart if we could get enough of a street transformation under way we might be able to get a city grant, and we could pool resources to hire local street people to help maintain our new trees and sidewalk gardens.

A different planter next to St. James Infirmary, further west on Mission, nearer 10th Street.

Photo: Bryan Goebel

“This Sunday’s event is the finale for 2009, but Sunday Streets will be back in 2010 with more routes, longer hours, more San Francisco neighborhoods and more programs at each event,” Newsom said in a statement. “We have created a new tradition in San Francisco that will improve our quality of life for years to come.”

This year's six Sunday Streets proved to be a real success, with tens of thousands of people spilling into the streets. They were also embraced by merchants, with calls for expanded hours. It left many of us asking: Why can't we do this every Sunday?

Susan King, who organizes Sunday Streets through Livable City, said the Mayor's office is talking about holding eight events next year, but she said nine is also a possibility. The hours will likely be extended, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (instead of 2), and stressed that anything beyond that would be taxing on the volunteers.

"I know people would like it to go later but with the wind and everything else that kicks up it's really hard to keep everyone that's out there working the event motivated beyond five hours," she said.

Next year's Sunday Streets will likely be expanded to underserved neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and Western Addition and "loop around to the great lawn at City Hall as home base," King said. There's also interest in expanding the route in SoMa, and returning to the Mission (this year's events drew upwards of 25,000 people), the Bayview District and Ocean Beach.

King said Supervisor Carmen Chu has been "astoundingly supportive" of Sunday Streets and helped turn the last event through GG Park and the beach into a success. "Of all the supervisors, her office has stepped up the most passionately," she said.

Besides Sunday Streets and a car-free Golden Gate Park on Sundays, "there's also talk of creating another set of roadways that aren't really heavily used on the weekends to have kind of a permanent closure." She said it would also be interesting to hold a Sunday Streets with no programming to see what people would do on their own with a blank canvas.

"I would also like to see individual neighborhoods going and closing off their own streets and then having the ability to bike ride through the city to various car-free nooks and crannies, like how they do the art walk, where we have open streets and designed routes throughout the city to these various car-free spaces."

King said she is encouraged to hear the Mayor's office talking about being "really bold" in moving forward with car-free spaces to keep up with the demand and interest that Sunday Streets has generated.

"The possibilities are really endless," King said, adding that she's confident she can leverage the success of this year's events to raise the money needed for next year and "that we won't have to be hands and mouth like we were this time." Each event easily costs between $25,000 to $30,000, with the bulk of expenses geared toward traffic safety personnel.

• Rock the Bike teams up with Young Performers International to provide a full lineup of live music powered by Rock the Bikes pedal powered stage. Young Performers International features young musicians (ages 11-14) performing rock n roll classics. In Golden Gate Park at the intersection of MLK South and Bernice Rodgers (near the western exit from the Park).
• Cyclecide will bring out two of their pedal powered amusement rides made out of bikes. Look for them in the kids area, just north of the Lincoln and Great Highway intersection.
• Athletes Burn Rubber: Bianchi fitness brings out the human tire pull competition set to live music from the Brother's Comatose. At Lincoln and Great Highway.
• The Riptide and Taraval Merchants present their 3rd annual Taraval Street Festival in conjunction with Sunday Streets. The fair starts at 10, and live music goes from 12-6. Taraval Street, between 46th and 47th Aves. 
• The SF Zoo brings out their zoomobile, Penguin mascot, Leaping Lemur game for the kids, joined by Bluegrass band the Barbary Ghosts playing live bluegrass from 10:30-2:00. Sloat and Upper Great Highway.
• Look for Bike & Roll's funbike built for 7. It will be roving the route from 10-2, hop on for a ride!

See you on the streets this Sunday, and don't forget to send your photos to our Flickr pool!

Intrepid explorers of San Francisco regularly stumble upon the many ghost streets that still hide all over town, rewarding the patient pedestrian for their diligence. Mostly they are on hillsides where steep grades impeded road building at earlier moments in history, but they're still presented as if they were through-streets on the maps.

A tour begins with an old map and lots of photos below the break.

1909 map of southeastern San Francisco. Most of the streets here are still under water, awaiting a bayfill effort.

Other ghost streets can be found not on foot but by exploring old maps, where one can enjoy the strange city that extends well into the bay off the southeastern shoreline. I've heard rumors, or maybe I saw a story in the Chron decades ago, about families that continue to pay their property tax annually on parcels that are well into the bay and thoroughly under water. On this 1909 map of the Yosemite Creek area, streets going NW/SE are numbered and alphabetized but they later got real names. The perpendicular grid of alphabetized streets were eventually given real names (similar to what happened in the "outside lands" of the Richmond and Sunset). But on this 1909 map, Jennings, Ingalls, Hawes, Griffith, and Fitch (J, I, H, G, F) are followed southeast into the bay by E, D, C, B, and A streets, and five further blocks with the names, Ship, Dock, Tevis, Von Schmidt, and Pollock before arriving at "Water Front" boulevard. Obviously these streets were never created since the bayfill on which they depended never happened.

Spectacular garden adjacent to Harry "Street."

Harry "Street" in its forest.

Where Harry Meets Laidley.

