S.F. arcana
I've learned a lot more about San Francisco over the past 3 or so years since returning back to the Bay Area after a decade's hiatus - the 2010s - and having lived in the East Bay for the better part of a quarter century (1982-2010).
Much of this discovery has been serendipitous, and mostly on foot thanks at first to Adah Bakalinsky's now-classic Stairway Walks in San Francisco but eventually just my peripatetic, nomadic nature. I didn't just walk all the stairways in Adah's book, I found quite a few more that weren't in it; clearly, pathways evolve in this city as well and, over time, become stairways.
Of late these are some items on my S.F. walkabout list:
- Find out if there are any chestnut trees in the city (likely Chinese, European, or Japanese, as the legendary American chestnut is all but gone); this is due to reading The Overstory currently.
- Same with Sequoia sempervirens - there may be a few younger ones within the city limits (e.g. in the Golden Gate Park, The Presidio, MacLaren Park).
- Go look at the Fleishhacker Pool building façade if it still exists, over by the S.F. Zoo parking lot.
- Find the gravestone markers repurposed into canal or sluice channels along paths at the Buena Vista Heights park above the Haight-Ashbury.
[ more to be added... ]
[ Dredging and old gas plant leak mitigation at Pier 39... ]
