Started this entry at 8:15 last night. I'd just come in from a trip downtown after spending a couple of hours roaming Haight. It was 55 degrees and foggy out, and windy, and truly illustrated the famous Mark Twain quote: "The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer in San Francisco." While it's not summertime yet, it's definitely wintry out there. Thankfully I had dressed for the occasion, but in the billowing wind, you sort of almost needed a parka.
Checking my map yesterday morning, I was initially going to take the #22 bus which would have taken me to within about 6 blocks of the center of Haight, then saw that there was a 33 bus, which, amazingly, stops right here at the corner of Eureka and 18th! This goes up in a totally circuitous route by Twin Peaks, then back down again, in fact, right down Ashbury Street itself, and drops you at the famous corner of Haight/Ashbury. This was the quickest public transit ride I've had thus far, at about 12 minutes.
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On the way there, there was a conversation between three girls opposite me on the bus. They appeared to be college age, and they were discussing whether you want to meet "The One" now, and be with him the rest of your life, or not. Interestingly, two of the three said hell no, that it was way too early, but the last girl described herself as a "hopeless romantic" and also said she was up in her "cloud" so I guess she's in love with some boy. One of them said her parents, who had married at age 23, told her they had both changed enormously by the time they turned 30, and had grown apart and had long since had nothing in common. She didn't say, but I assume they're divorced or they wouldn't have told her this. Another girl talked about how much she had "matured" since high school. Damn. They have no idea what pups they are.
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Unfortunately I got to Haight too early - maybe 10:45am. Once again, nothing opens in this town before 11, 11:30, noon. I was bad and ate lunch out again, at a lovely little Puerto Rican place that had just opened seconds before - I was the first customer - called Parada 22, at 1805 Haight, 4 blocks down from Ashbury. It was quite delish, they played all Spanish music, and I really dug the look of the place.
Seriously. That fucking cabinet thing looks gorgeous - I want this in my kitchen.
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Haight is I guess what you'd expect from Haight, ie there are quite a few head shops
And dreamy, hippy, crystal-y shops, second hand and vintage clothing stores
(Yes, that is a Jesus Christ Superstar belt buckle)
And one weird-on-purpose shop called Loved To Death, which had a blue velvet coffin in their window, and all sorts of goth/death-y, taxidermy and skulls and mummified fingers and shit for sale inside.
This is the only photo I took, because as I was taking it, I was told, simultaneously by two employees behind the counter that photos were not allowed. I'd just walked in the door - this chandelier featuring dead squirrels was directly above the entryway - and didn't notice the many framed signs on the wall up telling you that photography was a no-no. Interestingly, the really great, large, well organized - by decade - vintage clothing store (see hats and belt buckles, above) up the street also had these same sorts of signs. I guess I more understand the death-y place wanting to maintain their "look" lest anyone try to steal it, but a used clothing store, of which there must have been a half dozen on this same block? Oh well.
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I had two nice conversations while in Haight. One with a girl named Andrea, who worked at a store called Earthsong - Christ, is that a hippy name, or what? - where I bought these eerings.
For 16 bucks - not bad for sterling silver, and I really like them!! Anyway, Andrea had just moved here from Minnesota for god's sake, 6 months ago, and was living in a flat - not a house - with six guys and one bathroom. Even then, she said her rent is still $250 a month, and it's only technically, she said, a one bedroom. She explained that one person gets the bedroom - gotta wonder who lucked out there, or maybe they drew straws, or maybe they trade off - and one person I think she said is the hallway, and there are four in the living room. That's the kind of shit you can do when you're 20.
The other nice person I spoke with was this kid:
Who was collecting for Greenpeace, or actually, trying to get you to sign up for a monthly payment plan - which I declined, and he wouldn't take the five bucks I had in my pocket just as a general donation - but shit, he's pretty much the picture of a sweet faced, wide-eyed, braided pig-tailed, earnest Greenpeace hippy kid, is he not? When I walked by, I was wearing the blue striped shirt I got in Paris last fall, which is sort of my favorite shirt I own right now, and he pointed to it and said "Stripes! We're working for better standards for stripes at Greenpeace!" That's how I got pulled into talking to him. He gushed about the fact that, he said, they had recently won a victory in that they convinced Mattel, the world's largest toy maker, to package Barbie in recycled materials, I guess, instead of plastic. Also, I think he said they did this with the Lego people, too.
I thanked him and shook his hand when I left and it was actually really cold. He was only wearing those half finger gloves instead of normal gloves.
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They have a really big Goodwill store which I remember being mightily impressed by back in '92 - they seemed to have a lot of cool, original old hippy leather purses and fringed jackets and the like, but this time it was just ... meh. I sometimes thinks it's me, getting old, in not fully digging garage sales and Goodwills anymore, but really I think the fault lies with the internets. 'Back in the day', you could find awesome, fantastically horrid stuff at the Salvation Army, for dirt cheap, including shit like a pair of original early 70's platform shoes - in my size - that I found at a junk shop in Cambridge, but since the dawn of computers, these places now comb thru their donations for anything remotely cool and collectible, which is then sold online to the highest bidder.