My favorite ghost streets are short blocks, usually either bedecked with amazing gardens tended by loving neighbors, or else just odd stubs that continue to defy the rigid grid-imposing city planners of days gone by. In these small patches of nature, sometimes groomed, sometimes not, we can free our imaginations from the sterile symmetry imposed by endless blocks of asphalt crisscrossing the city. When we whisper to each other "One Lane for Food" or other equally "preposterous" depaving notions, the ghost streets echo back to us a knowing wink with a survivor's resilience. Probably the best patch of ghost streets in town is the Filbert Steps and its cross "streets" Napier Lane and Darrell Place. The Grace Marchant Garden that fills most of the Filbert right of way on the east side of Telegraph Hill is one of the true ecological treasures of San Francisco, home too to a big flock of much-celebrated parrots.

Filbert Steps on Telegraph Hill, Grace Marchant Garden to right in photo.

I live near 24th and Folsom which gives me a good staging area for visiting the ghost streets of Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, and both Noe and Eureka Valleys. There are many more than I can fully list or display here, and yes, you can take that as an invitation to get out there and explore! But a couple of my favorites on Potrero Hill are Kansas between 22nd and 20th, and 19th Street between Rhode Island and DeHaro. Potrero Hill in particular used to be a favorite walk many years ago when you could walk up the hillside below McKinley Square and visit the amazing community garden at Vermont and 20th, or take this Kansas ghost path uphill, continue to 19th, and then go right (east) to the ghost of 19th, popping out above the high school and then skirting the Potrero Commons that once graced the slopes above the old Northwest Pacific railroad tunnel (the train's right of way makes another ghost of transit past, cutting diagonally northwest from Potrero Hill through the Showplace Square area before petering out in the confluence of Potrero, Division, 10th, and Brannan Streets...).

Kansas "Street" just north of 22nd Street.

View south from top of Kansas "Street".

19th "Street" at Rhode Island.

A real undiscovered treasure close to the intersection of Corbett and Clayton that I wrote about not long ago in the context of historic water wars and the charming garden that's been planted on the corner, is Al's Park. This curious ribbon of whimsy and nature rises from the mural on upper Market Street (next to the pink historic Joost House) and emerges on Corbett. My 1995 Thomas Bros. map has it labeled as 19th Street (multiple ghostly incarnations for 19th!) but Google's Satellite map doesn't show there as being any public right of way there. Enter Al's Park from Corbett and enjoy a strange, almost 19th century-feeling slice of eccentric San Francisco land use.

Al's Park along the thin red line between Market and Corbett. It is on some maps labeled "19th Street."

Al's Park or 19th Street?

The entrance to Al's Park on Corbett Street.

Al's Park is a veritable museum of oddities.

Al's Park boundary.

Market Street below Al's "19th Street" Park.

Not too far from Al's Park on the northern slopes of Eureka Valley is the ghost of Saturn street that plunges from a cul-de-sac where the street seems to end into a slope with view benches, two staircases, and a lovely landscaping that accompanies one down to Ord Street. Just a few hundred feet to the north are the Vulcan Steps, another of San Francisco's many amazing public stairways serving private homes with cool, inviting porches and elegant, tree- and flower-filled gardens.

Saturn "Street" with views across Eureka Valley.

Back on Bernal Heights, where hundreds of new stairs have been installed in the past few years, especially around the rim and the eastern slope, there's a long legacy of ghost streets. Peralta and Franconia both start and stop from north to the summit and in the case of Peralta all the way down to the Alemany Farmers' Market, punctuated by incredible views, stairways, and gardens all the way. An east-west street near the southern edge of the hilltop is Powhattan and it has its own ghost block between Gates and Ellsworth. Further to the southeast Tompkins Street also has a ghost block between Nevada and Putnam. And probably the best known ghost street on Bernal is Esmeralda, which has a brief life as a thoroughfare on the east side of the summit, but is one of the hill's most glorious stairways down the west side.

Esmeralda above Elsie Street.

I only found this ghost of Harrison Street beneath Ripley a few weeks ago, missing it for years on many walks up Bernal.

Tompkins and Nevada on southeastern slopes of Bernal Heights.

Peralta "Street" looking north.

Powhattan at Ellsworth looking east.

I joined the India Basin Neighborhood Association for a guided tour of their shoreline on August 8, and enjoyed the fantasies and plans of the neighbors juxtaposed to the designs of the Redevelopment Agency for that long-lost corner of the city. India Basin is a favorite haunt of mine, home to Heron's Head Park, India Basic Open Space, and the historic Albion Brewery. It's been the main access to the Hunter's Point Naval Base, but these days, with the rebuilding starting and the naval shipyards long gone, the area is just beginning its gentrification process.

Historic Albion Brewery, now a private residence.

Long-billed Curlew and Egret share some chow time along India Basin shore.

A big roadblock to full-scale upscaling are the dozens of 1940s barracks-style public housing projects at Westbrook and Hunters View. I was struck by the ghost streets here too, staircases filling the zone that could have been Fitch Street or Griffith Street. But out here the landscape is parched, the neighbors indifferent, and the possibilities of flourishing, permaculturally designed corridors along the stairs remote at best. Even as native species habitat it was pretty bereft.

Westbook Public Housing at Fitch Street above Innes Avenue.

