“Luke, you turned off your targeting computer!”

“Stay on target…”

Oh, wait, that’s no Death Star, it’s just what I think when I go up the escalator and mentally create kaleidoscope images with the brutalist architecture.

Here’s the original, unrotated, dramatically sunlit shot of a station that should be obvious.

And here’s a twisty BART (via Tiny Planets on the iPhone):

Mission and 24th:

Note the walkways across Army/CC…

…to massive, circular parking lots.

I somehow doubt Valencia would have maintained its bicycle friendly charm.

Mission and 16th:

Hey, a kite!

Hooray, tacos!

But a piñata tent?  WTF are the chairs for?  To watch people break piñatas?  People pay for that? I’m confused.  (I’d totally dig a Lucha libra tent though.)

Some context is in order.  This was the “Miracle Mile” — the Mission used to be one of the primary shopping districts in the city (there was a Sears at Mission and Army, after all — that was probably what the second walkway over Army St was for).

1956:

Pictures of shoppers on the Mile in the 40s and 50s: (from SFPL, but their image site seems to be down at the moment so I can’t link to the metadata, sorry)

1958:

1957:

1949:

I am sure theses 50s/60s era planners were hoping to stem the flight to the suburbs as the city depopulated around them.

(Anyone know how to constrain the date range for Wolfram Alpha charts?)

This is of course a completely different approach of construction destruction than the post-WWII SF freeway plans that we’ve discussed before — imagine a huge Geary-like trench through the Mission, and a highway on the west slope of Bernal, along Coleridge.

Detailed map below of the Mission Freeway from 30th to 14th (south is up). basically, all the odd-numbered streets except 21st would have been cut off, and the even-numbered streets would have been bridges (think Fillmore over Geary).

I need a drink.

Happier bonus material of a slightly modified past via Eric: a great 1966 picture of 24th and Mission (looking north):

Here’s a bunch of 1950 Sanborn maps jammed together to give you an idea of what the pre-BART 24th and Mission was like. (Click to zoom).

The NE and SW corners of the intersection are obviously gone. The McDonalds took out the SE corner, but the building next to it (Last’s Paints) is still there (now Western Dental / Mr. Pollo), as is the Dance Mission Theater building on the NW corner.

Here’s the 1950 Sanborn overlaid on Google Earth:

Note the stores in the diagonal slot where the railway used to be. Next time you have a sausage and beer at Rosamunde, remember that you are sitting right on the railway tracks.

Speaking of which, a 1926 shot of the guard arms for the active railway crossing (looking north up Mission, just before 24th) :

The rails in the foreground are the tracks for the old 14 and 24 streetcars (via SFPL)

And a 1945 shot of an apartment fire on 24th between (1) Valencia and (2) Mission (where that big church is now) from a WWII bomber that happened to be flying over the Mission:

(SFPL)

Zooming back to the 1950s and 60s version of the corner, we can get an idea of the vibrancy of the mile:

(Sorry for the lack of bars.  Older Sanborn maps clearly mark bars/saloons as “Sal.” but it’s weird there are NO bars here. I’m guessing Sanborn never updated the maps to show saloons like they did before the 1920s.  Still, a lot happening on the corner…)

Anyway, some great details in the photo:

Theater marquees a few blocks down the street: Grand. Crown. New Mission. Tower. Also the Leeds / Sketchers sign. No trees at all.

Tired of your typical, depressing 1960s bar? Sobered by highway and infrastructure planning? Come get a drink at “Smile Awhile Cocktails!”

Hey, that sign sure is a funny shape. Jigjag, jigjag.  Just north of 24th. Where have I seen that before?

El Farolito, continuing the tradition of old school Mission signs.

And this concludes today’s lesson in Mission bar and infrastructure history.

Northbound BART train in Marin County leaving Sausalito (February, 1961)

BART passengers on platform (September 1960) (aka “Mad Men on a train”)

BART passengers on train (September 1960) (Hey, triplets on a train!)

And can ever forget the view from BART over the GGB?

Just call YUkon 2-9838 to express your support for BART to Marin County:

Fans of Tufte will immediately recognize it. If you guessed something transportation related, you are correct.  The great dataplotter Eric Fischer has once again wrangled meaning out of a hapless API: The chart above shows BART train movement between Millbrae (top) and Richmond  (bottom) between 7:30 AM to 9:30 AM on July 2. The entire day along with Eric’s comments are available on Flickr.

