SF.Streetsblog brings us this SFPD chart showing the Muni routes with the most incidents (blue), vs percentage of SFPD rides in minutes as tracked by TransLink (red).

Our frenemy the 14 Mission leads the city in terms of incidents.

Here is a breakout of Mission routes:

Thank you, Muni, for killing the safest route in the Mission.

And yes, I know that the 14 has about 10x the ridership of the 26, meaning the incident per capita is about the same.  But can you really imagine a more crowded 14 or 49?

Goodnight, 26.

Breaking news! Blight exists in Noe Valley AT THIS VERY MOMENT.

Now I know what you’re thinking — “how can you possibly detect blight without the advantage of retro-history and the assistance of Eric Fisher’s time machine?” By walking up Duncan between Church and Dolores:

Sometimes blight arrives because you don’t rebuild. Other times it comes around because you don’t finish. This site has been under construction for at least two years, and I don’t think any work has been done for about a year.

But how exactly do we know this is blight as opposed to procrastination? Easy:

Click to zoom for the commentary added by neighbors regarding Contractor “LOSER”.

“Tack down your tarps.”

“Your neighbors are getting pissed – you lock it down or we will.”

Peel back the blue tarp and you see old school Noe ready to roar.

No, not enchilada, Enceladus.  The Cassini space probe, launched in 1997, has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004 and has returned all sorts of ridiculously crazy-detailed data and pictures of Saturn and its moons.

Epic shots during Saturn’s equinox, when the rings were nearly edge-on to the sun and height variations cast long shadows:

Planetary Society, via NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute

Earlier this month it skimmed 64 miles above Enceladus, an icy moon that gets squished by tides from Saturn and as a result has geysers that vent up through cracks on the surface:

NASA / JPL / SSI / mosaic by Emily Lakdawalla

A mosaic of a cracks, or tiger stripe – Enceladus is about the width of Arizona, and the cracks are over a mile wide (a little wider that San Andreas Lake / Crystal Springs reservoir off 280).

NASA / JPL / SSI / mosaic by Astro0, unmannedspaceflight.com, via The Planetary Society

And here is a 3D stereo shot of the crevasse (rotated 90 degrees from the shot above):

Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI

(Sorry if you can’t cross your eyes to see the THIRD DIMENSION. On another planet, no less.)

And just so Republicans don’t think their tax dollars are wasted on a single icy planet, Cassini’s radar picked up what is believed to be methane lakes the size of Superior on Titan:

(NASA, University of Arizona, Planetary Society)

UPDATE: I am an idiot and took pictures of 998 Valencia (to the left of ATA) rather than the un-AA space at 988 Valencia (to the right of ATA). I get my empty Valencia storefronts confused. My apologies.

Some redecorating going on in the not-American Apparel on Valencia and 21st former Botanica Yoruba space?

What kind of establishment would want a wall of horizontal beat-up two-by-fours? Discuss.

Eric Fisher has unearthed and scanned proto-BART plans from 1956. Some fascinating detail, including a Marin line routing along Kearny, Columbus and down Lombard (instead of Geary in later not-to-be plans).

Various alternatives were presented.  One included underground stations for the Marin line at Lombard & Van Ness, with a tunnel under Russian hill to Columbus & Green, and a terminus at California & Kearny.  Both elevated and suspended trains were considered.

A few different options were proposed for downtown.

One was a tunnel from the East Bay meeting with the Marin terminus at California, dodging over to Market as we know today, then continuing down Valencia.

The alternative would have come in from the East Bay over the Bay Bridge and run above Mission (with stops at 4th and 8th).

The Peninsula line would have dangled above Valencia (with stops at 14th and 22nd), then cut down Tiffany Ave to a tunnel at Dolores & San Jose, exiting around Bosworth, with a station at Ocean.

The plans show the line continuing south down the Peninsula to Palo Alto with a maintenance yard at Arastradero.

All sorts of crazy detailed suggestions for Marin, and past Palo Alto to Santa Clara / San Jose / Los Gatos (no 280 or 880 yet!) More can be seen on this system-wide map and the rest of the detailed maps on Eric’s Flickr stream.

Sutro, Mission’s Protector:

Troy Holden, Caliber: At This Hour of the Day

Bernal Island:

Bats, Bernal Heights

Bernal and Sutro, together again:

Trees of Bernal, at night – 60 second exposure on a cloudy night (tonight):

Bernal on a hot, sunny morning (through my Oakleys):

Houses at night, west side of Bernal, (60 second exposure, last night)

It’s 1947.  You have neither TV nor blogs — how do you evangelize?  Posters and pamphlets of course.

Eric Fisher brings us scans from the 1947 campaign to redevelop the Western Addition, aka “raze a neighborhood.”

One method is the strategic use of color.  Simply layer green upon black.  Problem solved!

Down with fire!  And garbage!  And bay windows! And cars running into giant oil barrels!

Imagine what these guys could have done with Photoshop

Note: I’m all for public health and children not living in squalor.  But the shame of children wearing overalls and the high social cost of dressing like hipsters clearly justify massive urban renewal.

Mr. Stripey Jacket kind of looks like Morrissey, either with a hangover, or about to start a solo.

I did find this copy entertaining:

“Gone are the disreputable joints, the so-called smoke shops, the ‘hotels,’ and pool hall hangouts known to the police.  Gone, too, are the alleys in which juvenile gangs plotted mischief that sometimes ended in murder.”

Damn you, 1940s — we could use a couple more pool halls in the Mission. That pool table at Latin American is rarely free of jackets or asses (not that I could get through a game with their margs.) But I digress.