Interestingly, the Neighborhood Association presented many ambitious development plans for the area, including a "restaurant row" along Jennings, more offices and shops near the open shoreline at the south side of the basin, and another idea that some of us found a bit disturbing: Hudson Street is a ghostly presence out there, like a derelict alley running east-west just north of Innes Avenue, the main boulevard. But where it should cross Innes and continue westward up the hill into the Hunters View Projects, there is only a fence to mark the city's "right of way." The slope here is a hotspot of native habitat, so aficionados of plants and insects of our original eco-niche are especially interested in saving this hillside from becoming a through street. The Neighbors, for their part, saw a through Hudson Street as a way of relieving the heavy traffic on Hunters Point Blvd and Innes Avenue.

"Hudson Street" (the fence) above Hawes and Innes.

From a quarter mile further west, looking back along Hudson Street towards same hillside as photo above.

"Earl Street" at edge of Hunters' Point Naval Shipyard.

Looking north along Earl from Innes.

One essential way to enjoy the streets of San Francisco is to get out and walk around. We have so many amazing walks at our doorsteps. In the hills are hidden staircases, promontories and open hilltops with amazing views, and secret treasures. I'm particularly curious to dig through the layers of history wherever possible. For the last seven years I've been hiking up Liberty Hill, across Kite Hill and then up and over Market to the intersection of Clayton and Corbett Streets, just below the spot where the Pemberton Steps come down. If you've only passed this way by car, you're missing the whole show!

The intersection is quite a huge expanse of asphalt, but in plain view are some hints of what once was, and a fantastic garden that neighbors have brought to life at the point where the streets meet. To the west of the intersection is an open lot with outcroppings of chert, the ancient seabed thrust upward that makes up a good number of our hills. Somewhere beneath that hillside is a bubbling spring of fresh water, surging to the surface year round. That water is sometimes visible to passersby even now, as in this photo (below the break) showing water running out on to Clayton from the hillside.

You can often see water seeping from the hillside at Clayton and Corbett, evidence of the historic spring here.

Just to its north are the Pemberton Steps, a lovely staircase that takes one up the hill to Graystone Terrace, a nice way to access Tank Hill from the south, across Clarendon Road (the other way to get to Tank Hill, with its spectacular views of the city, the Golden Gate and on clear days, Bolinas and Pt. Reyes, is by going to the very top of Shrader Street and turning left, walking to the end of the cul-de-sac and following the path out of the end past the wildflowers to the summit). The uppermost flight of the Pemberton Steps are still beautiful old stone, but the lower two flights were redone in the past few years, with pink cement and a water fountain. As is the case with most stairways in upper Eureka Valley, there are some amazing homes along the steps with gorgeous gardens and fantastic viewpoints.

This pink wall doesn't necessarily look very inviting, but walk up and discover the amazing stairway and find your way to Tank Hill!

The upper flight of Pemberton Steps still has an ancient feeling...

The lower flights of Pemberton are good examples of how to do it right, when stairways are redesigned...

The landscaping along the Pemberton Steps is lovely, harmonizing well with the triangular garden at the intersection below.

Clayton-Corbett Garden, Pemberton Steps wall across street behind.

The intricately landscaped garden has some standing and sitting areas to enjoy it from, but is otherwise behind small fences.

The mysterious spring-fed water, though, is where our story lies. Two landmark buildings near this intersection housed historic characters who once fought over the water. Our characters are Behrend Joost, whose pink farmhouse is one of the older structures in the area, sitting atop the rainbow-ish mural along upper Market as it turns southward on its ascent, before the intersection with Clayton (a hidden garden connects the pink house's garden with Corbett above it, open to the public from the Corbett end).

The Miller-Joost House on upper Market Street.

Joost was an important player in San Francisco's early transportation and real estate development (two things that always go hand in hand). Our other character was a San Francisco eccentric named Alfred "Nobby" Clarke, who built the amazing turreted mansion at Douglass and Caselli, just a few blocks downhill from Clayton and Corbett. If you're visiting this on bicycle or foot, you will notice quickly that the low point in upper Eureka Valley is 18th Street, descending almost directly from below Clayton and Corbett, and just downhill from the mansion on Caselli, known in its time as "Nobby Clarke's Folly." Clarke got his fortune by becoming the City Clerk during the 1880s, a time when anyone needing city permission for anything needed his signature, a lucrative monopoly whose proceeds he apparently channeled into the construction of the 20+ room mansion.

"Nobby" Clarke's Folly under construction at Douglas and Caselli,1890s.

Joost owned the Mountain Spring Water Company that had its water origins southeast of his home. Residents in the neighborhood today recall a surface spring at Corbett and Clayton from which water was sold by the bucket or cup. A wooden bridge across Corbett on Clayton made the road muddied by the spring much more passable.

Clayton and Corbett, c. 1915.

That Mountain Spring water turned "Nobby" Clarke's and Behrend Joost's lives into daily warfare. In the early 1890s, Alfred Clarke bought seventeen acres of land in and around Caselli and Douglass Streets. Clarke's land was downhill from Joost's. The spring in dispute flowed through Joost's property down to Clarke's. Clarke didn't like Joost's water service and started his own. In turn, when Joost extended his water service, he ruined business for both of them.