(I find the thought of a Muni version of this chart mildly terrifying.)

On a side note, Eric is in print!  His tourist vs local mapping made the Boston Sunday Globe! Congratulations!

A few weeks back they painted the Powell/Montgomery/Embarcadero BART stations. Great, right? Well, in the process, they changed the signs. Not that they were so great to begin with, but the ones they replaced them with had me convinced that these were temporary ones until they were able to hang some fantastic new signs that would match the new paint scheme.

I can be naive.

I’ve seen this happen multiple times now – since these signs are posted at a height that is below the height of a BART train, when there’s a train in the platform, the signs are completely obscured…

This is easy enough to fix though:

Is apathy the real issue?

Stuff like this makes me sad. It makes me sad because sometimes I like to entertain the notion that San Francisco is a special place where the people who live here and the people in charge of stuff actually give a damn, that they’re proud. This blog is based on that innocent premise. But other times, I’m reminded that, to a large degree, it’s just not the case, that we are one big earthquake away from Louisiana status.

The frequency of transit fails on both BART and Muni are worrisome — do they point to a lack of investment and preventative maintenance? Is this what the Romans were thinking in the 3rd century? “Hey, the Via Appia used to be great, but it’s total crap these days.”

It’s not like we’re asking for mosaics made of Murano glass. (Actually, that would be very cool. I want stylish and highly visible rows of repeating signs made of Murano glass tiles please, distinct for each station. Thanks BART!)

Between civic apathy, an unwillingness to pay taxes for infrastructure, and government budget shortfalls, if there were a another 1906 level earthquake I have to wonder if San Francisco would end up like Detroit.

And don’t get me started on our creaking water and sewer infrastructure. If that goes, we’re historical footnotes.

BART around the Bay, to SFO via Brisbane, and over the southern bridges.

And look closely — that’s not 101 along the edge of the Bay, it’s a super-extended Highway 87 from San Jose to SF, extending through marshland and to the east of SFO.

And of course a dam.

Those mid-centurains sure had it in for the Bay, slicing and dicing it in their dreams.

Via Eric:

There is a dam across the Dumbarton Bridge, turning the south end of the bay into a freshwater lake.

All kinds of freeways that never happened: the Bayfront Freeway from San Francisco to San Jose; the Willow Road/Sand Hill Road freeway in Palo Alto; a Skyline Boulevard freeway north of where it meets Interstate 280; extension of the Route 92 freeway west to Highway 1; extension of the Highway 1 freeway south; Interstate 380 extended west and east; Route 84, 92, and 238 freeways in the East Bay; and the usual ones in San Francisco. No Southern Crossing, though.

And BART around the bay, and on the Dumbarton Bridge and San Mateo Bridge. In San Francisco and Oakland the routes still follow the 1956 Regional Rapid Transit alignments.

($300 mil is ~$1.8 billion in today’s dollars.)

I’d take the Geary section over the Central Subway in a second.  Hopefully the 1968-Third would have been faster than today-T-Third’s 29 minutes from Embarcadero to 3rd/Carroll.  BART is 32 minutes from Embarcadero to SFO, but it that just seems like a lifetime.

As an aside, here’s a fun smackdown comparing the T-Third to Dublin’s theoretically more expensive LUAS.

They were also considering a Third St monorail to SFO. Yours for under $100 million 1968 dollars! And don’t forget the 1956 Valencia-Mission Skytrain! Man, that that would have sucked.

I still say that we keep that Central Subway tunneling machine running to dig out a crosstown subway — take a left at  Divis, then shoot through Castro and Noe to hook up with a 30th St BART and the Muni ROW coming down San Jose Ave.  That would make it way easier for me to see shows at the Independent.  Also, I’d be able to take the Geary subway to get to GAMH.  That just leaves Slim’s, but a Van Ness line would take care of that nicely.  Anyone have five billion handy?

• BART under the Golden Gate Bridge and down Geary
• a BART tube from Sausalito to Columbus Ave with one Marin routing option through San Rafael, the other through San Anseimo.  (That would have been one looong tunnel.)
• an exclusive busway over the GGB
• a BART bridge from Richmond to San Rafael, and a busway over the GGB

(The colors are real, though I did adjust the black levels for added blogging excitement.)

