Point Reyes, January 2008, originally uploaded by mark.hogan.
Wow! What a great time of day to go hiking. I highly recommend it. Just don’t go hiking where this picture was taken (hint: there are lots of cows there) or it will get too crowded.
Oh, did I tell you that the cows are really aggressive? You probably don’t want to have anything to do with them.
The prestigious California Street Cable Car whisked us to the top of Nob Hill
On Sunday, Rob and I went into the time machine known as Nob Hill. We took the California Street cable car up to the Fairmont hotel, and then walked over to his apartment and used the rotary phone (yes, you can still use rotary phones). We had to take this adventure at the beginning of the month after he had bought a new transit pass but before his old one expired. There was no way I was going to pay $5 to ride the cable car three blocks.
Feel like you need a rotary phone of your own but you don’t have a land line? Have I got the solution for you. A rotary phone with a slot for the SIM card from your mobile phone! Okay, so maybe this is the equivalent of having a horse pull your Prius around town, but what’s more satisfying than slamming down a nice heavy phone when a telemarketer wakes you up on Saturday morning?
The author enjoying an old-timey phone conversation
At least half of my childhood memories of looking out a car window are slightly clouded by a film of salt on the window. It is a weird phenomenon to me now since I live in San Francisco. I guess the only equivalent is riding on the bus and trying to see out the window through the film of hair gel and graffiti on the inside and pigeon droppings on the outside, but the bus seems to be like that anywhere so that’s not really a San Francisco observation.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Park(ing) Day? It started in San Francisco by Rebar (an art collective focusing on public space/urban design etc) and has now caught on around the world. In a nutshell, people get together and create temporary parks on city streets by renting a parking space for the day (i.e. paying the meter). I helped my office (David Baker & Partners Architects) put together an urban croquet park in front of our building on 2nd Street.
More photos of Parking Day available on my Flickr page!
Park(ing) Day was a big success, both in San Francisco and around the world. Make sure to check out the rest of those photos on Flickr so you don’t miss the Urban Chicken park!
Folsom Dore Apartments by David Baker & Partners Architects
On Sunday, I hosted tours at the Folsom Dore Apartments, a “green” (I hate that term) affordable housing project completed by my office in 2005. It was part of the “Build it Green” tour, which was a series of open houses at environmentally sustainable residential buildings ranging from some very small houses up to the Sunset Idea House (about four blocks from where I live) which bordered on grotesque in its lavish (and schizophrenic) furnishings and wasted space (Curbed had a great post yesterday about the Sunset house).
Most of the people on the tour were from outside San Francisco, were wearing fleece, and had a lot of money. At least as far as I could tell. It was quite amusing to see them touring an affordable apartment building as they struggled to figure out what to say about it. Many people raved about the carpeting, despite the fact that they drove to the tour in a car that probably cost significantly more than all the carpeting in the 98 unit building. One visitor told me about how she bought energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs “for all her Hispanic neighbors.”
In the end, most seemed impressed that it was affordable housing because it was much nicer than they expected it would be. It was also good to show people that “green” doesn’t have to mean expensive- which seems to be the impression many people have. While some of the other houses on the tour had more impressive displays of their sustainability (like the windmill at the Sunset Idea House or an entire forest’s worth of responsibly harvested wood at the Bole/Klingerstein Residence) the type of improvements at Folsom Dore are much more attainable to the average homeowner.
As for the rest of the them, each building was totally different- they represented the full spectrum of price levels and approaches to being sustainable. I was most amused by the giant banner hanging across 22nd Street from a condo building on the tour:
rough banner translation: “Enough with rich people and their condominiums”
Note that I took that photo through a rain screen made out of responsibly-harvested Ipe wood. For more photos of the home tour, visit my Flickr page (again!). There were also more urban chickens… who knew they were so popular?
I found out that I’ll be moving again in the next few months, which has led me to fine pages of Craigslist to see just how much rent prices have escalated in the past year. It’s pretty scary to see studio apartments in marginal neighborhoods renting for over $1100 a month. It’s even worse if you are as picky as me and expect a fireplace and whirlpool tub.
Since it looks like camping is pretty much out of the question now that the City is cracking down on people sleeping in the parks, the next best option appears to be buying a boat. Not only do you get a great view of the water every morning when you wake up, you can move your house around. I could probably even commute on my boat if I buy one docked in Saulsalito or Berkeley! Considering the slip rental fee is usually between $200 and $400 a month, and there are very few apartments out there for under $900, this definitely looks like a winning situation.
The following photos were attached to a posting today, a 25′ sailboat with current registration selling for a measly $3500! For the price of a ten year old Ford Taurus you could be cruising the San Francisco Bay in style while spending less on your living expenses than any of your friends… and you would have a triangular-shaped bed! It doesn’t get any better than that.
sweet boat pictures courtesy of craigslist.comÂ
If you’re interested, click here to see the current listings of sailboats for sale. The only drawbacks I can see are:
I found this great site with lots of helpful information if you want to learn more.
view through the fog at the Sweeney Ridge trail
Natasha and I decided to go hiking on the Peninsula today, thinking it might be a little warmer than San Francisco. We were wrong. As you can see in the photo above, the trail at Sweeney Ridge was covered in fog and possibly haunted. Granted, the exposure settings on my camera helped make it look extra gloomy but it was freezing and windy nonetheless.