"Nobby" was clearly contentious and maybe a bit proud. After he built, or overbuilt, his mansion in the Gilded Age, he and his upslope neighbor, Behrend Joost, began a feud that lasted their lifetime. While the frequently given reason for the daily warfare was the Mountain Spring Water Company service Joost owned and provided to Clarke and others in Eureka Valley, it is probable these two "rags to riches" businessmen were destined to compete about anything and everything. Their stormy relationship didn't stop with sharp words; neighbors still recount stories of their fist fights on 18th Street.
(from Mae Silver's contributions at FoundSF.org)

I was glad to see “We Are the World” on the ridiculously inadequate Climate Change bill that finally emerged from the corrupt U.S. Congress. Sadly, the bill could only emerge with the support of a number of mainstream environmental lobbyists in DC, who clearly have sold out to get something, anything, in the direction of addressing the climate catastrophe. Here in San Francisco there’s an inordinate amount of enthusiasm for the Bike Plan getting okayed by part of the city government, even though it’s still under an injunction, and even when that finally gets lifted, it’ll take three years to finish this Plan, one which will have relatively little effect on this car-dominated city. In some strange way the Climate Bill and the Bike Plan are eerily similar: sources of great pride to those who believe in incremental change, “the best we can do in the current political climate” to political realists, but falling way short, sorely disproportionate to the actual needs they ostensibly address. (An article in the UK Guardian Weekly June 5-11 edition “Climate Change Creates New ‘Global Battlefield’” quotes a new report from Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum that there are already 300,000 deaths a year due to the warming climate, and 300 million people have already been affected!)

I’m not saying anything that most people can’t readily see if we pause from our daily frenzy long enough to think about the bigger picture. I’ll go out on a limb (barely) and say here and now that the Climate Catastrophe conference scheduled for Copenhagen, Denmark in December will fail to do anything meaningful. It’s not hard to predict, since even with a 60-vote Democratic (comedian-reinforced) Majority in the U.S. Senate, there’s no chance of a treaty being ratified that addresses the structure of the U.S. economy or the geographic arrangement of our dwellings, our transit infrastructure, or our energy use. And yet, this is simply what is necessary to have ANY CHANCE AT ALL of averting catastrophic ecological and economic collapse… funny to think that things are that stark, and hard to see if we don’t stop and look, but there it is.

Bike and Irreligious Pride! Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence indulging in the June 09 Critical Mass...

I get a lot of readings coming my way. Here’s a few to help you source what I’m arguing, in case you’re not sure—"this all seems rather hysterical," “the sky isn’t really falling is it?”, and so on… In the June 29 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert profiles James Hansen, the NASA director who was shut up by Bush Administration decree, but wouldn’t go quietly. He’s still at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and in the article, Kolbert traces his emergence as one of the world’s most eloquent and urgent climate catastrophe bell-ringers.

NASA scientist James Hansen (left) gets busted protesting coal. (Photo: Rainforest Action Network)

Hansen has now concluded, partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, that the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Carbon dioxide isn’t just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken—including the shutdown of all the world’s coal plants within the next two decades—the planet will be committed to change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with… Speaking before a congressional special committee last year, Hansen asserted that fossil-fuel companies were knowingly spreading misinformation about global warming and that their chairmen “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

Lately, he’s taken to marching on coal plants, and was even arrested recently. I’ve enjoyed the brilliant and funny tv spots by This Is Reality who have been doing a good job of ridiculing the rhetoric around “clean coal.” (And let’s not forget, this is the centerpiece of Obama’s energy strategy!) Not only is coal not clean, it’s about the dirtiest technology going, and if you look at what’s happening in West Virginia now, with mountaintop removal becoming the norm, it’s hard not to grow numb with despair or want to do something drastic.

The new Orion magazine has some good articles and photo essays in their July/August 09 issue on coal, but in their typical fashion, they manage to put together a treatment that goes a lot further than the basic facts. Photographs by Rick Stevens show the effects of mountaintop removal up close on the ground, but in a way that aestheticizes what should be simply ugly and monstrous. A short companion essay by West Virginia native Ann Pancake makes the point:

The photos take the ugliest landscape I’ve ever seen, the one that hurts me most profoundly, and make that landscape also beautiful. “A terrible beauty”; it was Yeats I first heard in my head. Rick has a more fitting and original phrase. He calls it “ruthless elegance.”

West Virginia is being destroyed for coal, one mountaintop at a time.

Aerial shots taken by activists are the only photos I’ve seen before this essay. Go to Mountainaction.org for the basic story with photos and videos. In West Virginia the economy has been coal-centric for two centuries, so breaking with it there is even harder than coastal latté-sippers figuring out how to reconfigure our utility bills and food-buying habits (though, as Derek Jensen argues elsewhere in the same Orion, “personal change does not equal political change,” an argument that I appreciate him making, even if he generally sends us into the cul-de-sac of blaming the “industrial economy” rather than capitalism, wage-labor, or specific technological choices and work patterns for our plight). Another piece (Hell Yes We Want Windmills) in the same issue introduces us to Coal River activists in West Virginia who are campaigning to replace the fantasy of “clean, carbon neutral coal” with wind farms.  

