On my way in to work Friday morning, I took a detour via the Marin Headlands:
It was a total whiteout on the Golden Gate Bridge, but as soon as I got to the north bay, it cleared right up. I went back into the fog for the ~800 foot climb up Hawk Hill before breaking through and getting some amazing views from the top:
I saw a fighter plane zoom into the city, which made me briefly think that it was Fleet Week. Not so! (It’s in October.)
The ride down the back side was misty, beautiful and frighteningly slick. All in all, I left at 7:40 and got into work with a change of clothes right around 10.
The analogy struck me when I saw the de Young Tower from the aptly-named Grand View Park. Maybe the resemblance isn’t quite so clear as it was in my mind.
Also, arcologies? Anyone want to hazard a guess what fraction of people familiar with the term learned about it from SimCity 2000? I’m going to say 99.
While walking around my block with an out-of-town friend the other day, I found myself pointing out all the restaurants I had never been to. How could I be so remiss? Part of it is the sheer number of food places: 40 within a three block radius.
Here they are. I’ve been to the bolded places. The links go to Yelp.
I plugged in my cross streets on the San Francisco Library’s digital photo archive and found this picture. The image is mislabeled. The street in the foreground is actually Fillmore, not Webster. Which means that this photo, from 1945, was taken from my roof!
This past weekend, Miriam and I did a Now and Then shot. There’s a higher-resolution image there, but you can fade between them using the slider here:
1945
2008
There are more trees now, more cars and more power lines, but one less cable car. But the coolest difference is only noticeable if you look at the tall building in the upper right. It hasn't shrunk. No, the trees in Buena Vista Park have grown!
A year after making my last move, I’m doing it again! This is less of a dramatic shift. Whereas the last one was a 35-mile move from Mountain View to San Francisco, this is a 2 mile move between neighborhoods in the city (Russian Hill to Lower Haight).
I’ll post pictures when the move happens after September 1. For now, you’ll have to settle for maps. Here are the places that are twice as close to my new place as my old: Read the rest of this entry »
Richard over at Sparkletack recently wrote about the Charles Cushman Photograph Collection, which includes hundreds of pictures of San Francisco from the 1930′s to the 1960′s.
The images offer a fascinating tour of San Francisco history, from Chinatown in 1952
to hippies on Haight street in 1967:
The real coup, though, is to find an image of your own block or apartment from the photographic past. To that end, I’ve put the Cushman images which include a street address on a Google map. There aren’t any pictures here from my block, but maybe you’ll be luckier! Here’s the map: Read the rest of this entry »
