The fourth is still an open-air parking lot and doesn’t show any signs of joining its counterparts any time soon.
The northeast corner has a pleasant collection of umbrella’d tables and some trees just tall enough to give an effective shade. We hung out there for a while and watched the light change as the sun bounced off buildings and the trees broke it up. Most relaxing.
The northwest corner is more severe, as befits the anteroom of the building that houses the Black Rock investment firm, which basically runs the world right now. There are tank barriers around the
perimeter artfully designed to look like tank barriers, and a forbidding Moebius-like sculpture doubtless intended to evoke the incomprehensibility of modern finance, or something.
The southwest corner shares the elegant black rock motif but gives more space to its trees than to walking or sitting space. It is dominated by a Specialties restaurant that contains an Intelligentsia
coffee kiosk, a nice surprise for coffee snobs weary of the long lines at Blue Bottle. Intelligentsia appears to be following a Starbucks-like model, with settings controlled by someone other than
the barista and not a lot of information available behind the bar. But the coffee is passable, certainly far superior to any Starbucks I’ve been at lately.
Our fortunes improved with site 53, which is a pleasant enough little courtyard outside the building at 235 2d St. that houses CBS Interactive. There are spiffy brushed-aluminum tables and chairs. At this time of year there is shade along the east side after about noon, thanks to a tall hedge that our hosts thoughtfully provided.
We skipped site 54 (we’re doing this backwards) pending further research. The list has it as “Marriott courtyard,” but I’ve been all around there and haven’t seen anything resembling the description. The map doesn’t help. I suspect they list is referring to a different location, perhaps near the Courtyard Marriott? Stay tuned.
Site 51, just down the street at the corner of 2nd and Mission, is even more impressive. It was clearly designed by someone familiar with San Francisco weather. It is completely enclosed in glass, so you can hang out there in faux-outdoors ease throughout the year. There is a reasonably interesting 20-foot tall sculpture on the ground floor, and some large ficus trees to complete the al fresco effect. You can go upstairs and hang out on a mezzanine level with a nice view of the skyline from an unaccustomed angle. The tables and chairs are the same brushed aluminum that graces site 52.
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The second site on our tour of publicly-owned, privately-operated spaces in San Francisco was another disappointment. The whole open area attached to 303 2d St. is fenced off for construction. We had to peer over the fence and try to figure out what the features might look like when finished. It looked like there would be some smallish circles of vegetation and probably a fountain or two.
(This is the list of sites we plan to visit. We’re taking them in reverse order; this was site No. 55.)
To assuage our despair, we went over to the nearby South Park area and did some yuppie-watching from a table outside a sandwich shop. We felt much better after having a bite to eat. Then: excitement! While we walked back to John’s subway stop we were stopped — right at the site of last week’s disappointment, No. 56, as it happened — by police clearing the way for some dignitary or other.
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Since I started working in downtown San Francisco, I’ve talked John into helping me with a project I’ve been idly imagining for years: visit every one of the sites on this list of “publicly owned, privately operated” spaces. I thought we’d start from the end of the list and work down, just because.
Today I took an exploratory look at 611 Folsom. It’s as bad as the pamphlet says. Windswept, scraggly trees spaced far apart; big pointless flat areas paved with pale reddish brick. Plenty of seating on the brick benches, at full-on lunchtime, because only a few people were depression-proof enough to hang around. I’ve seen smoking rooms at airports that looked friendlier.
Here’s John modeling the way the surrounding buildings loom over the site, making you think of Mordor, or Wall St. He’s struggling to keep up his cheer in the face of these enormous masses of gloom bearing down on him from behind.
One thing that could save it: with all that heavy built-in furniture, it might have made a convenient skateboarding location. Skaters bring a certain something to a neighborhood, and they’re fun to watch on your lunch break, like the break dancers and drummers who entertain in the subway. But the authorities have killed off that possibility by installing those nasty little steel blades all over every surface. They don’t just repel skaters, of course: they repel anybody who doesn’t like nasty little steel blades.
Upside: Mehfil Indian restaurant, just across Folsom street, has a quick, cheap and tasty to-go menu. I had the meatballs in yogurt gravy and a mango lassi. Most satisfying.
Next time: Marathon Plaza, aka (I think) 303 2nd St. Plaza.
My cousin Ian, on his way from Austin to Osaka for some super-brainiac post-doctoral type thing, was stuck on a plane for six hours at San Francisco last Friday night, courtesy of a storm we were having. We brought him home and made him eat some of Mary’s chicken pot pie. The weather cleared the next morning and he was gone before we woke up.
My dad’s dad passed away in November at 95. He became a Lutheran minister in 1935 and served in about 10 churches, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. Laura and I joined the family for the funeral in Minneapolis, where Opa had lived in retirement. Then we all drove to Madison and had another service at the church where Opa had served his longest tenure. It was good to see everybody, and it was good to know Opa went out a pretty satisfied guy. He was a connoisseur of church music — he booked the organist for his funeral himself, a couple of years ago, and the man was indeed the best organist I’ve ever heard live. I was picturing Opa lying there listening with that sly little smile he used to get when he heard something he really liked.
We’d been thinking about moving across town to the Mission for a long time. Closer to both our jobs, Lilly’s school (and Laura’s too, as of this year), better weather, more diversity, decent coffee. This summer we finally went ahead and got an agent (Steve Davis, who is married to Cassandra Mettling-Davis, the architect who helped wiht our remodel a few years ago) and from there things went very fast. It was of course a big project, and it inevitably oozed on into the school semester, which increased the stress level, but finally we were out of there.
Next chapter: A short-term lease in Bernal Heights while we shop for our new place.
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Wow, Kauai. What a place. We just got back from a week there with Mary’s parents. We had a gas. Even the occasional rain shower was better weather than we get at home.
This is the view from the back deck of our apartment.
Lilly spent more time in the water than out. She preferred the pool (salt water, no chlorine) but liked the ocean just fine too. Both Laura and Lilly were willing to snorkel with me in water quite a bit deeper than they go in at home. (Lilly was in swimming lessons for the three weeks before the trip, expressly to get ready to go look at some colorful fish.) Next time I hope we’ll spend even more time on the reefs.
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Hied me to the ancestral homeland for a week to attend a professional conference and see friends and family. My first day here I got to see my mom (right) and my sister Jo (left) perform with a flute choir called Flute Cocktail, accompanied by my brother Nathaniel on the Andean quena and related tubular things. The next day my brother threw a fairly raucous brunch, partly in my honor. I also got a tour of my brother-in-law Luther’s dauntingly large collection of solar cooking equipment, all of it fully functional — I witnessed him making a batch of darn good custard pudding with the parabolic reflector stove. Later on my dad showed off his most recent model railroading achievements.