Caravan at the gate of Kingsnorth, UK, Climate Camp 08, Kent, 9 August 2008 (photo: metamute.org)

As activism has grown around the planet, the rising call is not simply to address the Climate Catastrophe, and certainly not to blindly assert that “everyone must make sacrifices,” but rather to see that the capitalist system depends on crisis, and never fails to use it to sharpen inequalities and reinforce power relations. “Climate Justice,” like environmental justice, is the answer beginning to take shape in the global south, and in many parts of the industrialized world too. Over in Newcastle, England, near the border with Scotland, a conference was organized last November (Class, Climate Change and Clean Coal--the Climate Campers and the Unions) bringing together members of England’s storied National Union of Mineworkers with a motley crew of Climate Campers, mostly anarchist, to debate the role of coal going forward. England had a huge coal industry until the early 1980s when Margaret Thatcher decided it was the perfect target for her larger effort to break organized labor in the UK, an effort that proved fairly successful. John Cunningham (whom I had the pleasure of visiting in April) has a good account of this curious confrontation in the latest issue of MUTE magazine (A Climatic Disorder?) 

Tripods with Kingsnorth power station in the background, Climate Camp, Kent, 9 August 2008 (photo: metamute.org)

Long standing anarchist activist and ex-National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official Dave Douglass issued a polemic against the [Climate] camp. He addressed the anti-coal bias of the Climate Campers alongside a perceived lack of class analysis within the camp and the wider green movement. There is undoubtedly a feel good anti-capitalism implicit in much of the discourse around Climate Camp that can exclude any consideration of class in favour of blandly utopian sentiment…against the fluffy anti-capitalism of much of the camp's official discourse, Douglass introduced the perspective of those who may not have ‘somewhere else' to go, locked into jobs and communities that a politics of exodus cannot easily address. The yearly anti-climate change roadshow attempts to offer a response to climate change that would destabilise business as usual, suggesting at least nominally anti-capitalist alternatives. However, its model of protest camp and sustainable community gleaned from the post-Seattle summit protests can seem too abstracted from everyday life to break the general perception that climate change exists ‘out there'… Its model of sustainability can also appear as a holiday in scarcity to the casual observer…

Climate Camp ran workshops on class and emphasised a ‘just transition' in the official booklet's dialogue with workers in carbon-based industries. This is the notion that a transition can be made to a non-carbon based economy that does not penalise the poor or workers in carbon based industries such as coal miners. It is an argument for responses to climate change that place social justice at the forefront of any structural shift in the economy. While it is often posited as a decentralised, autonomous response, it can also be part of a social democratic state-led one…

The conference often threatened to become nothing but the conjunction of two forms of reformism - trade unionism and environmentalism - disputing the response to climate change rather than providing a challenge to the commodification of the world that both climate change and capital are predicated upon... The central question the conference raised for me is how to formulate a response to climate change capable of resisting capital's own one - given that capitalism loves a good catastrophe from which to extract value. Is there an inherent connection between capital, disaster and labour?...

Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard at MLK Jr. Middle School in Berkeley... one of the more coherent responses to the imperative towards Transitioning!

Editor's note: This piece was written for Shaping San Francisco and is now incorporated into the new wiki version, your best place to research San Francisco history, FoundSF.org.

Protesters march along Embarcadero in early 1960s, stump of Embarcadero Freeway ends behind them at Broadway.
Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library

In the 1950s, the California Division of Highways had a plan to extend freeways across San Francisco. At that time the freeway reigned supreme in California, but San Francisco harbored the seeds of an incipient revolt which ultimately saved several neighborhoods from the wrecking ball and also put up the first serious opposition to the post-WWII consensus on automobiles, freeways, and suburbanization.

Early plan for 8-lane freeway to cut under Russian Hill on its way from the Embarcadero to the Golden Gate Bridge.

On November 2, 1956 the San Francisco Chronicle graciously published a map of the proposed and actual freeway routes through San Francisco even though its accompanying editorial was already chastising protestors: "The remarkable aspect of these protests and claims of injury is their tardiness. They concern projects that have for years been set forth in master plans, surveys and expensive traffic studies. They have been ignored or overlooked by citizens and public official alike—until the time was at hand for concrete pouring and when revision had become either impossible or extremely costly. The evidence indicates that the citizenry never did know or had forgotten what freeways the planners had in mind for them."

In the 1940s the California Dept. of Highways came up with various plans to blanket San Francisco with freeways. This is a version proposed in 1948 by San Francisco's Planning Department. Image: San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR)

James Lick Freeway under construction in 1953: San Francisco's first. Seals Stadium, the old ballpark is visible in center-left of photo. Photo: Ed Brady

Proposed freeway routes for the continuation of the Embarcadero Freeway to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Today, San Francisco's freeways have changed again, thanks to the Loma Prieta 1989 earthquake. The much maligned Embarcadero Freeway has been removed, as has an unsightly spur of the Central Freeway. A raging debate over the future of the Central Freeway ramps that go north across Market was finally resolved and has now been replaced by the surface Octavia Boulevard. The 101-280 interchange was a mess from 1989 to 1996. New offramps were added to I-280 to serve a new waterfront roadway and the planned Giants ballpark at China Basin in 1997, but no new freeways will be built in San Francisco. New transit money goes to BART and MUNI, while Caltrans and SF Dept. of Public Works continue to spend vast quantities of social wealth on maintaining the San Francisco road system. The rapid rise in value in both areas where freeways were removed, along the now open waterfront, as well as the rapidly gentrifying Hayes Valley/Civic Center area, show that profits can be drawn from forward looking urban planning, de-emphasizing cars and re-emphasizing neighborhood, community, and nature. But most U.S. urban planners still adhere religiously to the cult of the car, hence constant efforts to expand roads and parking at the expense of numerous more sensible alternatives, from decent mass transit to ubiquitous bikeways.