San Andreas Lake (source of the name of the San Andreas Fault) as seen from the trail when the fog subsided
My favorite part of the trail was the entrance near the parking area. The gate is the sort used to enter a pasture, there is a small space to one side of the main gate for pedestrians to pass through but the main part was locked with no less than eight locks of varying sizes. This seems like the level of security assigned to nuclear weapons in cold-war era movies, so it kind of makes me wonder what is being kept out of this park (or kept in?).
This weekend I had the opportunity to visit two very scenic bay area attractions.
Saturday morning, Natasha and I went to the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco to meet up with three other friends for a trip over to Angel Island. Angel Island is the largest island in San Francisco Bay. It used to be the largest immigration station on the west coast of the U.S., serving as a sort of purgatory for mostly Chinese immigrants. The island has a large (almost 800′) hill in the center and is a few miles across. Nobody lives there, but you are allowed to camp with a permit. We just went there to hike and have a picnic, which was fun but extremely hot and half the trail is very sun-baked.
As you can see, the National Park Service takes the threat of wildlife very seriously.
The view from the top is spectacular.
Today’s adventure didn’t involve a ferry, but there were more warning signs! Natasha and I went to the Marin Headlands to go birdwatching and took a short walk out to the Point Bonita lighthouse. This lighthouse marks the mouth of the San Francisco Bay and has been in continuous operation since 1855. It was working today, as was the foghorn, because of the extremely thick fog that was hovering over the exact location we decided to look for birds.
Please note that this photo was taken when the fog started clearing.
This warning sign was one of my favorite parts of the lighthouse experience. Upon walking across the bridge, where you can actually see down between your feet and feel the entire thing sway in the slightest breeze, I would definitely not put I third person on there.
It’s a short walk, but memorable. None of the wood looks like it has ever been replaced. Hopefully the bridge isn’t from 1855 too.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, wild coyotes attacked a pet dog in Golden Gate Park today. It’s not a surprise that the coyotes live there, there have been a number of them living in the city for some time. People are a bit taken aback by the fact that they are lashing out at dogs (after all, dogs are the new babies).
In a statement to the Chronicle, the Animal Control Department says that “We have officers looking for the coyotes, and we are letting the public know about these coyotes.” Okay, great. What exactly does that mean. They are “looking” for the coyotes? What are they going to do to them? Is that like when parents tell a kid that their dog “went to live on a farm”?
I think people should keep an eye on their pets and learn to live with wild animals. You can’t be 100% insulated from natural world all the time, especially if you choose to go to a huge park that has a lot of nature in it. The Chronicle article says that “the coyote bit a Rhodesian ridgeback, a large type of dog that can weigh more than 100 pounds and was originally bred to hunt lions.” According to wikipedia, the end-all be-all authority on every topic, the average coyote weighs 31 lbs. The average adult Rhodesian ridgeback (also known as the African Lion Hound) weighs 70-85 lbs. and has been known to grow to 160 lbs. If a dog that was bred to assist in the hunting of lions can’t stand up to a coyote less than half its size it’s clearly a case of the dog being a total wuss.
I hope that people leave the coyotes alone and let them do whatever they normally do. There isn’t a whole lot of space left for nature, which is made very obvious by this sign on Ocean Beach:
Apparently unleashed dogs bother endangered animals, but people having drunken, out of control parties on the beach and massive amounts of graffiti do not bother them.
And now, for Matt, an embarrassing photo from his birthday party at Zeitgeist:
I was walking home from Dolores Park today and a cardboard box with the words “Estate Sale” scrawled on the side caught my eye. I turned on to a tiny side street and there was another piece of cardboard with a hastily scrawled arrow leading me up a stairway to a dark second floor apartment. I ascended the stair, my eyes barely adjusting to the darkness after spending a few hours outside in the sun.
The apartment looked like it had either been occupied by an elderly packrat or a band of hipsters with an eye for ironic furnishings. Because it was billed as an estate sale, and most of the furnishings had clearly been in this exact apartment since at least 1984, I had to assume that the owner was closer to 80 than 20. The sign at the curb had advertised “lots of art” but the only things I spotted that resembled art were a postcard of puffins in a gold wooden frame and a poster from the 49ers last Super Bowl appearance (in the Joe Montana days).
I walked in to the back room and noticed an abundance of VHS tapes. That is probably an understatement, short of a video store I have never seen this many tapes in one place. Then I turned around and noticed a huge bookshelf full of blank tapes that were still sealed in their original packaging, sorted by brand:
This is where the first bout of bad judgement comes into play. Instead of reaching in my bag and using my 7 megapixel digital camera, I decided to use my piece of crap T mobile camera phone to take this photo. I didn’t even have it on the highest resolution (which still looks like a security camera photo blown up 300% and reproduced on newsprint) but instead I had it set to 170 pixels wide. This photo is all I ended up with.
It’s a shame that I didn’t have my good camera out. I walked into the bedroom next to the kitchen and there was a full size bed in the middle of the room. What, you ask, was for sale in this room? None other than the mattress pad on the bed that the previous tenant probably died on. This mattress pad was selling for a whopping $10.00. There was also a large wedge-shaped pillow for sale on top of it but I didn’t see the price tag. To top it off, across from the bed was a television with a sticker on the front that read “$10. Stuck on mute. You fix.” I can just imagine the scenario now. The deaf and incontinent resident of the apartment was stuck in bed all day, and the live-in nurse broke the television by permanently sticking it on mute so that he or she didn’t have to listen to the “Price is Right” and “Matlock” reruns on full volume from morning until night.
I’m not sure if it was worse judgement to sell a used mattress pad and broken television or if it was a bad call on my part to go to an estate sale advertised via a sharpie and cardboard box. At least I got a photo.