SF, CA - Misc

Sometimes, I have neat pictures that don’t seem to fit in anywhere. Here are a few.

We’ve made a goal of climbing lots of the stairways scattered throughout the SF area, and there are a lot. Sometimes, though, they are not so much stairways as paths. Here is a public path which goes down a few railroad timbers with beautiful gardens on either side,

onto a grassy area that looks like someone’s lawn

and around a corner to this pretty obscure path through long grass. It looks as if it might be part of someone’s yard but there are signs on it to indicate that it is a public path. Unusual and really neat to find.

On Sunday, when the main street through Golden Gate Park is closed to cars, it is the perfect oppoptunity to learn how to ride a bike and here’s a father with his son. Do you think the son wants to be here?

I’ve mentioned that many of the hills here are quite steep but somehow my pictures don’t really show this. Here are two pictures that I took to try to show how steep some of these streets are. First is the street as it really is, with the homes on the level and the cars on the hill. I think that you can see the steepness better in the second picture where I’ve made the cars on the level and the homes show the angles. This hill is somewhat steep but by no means the steepest we’ve found. It was just handy when I was thinking of this angle. And, by the way, Janis Jolplin lived in the home in the middle when she lived in the Haight Ashbury section of SF. (And note the slope must be going into the garage of each of these homes.)

For this next picture, you’ve got to know that every corner is a 4-way stop except for the main streets. Now, here’s a picture of a car cresting a particularly steep hill and stopping at the top as is the law. Come on, how in the world can this driver possibly see what is in the street in front of the car over the crest?

Gary went to Google on his phone to look at a satellite view of how the cliffs are eroding along the coastline here in Pacifica. Then, by chance, he did the same thing on his laptop and noticed that the pictures were different. On the laptop, the pictures were older and showed more coastline around the homes. On the phone, the pictures were newer and showed how much of the land had eroded. We thought the difference striking. Notice in the older picture on the left that there is some cliff with green grass on between the street and the beach. In the newer picture on the right, the cliff has fallen and the city has made a path to the beach with switchbacks in it where the grass used to be..

Here are two more pictures, showing some apartment homes which used to a have a great view of the Pacific. Today, they have a much closer view than they had planned. Compare the green space around the older left-hand hand picture one with the newer right-hand one. Note that in the newer picture the sand cliff is right on the edge of the apartment homes. AND, there are still people living in these. There are a few apartments which have a condemned note on the front door but not many. And, it seems to me that if one apartment in a building falls down the cliff, probably others will fall down with it.

Here is the sign on the door of the one apartment which is condemned. It might say ‘this building’ but it lists only one unit, # 36. And, note the date, 12/17/09. And people are still living here and the slope continues to degrade.

4.3 390’