Demolition of Central Freeway over Market Street, 2003. Photo by Chris Carlsson

Various freeway plans over the years.

Maps and photos of San Francisco's original freeway plans

Images and maps of many San Francisco freeways that were never built and some that were

We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of painted bike lanes and green bike route signs, and a significant number of bike racks for parking, before it all came to a halt due to the injunction three years ago. After perusing the much-anticipated Draft Bicycle Plan and its dense bureaucratese, full of overlapping redundant promises, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a good while longer to see the kinds of changes that we ought to be getting.

It’s really hard to believe that after all this organizing and earnest campaigning we’ll basically end up with a few thousand “sharrows” and another batch of partial, end-in-the-middle-of-nowhere bike lanes, lanes which in any case are horribly inadequate patches on our misallocated and car-centric public streets. How is it that after almost two decades of rapidly expanding bicycling, the city’s transit priorities still treat bicycles as an annoyance that they only grudgingly are willing to accommodate? When will there be a systematic commitment to altering the streets of this city to create dedicated bikeways, separated from cars and pedestrians, comprehensively linked to provide for easy, graceful, convivial bicycling to all parts of the city?

Over at the blog Copenhaganize their basic point is summarized in two short sentences:

Each and every day 500,000 people ride their bicycle to work or school in Copenhagen. This blog highlights who they are, why they do and how it was made possible.

Forty years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 36% of the population choose the bicycle. Copehagenizing is possible anywhere.

My mother is from Copenhagen so I’ve visited the Danish city many times. I think it must have influenced my early thinking, because it was back in 1987 when I drew up a little flyer calling for a “City of Panhandles.” San Francisco cyclists all know the Panhandle’s cyclepath as one of the real pleasures around here (granted, it would be better if pedestrians would have their own path to its side!) and the way it links to the Wiggle route between the Mission and the Haight is just icing on the cake. A city with some vision, rather than a plodding traffic planning bureaucracy that is led by a Mayor who is only interested in what is going to facilitate his election to the next office (and always blatantly biased towards car owners and the wealthy), would have already been working on converting key routes across the city to bicycle boulevards… not just car-centric streets with “bike boulevard” signs, but whole thoroughfares that are closed to cars and only open to bicycles and emergency vehicles. Going a couple of steps further, why not open such thoroughfares to horticultural design and public art? Imagine sculpture gardens, curving murals, daylighted creeks, linear food forests, vegetable gardens, benches and fountains… the list goes on. The city would benefit in so many ways through such a comprehensive conversion of space currently sacrificed to the insatiable uses of private automobiles.

It’s self-evident how much better such street spaces would be for neighbors, pedestrians, children, and cyclists. It would open space for a systematic approach to re-localized food security. For those who clamor for “green jobs” (I’m not one of them), such natural ribbons crisscrossing the city would require first a lot of major construction work, and then a great number of gardeners, farmers, bicycle mechanics, bike parking attendants, landscapers, artists, and more. Juxtapose such quality, engaging, meaningful work to the stupid jobs that pass as “important” in the financial district, or the wasted labor producing so many luxury highrises, office buildings and other pointless projects of “economic development”… Let the tourists join us in riding and walking through the garden paths of San Francisco! Let’s think about the work we do and the design of our city as a canvas on which to create something really astonishingly better than what we’re settling for now. The SF Bike Coalition should be a lot more aggressive and push for much more far-reaching and far-sighted transformations than this tepid and uninspiring Bike Plan, in order to live up to its political and social responsibilities!

Critical Mass, March 2009. Photo by Bryan Goebel.

I got a call a week ago from the SF Bike Coalition's media person. She was looking for someone to talk to Joe Vazquez of CBS 5, a reporter who was going to do a piece on Critical Mass. I declined, having been interviewed far too often over the years, and having learned time and time again that the mass media is not going to do any favors for Critical Mass by covering it. Sure enough, the piece is now online, and you can see for yourself just how absurd the slant is. I'll give Vazquez credit for at least going on the ride, and in fact, in his sidebar piece, describing what it was like, he admits to becoming more sentient and feeling himself, instead of playing the (impossibly) neutral observer:

...along the way, I found myself unusually sentient. As a reporter, I am not supposed to feel anything while covering a story. That's how we are trained:  focus on the story.  Get it right.  Be fair.  Leave your human reactions out of the story. In this case, though, I was feeling it. My legs were sore and tired (because I haven't been on a bike in two years!)  The sunset was glorious.  Music was blaring from boom boxes on bikes... most riders were well-behaved and even polite (I watched one rider actually apologize to a car driver for tying up traffic). Critical mass is a riot, not just because it's a moving mob with a cause.  It's a riot because it's a celebration every bit as exhilarating as it is exasperating.  A true San Francisco tradition.

We can only wonder what behind-the-scenes pressure led to this new coverage. Did an editor get stuck in traffic recently? Did a local politician put them up to it? Did the station's owners get a call that a campaign would be helpful right now, in order to justify a coming attempt to control and abolish Critical Mass again? We'll probably never know. But given the ridiculous angle the main story took, it doesn't look promising. Vazquez's main point? Critical Mass "costs $155,060 in taxpayer dollars annually!"... and how does he  arrive at this bizarre number?