Here’s a blowup of the numbers.  Awesome. Can you imagine what a blog from the 70s would look like?

Sadly there are not enough vibrant colors visible to the human eye to get past five. 6 is into the ultraviolet and 7 starts emitting x-rays.

Through exhaustive Internet research, I have uncovered a video representing the BART plans described above:

All I can say is if Pointer Sisters had gotten behind the 70s BART expansion we’d be riding it to Santa Cruz today, never mind Marin and the South Bay.

Is it a contour map of Bernal’s western slope?  Perhaps a chart of KevMo’s popularity over time?

Here’s a hint. And the color is important too.

Bigger hint:

Before you run to the London Tube maps you have pinned to your wall, let me save you the trouble — it’s the Bakerloo Line between Baker Street (on top) and Waterloo (bottom).  Oxford and Picadilly Circus(es) are in the middle.

I bring this up as my distaste for the new overly-straight BART map was recently referenced in an article by Design Observer (the traffic from which leads me to believe it’s a substantial website read by real designers as opposed to my pedantically hacktackular self).

While I readily agree the previous wiggly BART map sucked, and that the new map has certain improvements, my main criticism was over the elimination of the Mission curve.  The standard response was “London Tube map!” which I adore, but it’s simply not a valid justification for the new map. And why, yes, I will show you with pictures. (I’ve been meaning to draw up better diagrams contrasting the London Tube and SF BART maps, so here we go.)

Consider these extracts, to scale, of the literal Bakerloo tunnel on the left and the BART tunnel between Embarcadero and Glen Park on the right. (I’ve rotated the Bakerloo line a bit to better compare the relative lengths.)

The distance between Baker (top) and Waterloo (bottom) is roughly the same as that between Embarcadero (top) and 24th. Same distance, one more station, one more curve. How does the London map handle it?  No straight line, that’s for sure, as we see in the brown line below:

Side by side comparison of literal vs diagram:

(Geofftech.co.uk hosts many alternate takes on maps of the London Underground, including several showing the entire literal system.)

BART, however, takes the brute force approach and straight-lines it from Embarcadero — blowing out not just the Mission curve but the Bernal curve as well — with one straight shot to Daly City, and even spacing between stations. There’s not much point showing it as an extract.

Then there’s the ridiculously detailed coastline and the airport in the middle of the peninsula, but now we are being unfair. As a commenter Neil noted on the Design Observer article, the new map is “strangely half-assed.”  I suppose the intent was noble but the end result is disappointing.

As the Rachel Berger of the Design Observer article concludes,

Ultimately, how a transit map looks communicates information about the people who designed it, the people for whom it was designed, and the place it represents. Certain transit maps have come to symbolize the very spirit and character of a place. In Metro Maps of the World, author Mark Ovenden claims it “difficult to imagine an image more ingrained into the very psyche of a population” than the London Underground map. Ovenden also maligns the “slavish topographic accuracy” of the old BART map. Yet loyalty to topography is what gave the old map its unique visual qualities. Besides, the new BART map engages slavish geometric inaccuracy. The BART system, with five lines and forty-three stations, is simple. The new map feels inauthentic. Lines have been straightened for straightness’s sake, not to solve design problems. The BART map gained legibility but lost a rare hectic energy. Now that the old map is nearly gone, I realize how wonderful it has been to be confronted by a poetic, painterly map, by a map that makes me uncomfortable.

So what’s the answer? While do I rather enjoy wearing my reductio ad absurdum BART map t-shirt…

…in terms of practicality and aesthetics, I once again call for BART to adopt the awesome transit map designed by SF Cityscape. I beg of you, do riders a favor. Otherwise I’m slapping the damn things up in stations myself.

(Meanwhile, some perspective is in order. Here I am fucking complaining about a map I don’t like when there’s this to rebuild. In addition to whatever you give to the Doctors Without Borders or Partners in Health for Haiti, Design Observer also suggests donating to Architects for Humanity to help with strong reconstruction.)

You give me these as BART bridges and tunnels, then we’re talking.

And in addition to going down Geary, any Marin line would obviously have to connect to my cross-town line: Fillmore-Castro-Noe-30th St, then down to Candlestick-SFO.  (Just sayin’ in case Gavin gets some Obamadollars and buys the Central Subway‘s tunnelling machine.)

I still like this bridge best though.