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Overall, Haight just felt a bit dirty to me, to be honest. There's a few beggers and homeless folks scattered about, especially as you keep going and hit the edge of Golden Gate Park, but then there is in any big city and I've seen them in lots of places here, but I think Haight probably attracts more than it's share of loonies just due to it's reputation. I was walking down the street at one point, minding my own business, and a guy sort of cut me off on the sidewalk - he was not homeless - he was a resident heading for his car which was parked on the street, and I saw him go up into a building using a key directly afterwards, and he looked at me, laughed, and said "You're in your own zone, aren't you?" I have no idea what he was talking about, or what expression my face was wearing, other than annoyance at being cut off. Maybe after living here a while, you think everybody's high, even if they're not, if that's what he even meant. I think I stumbled out a response that I was in a perfectly happy zone, thank you, which made me sound like an idiot, or high, or both.
*
At one point I walked up Ashbury and found 710, which was only about 2 blocks up the hill from Haight. Funnily, back in '87 when I first saw it, the house, to me, surprisingly, had a small acknowledgement as to it's former occupants, which was kind of cool: a single bumper sticker on it's lower step, which I believe said "Deadicated". This was kind of sweet when I think about it, because they didn't need to do it, and maybe they paid a price for doing it, but here was this, to me, a sort of classy and subtle tribute, or rather, nod to the history. This time, however, the owners, undoubtedly I'm betting, with very good reason, have put up a sizeable locked gate at the bottom of their steps. Nobody has a gate at the bottom of their steps here, and I've walked about 100 miles all over this city in the richest neighbhorhoods.
I wonder if at any point in the last, what, 45 odd years since the Summer of Love, if some poor assholes bought this house, ignorant of the history, and suddenly there's all these high hippy kids climbing all over their doorstep. Really - should this be something revealed to potential buyers as part of a seller disclosure? And would it help, or hurt the sale?
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After Haight, I took the bus back home and hung out a while, then, as with yesterday, the sun came out, so I took my F train all the way down to the end of Market Street downtown, and visited the San Francisco Railway Museum - not to be confused with the Cable Car Museum - which was free, and pretty cool, and told the entire story of the history of streetcars in this town. I had no idea that they ran all the way to the pacific ocean originally, where they had built an amusement park called Playland at the Beach, up the road where the Victorian Sutro Baths were, both of which are sadly long since gone.
Check this out, though. This is a photo on the museum's website. As you can see, the word "fare", as in subway fare, is spelled the wrong way, and nobody's caught it in all this time, and it's really weirding me out:
The picture on their site is clickable, and when you do so, it leads to a page entitled, and spelled, the same way. Seriously, this is embarrassing, people. But I guess this is what we can expect to see more and more of.
Anyway, I bought some cool magnets and shit, and then walked over to the Marketplace Ferry Building on Embarcadero, which was great. This is a beautiful, enormous building
... running right along the waterfront - the side facing the east bay which contains Oakland and Berkeley, and from which there are primo views of the Bay Bridge
And outside of which there was this enormous retro rocket thing, featuring a jokey writeup at the base of it about the various "travel packages" you can purchase to go up in it to the moon and other planets, and what sort of sights and shopping to expect.
The Marketplace building is pretty gorgeous inside
seemed to me to be a high end Faneuil Hall, with a loads of nice/upscale shops and farmer's market-y eateries and cafes, a really surprisingly good and decent sized bookstore, which had several rows of folding chairs out as an author reading was about to happen (Rachel Dratch from SNL), and behind it all was this enormous, building-length boardwalk/deck thing overlooking the water.
When I left, it was just 5pm, and tons of people exited the F car and headed towards the ferry end of he building, and I realized these folks are commuters. They ferry in in the morning from Oakland or wherever, and train it up into the city. No need for a car.
*
After, I decided to catch the streetcar again - and thanks to the handy little piece of paper known as a transfer, it was a free ride - heading up Embarcadero to dreaded Pier 39, aka Fisherman's Wharf, which is the biggest tourist hellhole in the city, ie there's a large concentration of stupid shops and things like Ripley's Believe It Or Not, but it wasn't as bad as I'd remembered. They've gussied it up a bit, and added some okay looking restaurants, and I got what came for: some more awesome magnets, though they were not as cheap as when I was last here, when they were like all a dollar.
*
I then caught the streetcar outbound back to Castro. This was one I hadn't been on before, an Italian one, which was all wooden inside, and no padded seats.
But with all the walking I'm doing, this bothers me not all that much, honestly. Anyway, by the time we hit Castro region, I was the only person on the train, so I got to have a chat with the driver, who, even though I was his sole occupant and he knew where I was going, nonetheless, continued to announce over the little microphone what shops and connections you could find at every stop.
It was damned cold and windy when I walked home - you could see the fog dead ahead as you continued up Market Street - and I was desperate for a cup of hot chocolate, but couldn't find any, so I just went home.
One interesting sighting among all the interesting sightings on my walk back home through Castro, aside from this pubic-y disco flyer:
(I thought it was Freddie Mercury at first) ... was this character. A crew cutted, blue haired boy in platform-y shoe-boots, hurrying up 18th Street. This is about as close I've come, believe it or not, so far, to any sort of cross dressing types.
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