Streetsblog San Francisco

It's been reported that the Fisherman's Wharf merchants who vocally opposed Sunday Streets along the Embarcadero last year now proclaim their support for the day and are programming numerous events to coincide with the street closures this Sunday. But merchants in Bayview never voiced concerns last year and this year they are preparing to capitalize on the car-free hours when the second of six Sunday Streets happens on May 10th.

Antoinette Mobley, Program Manager for the Bayview Business Resource Center and one of the key liaisons between the city and local merchants (she jokingly called herself the First Lady of Bayview), said that the Mayor's office had done a much better job this year with outreach to the businesses and stakeholders in Bayview, which she said will result in more local involvement in the event. She also hoped the attention brought to the neighborhood by Sunday Streets would prompt the community to host other events in the streets throughout the year.

"Our overarching goal is to make it a real fun family day for the Bayview community," said Mobley. "The more activities on the corridor, the better. This could even turn into a kick-off for street festival here in the Bayview.  We're one of the few, or maybe the only, corridors that doesn't do an annual street festival."

LaTanya Spears, owner of Trend Setters II, a women's apparel and style shop, said the primary benefit to her business will be advertising and outreach.  "We've been open half a year and a lot of people are still coming in and saying, 'I didn't know this was here.'  If you're driving by or riding the T-train, we kinda look closed, it's real dark in here."

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I just finished an interesting journey that took me to the World Social Forum at the mouth of the Amazon River system in Belem, Brazil, and then to Los Angeles and finally home, just in time to attend a presentation last night at CounterPULSE of Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes III. The show consists of rare and obscure footage of life in San Francisco going back over 100 years. A few of the clips are striking reminders of how much the basic "technology" of roads and how we use them has evolved during the past century.

It's lost to most of our memories, but in the 1890s bicyclists took to the streets (pdf) by the thousands across the U.S. with a shared demand: Good Roads and asphalt! Sometimes you get what you ask for and it doesn't all work out quite the way anyone imagines! (It is worth noting in a brief digression that as we celebrate and promote the bicycle as an ecological alternative to the private automobile, the early breakthrough that made bicycling what it became was the invention of the air-filled rubber tube. That in turn made it possible to produce a smooth-riding vehicle in early industrial settings, but to produce such a device required a lot of raw material, like any industrial product. Rubber in the 19th century was not yet synthesized from hydrocarbons and the supply was garnered by imposing extremely barbaric slave-like conditions in the Amazon and the Congo, where tribal peoples were violently coerced into gathering ever-increasing amounts of wild rubber from the trees growing in the forest, all to meet the insatiable demand of bicyclists in Europe and the United States!) Read more...