Much larger and more genuine than DC's Chinatown. Even the touristy part.
Nob Hill:
A couple of San Franciscans said I should see the cathedral on Nob Hill. I was not impressed. It's much smaller and constructed of cheaper materials than the DC cathedrals.
This however (in North Beach I think), we do not have in DC. I'm a little jealous.
More from North Beach:
The green one looks like a cool building. Wish I had gotten a better picture of it. This is as close as I got.
This reminds me of Philadelphia:
Walking up Telegraph Hill:
Does every tourist take a picture of one of these signs?
Coit Tower. I went up. That will be part three.
Friggin' steep hill.
Stopped briefly in the Haight for Girlfriend to shop. Looked interesting, but we weren't there very long. And it was rainy and dark.
The Mission District:
We have gotten the grocery store chains in DC to learn how to build stores that greet the street and have no surface parking, but we still haven't gotten them to understand the value of facing the sidewalk with produce rather than blank brick walls. Good on SF.
This grocery store (on the left) wasn't so great:
I assume this is the mission whence the district takes its name?
The Tenderloin.
I was surprised to find such a relatively seedy neighborhood so close to Union Square. That having been said, it was probably my favorite neighborhood in the city. I'm jealous of the density. DC's densest neighborhoods still have a lot of rowhouses mixed in with the apartments. My uneducated guess is this is probably the densest neighborhood in the country outside New York. Can anyone corroborate?
Another produce-stand grocery store? Curse you, San Francisco! They're all over!
What the eff is this thing?
We took the N-Judah through the Sunset to the Pacific Ocean. Neither Girlfriend nor I had been to it before, and we wanted to touch it.
It was stormy and cold.
We went in anyway.
Girlfriend didn't handle it as well as I did.
Luckily we thought to bring fresh socks and footwarmers. All was OK in the end.
Hey, some of your pictures are really cool! Hope you enjoyed visiting our fair city...even if the weather wasn't too friendly...
About the Tenderloin being the densest neighborhood outside NYC - I really can't see that being true because of the lack of highrises, I would guess that honor is held by someplace like Lakeview in Chicago?
A couple of San Franciscans said I should see the cathedral on Nob Hill. I was not impressed. It's much smaller and constructed of cheaper materials than the DC cathedrals.
Sadly, very few other American cities have the kind of money to lavish on public edifices that DC (where I grew up) has. But the Episcopal cathedral on Nob Hill does have bronze copies of the Ghiberti doors (called the "Gates of Paradise") from the baptistry in Florence:
That's the Market St. Safeway--where I and most residents of the Castro (which I am not) shop. I'm not sure what you don't like about it--architecturally, of course, the great expanse of surface parking lot is hated by urban purists. But the store itself is well-stocked (though there's better produce just across Church St) and had you not had your girlfriend with you (nor had one at all) you might have found it much more attractive--if you get my drift.
Quote:
I assume this is the mission whence the district takes its name?
Actually not. That's "Mission Dolores Basilica", a relatively modern church next to the Mission whence the district takes its name: Mission San Francisco de Asis (built 1776).
The Tenderloin.
I was surprised to find such a relatively seedy neighborhood so close to Union Square. That having been said, it was probably my favorite neighborhood in the city. I'm jealous of the density. DC's densest neighborhoods still have a lot of rowhouses mixed in with the apartments. My uneducated guess is this is probably the densest neighborhood in the country outside New York. Can anyone corroborate?
The city overall is the densest outside Manhattan and the T-loin is its densest part so you are probably right. Anyway, it is where it is because the city stopped gentrification in its tracks in the 1960s and 1970s by blocking conversion of single room occupancy hotels (sometimes know as "flop houses") to tourist uses and by limiting heights mostly to 9 stories. The purpose was to stop the loss of low income housing and it largely worked. These days the T-loin has lots of new construction of subsidized "affordable" housing due to the SF law requiring developers of market rate housing elsewhere to provide the subsidies. Did you see any of the newer buildings?
Quote:
What the eff is this thing?
That's the Cathedral Church of St. Mary of the Assumption--otherwise known as St. Mary's Cathedral--the Roman Catholic Cathedral, designed by the Italian Pier Luigi Nervi in 1971. Not everyone likes it--it's called the "washing machine agitator"--but some consider it one of the 3 best modern Catholic cathedrals in California. It may be better inside than out:
Oh wow, I knew frisco was beautiful but damn! I'm really impressed by the way the city is built up, I love it. Can't wait to go there myself. Thanks for sharing, they're top notch.
Good stuff. Those produce stands are everywhere, and I think it's a combo of old school urbanism mixed with heavy Asian influence mixed with Northern California produce (where there's always lots of stuff "in-season"). We do have lots of crappy suburban-style grocery stores with surface parking and poor urban design, though you're correct that the Market Street Safeway is the worst example of one because it happens to be on our main street and in a very pedestrian and transit-friendly area.
On density in the T-Loin - I've seen things before that establish it as the densest neighborhood outside of New York based on number of units per acre, however, depending on how you measure the neighborhoods sometimes Chinatown comes out with a higher density of people psm. Both hover in the 100,000 ppsm range (again depending on where you draw the boundaries). Either way, it's much denser than anything in Chicago, because Chicago mostly destroyed its dense SRO areas to be replaced with highrises (which despite their height tend to have lower unit/acre and ppsm densities because the units are larger) and never really had a super-dense Chinatown. You mentioned J Church in another thread - I remember a few years ago that Steve compiled density stats by neighborhood that he posted on his SF Cityscape Forums. I can't find that list now, but it was very interesting.
__________________
"You need both a public and a private position." --Hillary Clinton, speaking behind closed doors to the National Multi-Family Housing Council, 2013
Linear Mode