Here's an estimate of what critical mass would have to pay if they followed the rules: an event permit would be $1000. For a permit once a month, that's $12,000 for the year. Required portable bathrooms are another $500 each time, or $6,000 for the year. Add a $1000 cleaning deposit twelve times too, so $12,000 a year. And then there's police protection. For 20 officers, it's more than $112,000 a year, and another $13,000 for two sergeants. That's a grand total of $155,060 -- tax dollars never recovered.

This is a patently absurd argument and really funny! First of all, there's no permit, because there's just an organized coincidence going on. We happen to all show up to ride home together once a month. I haven't heard any plans to charge motorists who clog the streets EVERY DAY for a permit to fill the streets with their cars! I assume the $500 for "required portable bathrooms" would go to the private company that sells that service? So how does that impact the city's budget? And what's the "cleaning deposit" for? the porta-potties? or for Pee-Wee Herman Plaza? or what?... and if it's a deposit, doesn't it get returned? So that's another irrelevant number. (And how exactly are the porta-potties going to be used by cyclists rolling randomly around the city?) And lastly there's this curious idea of "police protection"! We're NOT protected by the police! We're being POLICED by the police! If they want to spend their money that way, which we've often encouraged them to forego and just leave us alone, that's the Police Department's problem, not ours! As far as I can tell, after riding in well over 100 Critical Mass rides since 1992, the police LOVE this duty. They get to bomb around on their motorcycles, occasionally writing a harassment ticket for corking or red light running (which usually gets dismissed in court), and have little to do but look at all the nice bodies and funny people on the ride. It's as safe and pleasant as overtime can be and many of the cops seem to like it! So Joe Vazquez's crazy math actually adds up to... Zero!

But there's a deeper problem here, and this gives us a chance to address it. Our culture is in the grips of a deep madness that keeps trying to monetize all human activity. Too many people have internalized this crazy idea that everything, from public transit to schools to libraries, to social gatherings in the streets, are supposed to "pay for themselves." On the contrary, we need to expand the realm of human life that is outside of that logic altogether. We should be ecstatic that Critical Mass remains one of the few authentically free uses of public space in this city, one that is not reduced to instrumental purposes that suit the needs of business. Instead, it's a rare example of normal human life, where people meet each other in a convivial and open-ended process of sharing space, moving through the streets of the city under a logic quite alien to the endless buying-and-selling that so many people seem to think is the be-all and end-all of our lives.

There is much to say about the etiquette and ethics of the ride, how it might be better received by passersby and participants if there was a greater commitment to the ideas that animated us from the beginning: a celebration of a better way to move through cities, an inviting experience welcoming to all, an assertion of a new kind of public space. As we've often said, "We're not blocking traffic, we ARE traffic!" We do not go out, as Vazquez would have it, during rush hour to block traffic. We proceed after 6:15 on the last Friday of the month, after most rush hour commuters are on the bridges and highways, and do not for the most part have an agenda to make motorists lives worse, but rather, for one brief two-hour period each month, to make our lives as urban cyclists as magical as they could be all the time, if only our roads were radically redesigned to make meaningful space for all uses, and not just the endless asphalt sprawl dominated and overwhelmed ALL DAY EVERY DAY by private automobiles.

Every time there's a new media story on Critical Mass, we have to go over all this again. This idea of "Critical Mess," that something really awful and dangerous is happening (which Vazquez helpfully did not promote this time, noting that claims of violence or mayhem from years past were not part of his experience, where most cyclists were quite polite and exuberant) is seriously out of kilter to the reality of a simple bike-in that happens once a month for about 2+ hours. From the hysteria created, and the breathless invocation of huge lost taxpayer dollars, you'd think something much bigger and more dangerous were underway. Channel 5 and all the other heavy breathers out there: Take a deep breath, relax, and come on the ride next month. It's a great way to see the city in a new light, to experience the intensity of real life in the city, to work things out in the heat of the moment with other cyclists or motorists or pedestrians you may or may not feel comfortable with, and to have your imaginations altered forever.

The mural is being painted on the white building in the second square from left, as seen from the Bell Tower atop St. Boniface Church on Golden Gate. (Photo LisaRuth Elliott)

A new mural is taking shape in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, at the corner of Jones and Golden Gate, diagonally across from St. Anthony’s Dining Room where hundreds line up every day for a hot meal. Muralist Mona Caron and Project Manager LisaRuth Elliott can be found on scaffolds these days, grabbing the good weather when they can to paint on a nondescript building housing a local “sewing company.” In this first of two parts, I talked with LisaRuth Elliott about her experience with the street scene in the Tenderloin. In part two, I’ll explore Mona Caron’s murals from her well-known Bike Mural on Duboce and the Market Street Railway mural on Church, to her recent Noe Valley diptych, all of which make streets and transit central themes.

From inside the scaffolding, St. Anthony's is diagonally across to the right, Jones Street flows below.

“In neighborhoods like Noe Valley or the Castro [CBDs are] more oriented towards superficial beautification. But here in the Tenderloin it seems to be pretty effective in bringing people together with the goal of bettering the neighborhood, but not at the expense of the people who already live here. The CBD is made up of people who were active in the tenant’s rights movement of the 1980s and others. They're residents, business owners and all kinds of engaged people. They seem to be on a good track. I’ve been really impressed. They’re trying to stimulate free programming and arts and culture for the neighborhood.”

