at Dolores Park
It was a lovely summer afternoon yesterday so I walked across The City, from Fort Mason to Dolores Park in the Mission. Walked straight up Octavia through Cow Hollow, up Pacific Heights then down through the east edge of Japantown, the Western Addition, Hayes Valley, then cutting across the Market Street artery and one of the vertices of the Duboce Triangle, to the Mission neighborhood proper (zig-zagging in a southerly jag along Valencia, then Guerrero, then Dolores).
In the last of these photos, taken from the topmost corner of the park, on 20th and Church, at the J-Church Muni Metro train stop, you can barely see the white, vertical spire of the Campanile at UC Berkeley, way in the background, at the foot of the East Bay hills, across the intervening Bay (invisible in the photo). Incidentally, that's where the Hayward Fault passes, and underneath my feet (well: a dozen K or so to the west of the San Francisco Peninsula), its powerful twin, the San Andreas Fault.
For dinner, I walked down to WesBurger on Mission near 18th Street. I'd read in the S.F. Chron earlier in the day that it's closing in July, after nearly a decade delighting hamburger cognoscenti, so I went to have its smashburgers, tater tots and local craft brew for one last time. Wes himself brought me my double with tots, and the delightful Tree People draft beer, and I wished him the best in whatever comes next (perhaps he might return to his roots as a photographer, he said).
Then of course (as usual), for dessert I walked all the way down to Mitchell's on San Jose and 29th, for halo-halo ice cream, in that liminal area between Noe Valley and Bernal Heights, that I now dub the Chavez Ravine. ::chuckle:: (It's not really a ravine, but I cheekily wanted to mirror the SoCal locale here in S.F., inasmuch as Mitchell's is near Cesar Chavez Street -- renamed some decades ago from its original, Army Street.)
After, I caught the 49 all the way to its terminus at the end of Van Ness near the Aquatic Park. Thus endeth the afternoon's travelogue across the various nouns, noetics, and neighborhoods of this city I have come to call home.
[ The view from the uppermost corner of the park... ]