“The rigid street system, with its death-trap intersections, is reorganized, simplified. The indiscriminate mixture of commercial, industrial and residential structures that is the disease of blighted areas is nowhere to be seen.”

Guess they were against mixed-use development.  Given that’s a primary reason I live in SF (so I can walk places) I don’t think I would have enjoyed the New City. Sure looks pretty though:

"Honey, here blight was once rife."

While the 40s-era planners’ “build projects and highways” plans may have been flawed, were they onto something in terms of urban renewal, quality of life and safety?  Did they see the fundamental changes in society and the jump in crime that would be brought by the 60s?

I found some ridiculously detailed homicide stats that name every person ever murdered in SF from 1849 to 2003 — the very first on the list was Beatty Belden, shot by “Chileans” on Telegraph Hill because of a “misunderstanding” — and crunched some numbers over time. (I took the 10 year census numbers and extrapolated SF population for other years , except for the last 10 years where I found yearly US census estimates.)

SF Homicide Rate, 1860-2008 (per 100K)

The 20s-40s were positively halcyon days in terms of murder in San Francisco — I’m kind of surprised that the rate was so low during the Great Depression and Prohibition.

But murder rates jumped drastically in the 60s. I’m neither a statistician nor a criminolisiticist, so sorry for any miscalculations, but homicide rates approached those of the 1870s.

This jump happened nationally, pointing to greater societal issues, but the SF rate was surprisingly high, even compared to NYC during the 70s. Granted cities like DC/Detroit/Baltimore were much higher, but let’s face it, the 60s-80s (suburban flight, racial discord) was a rough time for America.

SF-NY-Chi-US Homicide Rate, 1870-2007

US and FBI data, NY source data, Chicago data. Lots of extrapolating but the trends are clear.

SF leveled off in the 70s, and the 90s were a turning point for the rest of the nation. Chicago is well on its way down and NYC homicides have plummeted and now at the national average.  SF was dropping as well but is now ticking up, WTF?

But I guess Gavin can rest comfortably knowing that none of this matched the epic murder rates of the Barbary Coast days of the 1850s (or New Orleans today).

SF Homicide Rate, 1849-2008 (per 100K)

For all those sociologists out the frantically pounding away in the comments section that I’m doing it wrong, you’re probably right.  In fact, the FBI puts out a press release each year warning people not to do a straight comparison of homicide rates.  Georgia State University publishes a homicide ranking list adjusting for socioeconomic factors (poverty, median income, male unemployment, race composition, and female-headed families).  SF doesn’t come out so well.

Once again I find myself at the end of a post much longer than I intended to write, struggling to come to some sort of meaningful summary on top of snarky commentary and pretty pictures. (Damn you Eric Fisher!)

As for the idea of grassy fields and apartment buildings calming society, I doubt it would have made a difference in the 60s.  Just look at the failure of most if not all American housing projects or the riots in the banlieues of Paris in 2005. You can build all the elevators you want but race and jobs are undeniable factors.

Despite the crime wave in the 70s, New York made such density via elevation work. But how many other any other cities have done so? Tokyo? Vancouver? Singapore? Not many. What makes the difference? Is it possible to build a society that matches density with safety, or are we at the mercy of national socioeconomic trends?

Poor Mr. Frog — he never saw it coming:

Oh, and by the way, orca always wins. I don’t care what those Swedes think.

Oh, Noe, you looked down upon the Mission and thought you were blight free. But 1945 disagrees:

“San Francisco is an old city. Much of it is built of wood. The areas of obvious blight and decay are generally those spared by the 1906 fire. Here buildings 40, 50, and 60 years old are crowded together. They have been patched, repaired, and changed into apartments, stores, rooming houses, and garages. The districts in which these conditions are found are convenient to the business and industrial centers. Streets, schools, and utilities are all in. The land is gently sloping, the climate excellent. But the future of this once valuable property will be dark until the old structures can be scrapped and attractive new buildings adapted to modern needs can be built on the land.”

Eric brings us the blighted Noe Valley in 1945:

“Blight disfigures San Francisco, drives people out of the city, interferes with business and industrial development, lowers the value of good property, increases the costs of government. An attractive, new city can be built by reclaiming blighted areas.”

This is 1945, looking north on Sanchez, with Duncan on the bottom and 25th on the top:

Link to today via Microsoft’s birdseye view, but for easy comparison let us zoom in and see the utopian vision brought on by the sweeping aside of blight and decay, with so many chang… err, wait…  I think only one building turned over.

Oh, lazy post-war San Franciscans. You missed your chance to reubuild a glorious and shiny future!  History clearly will curse you for ignoring those fateful words of the wise 1945 planners — this once valuable property will be dark until the old structures can be scrapped and attractive new buildings adapted to modern needs.

Poor, poverty-stricken Noe Valley, worth nothing.

Makes you wonder what Fillmore and the Western Addition would have been like had the city not so generously redeveloped it.

Scanner, history.  History, scanner.

Here we have “The Master Plan of the City and County of San Francisco: Classification of Areas for Redevelopment (1945)” scanned by the indominable Eric Fischer.

While less colorful than our previous Blight Map of 1948, this is more detailed, revealing blight block by block. (Guess if the dark shading means good or bad.) Behold a 450 pixel-wide slice of blight from North Beach down to the Mission.

(Note this is even before 101 went in. And they certainly had their eyes on building on top of Bernal — those would have been epic streets.)

Here we have the key:

$40 adjusted for inflation is just under $500 today — I can only imagine how gobsmacked the city planners of 1945 would be to see Craigslist rental prices 3 to 6 times higher on their “substandard” properties.

It’s fascinating how blocks with million dollar homes were considered tear-downs 65 years ago.