The Tenderloin has been a contested neighborhood for many years. Thirty-five years ago a movement emerged based largely on community service organizations, and the legacy of their efforts has been a small but vibrant network, including Hospitality House, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the Cadillac Hotel (where a new Tenderloin Museum will open in a year or so), and a great many new affordable family apartment buildings built by Glide Church, Mercy Housing, and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation. The decades-old political effort halted the rampant conversion of single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) into boutique tourist hotels, and preserved a central city neighborhood several steps short of fullscale gentrification.

That in turn has meant that street life in the Tenderloin remains rather different than many other parts of the city. For one thing, a large population of Southeast Asians settled here after the Vietnam War, in the southwestern parts of the neighborhood abutting Polk Gulch, not far from this new mural’s corner. Preceding their arrival, the neighborhood has long been a home to the poorest of San Franciscans. The SROs that still fill much of the area just north of Market Street house many elderly retirees living on pensions and general assistance, transients of various types, and a fair number of alcoholics and drug users. Also, St. Anthony’s and Glide Church are the last stop for many homeless before going hungry. Our intrepid muralists have been immersed in this street scene, a place many fear to tread.

“In past mural projects we’ve been in less populated areas, but also in areas where people didn’t really care what you were doing, they didn’t really interact, perhaps more affluent areas, where people don’t really talk to each other. Here people talk to you, they are very volatile—due to their economic situation, their state of mind, how tweaked out they are—just where they’re at in their space. We’ve noticed that it gets a lot more tense towards the end of the month.

“When we started looking at it this last summer, we were apprehensive about taking up part of that space and being in the spotlight. We have a Greek Chorus across the street, a line of people waiting for a meal at St. Anthony’s. If anybody’s going to be tracking us and charting our progress, and commenting on it, it would be them.

“As we work week by week in that neighborhood I am less apprehensive and way more interested in engaging with people. A comfortability is setting in, and we’re getting such great feedback from people, everybody! 80 percent of the people we talk with are new people that we haven’t talked with before, and they love it. We’re beginning to recognize faces and we’re definitely feeling more recognized there ourselves.”

Across Jones Street from the mural is 111 Jones, sort of an affordable housing castle, built by the Catholic Church’s Mercy Housing in the 1980s.

LisaRuth Elliott (left) and Mona Caron (right) on scaffolding at Jones and Golden Gate, 111 Jones Street is tall building behind them.

“In many ways, that building, and the other nonprofit housing in the neighborhood, is a product of the community mobilization of the 1980s. Neighborhood activists put non-profit housing on the agenda as a way to house the Tenderloin's poor, and to ensure that they would continue to be able to live in their neighborhood. Yet few previous residents of the Tenderloin actually live in the 108 units at 111 Jones, and only three African-American families… The limitations of their work are also clear. For every [person] who managed to get a place in the sun in a building like 111 Jones, there are scores of who wait in soup lines for their meals and spend their nights in cheap welfare hotels or sleep in doorways on the street."

--Rob Waters and Wade Hudson (excerpted from "The Tenderloin: What Makes a Neighborhood" in Reclaiming San Francisco: History Politics and Culture, City Lights Books 1998; online here in FoundSF.org)

LisaRuth Elliott:

"What’s really great about what she’s doing with the mural is that she’s doing a flow of time and how perceptions of the neighborhood can change over time. So we’re looking at this nondescript building that we came to initially, on an unhappy corner, not a lot of great stuff going on there, and we plunked down a colorful building that you can see from Market Street coming up, and from Jones and Golden Gate along the sides. Also people are–because it’s a talkative neighborhood—people are asking what’s going on. The woman from the CBD overheard some people standing in line at St. Anthony’s. One woman said flippantly ‘Ah, there goes the neighborhood!’ But she quickly retracted it and admitted it was a good thing."

Anthropologists and transit advocates have long bemoaned the rise of The Sacred Rac, its subsequent worship by the majority of the people of the Asu tribe, and the attendant demise of bipedus norteamericanus, or the common pedestrian.  But new evidence appears every day that the once-endangered pedestrian may be seeing a resurgence in urban habitats throughout the nation.  

Cities around the country have committed to recovering habitat for the pedestrian, with reduced Rac speed limits, bans on Racs in certain tracts of metropolis, extensive traffic calming, zebra crosswalks, and pedestrian countdown signals.

Last week billionaire conservationist Michael Bloomberg vowed to open a large swath of former Rac territory to the pedestrian in New York City, a move not without its detractors.  Following on the heels of his Summer Streets initiative, there is great hope this pilot reclamation will be a success.

Though it celebrated a temporary habitat recovery last summer for Sunday Streets, San Francisco lags far behind other cities in restoring the delicate biomes that support the safety and health of the pedestrian.  According to a report from an agency that monitors Rac safety, San Francisco ranks in the top-five most dangerous large cities for pedestrians.

Though San Francisco has plans for pedestrian priority and complete streets, clearly much work remains to be done to ensure the survival of bipedus norteamericanus.  We look forward to San Francisco's announcement of the new Sunday Streets schedule for this year, which we hope will rival Seattle's own Summer Streets program.