Name Brand Recognition
J-Church Down To Earth
San Jose and 30th. Muni / DPT / DPW aren’t fucking around with this one.
San Jose inbound from 280 is fine, but outbound is a bit whacked right now.
Lots of rail grinding all up and down the line.
SF Bay, Obliquely
I live here.
Click to zoom. (Really. Click. So. Worth. It.) From @astro_soichi on the International Space Station, 264 miles up. Dude, you rock.
SF. East Bay. Silicon Valley. Santa Cruz. Russian River. Napa. Sonoma. Stockton. Sacramento. Even Tahoe. Damn, I want a window like that.
@guero310: San Francisco! It’s where I keep all my stuff!
@troymcluresf: “San Francisco… I was born there.” #sulu
Doesn’t that perspective look familiar?
And ISS, we see you too. Thank you microwave radar.
(via the Planetary Society)
Capp Street On High
Eric Fischer brings us scans of a 1930 plans for an elevated rapid transit line through the Mission running above Capp St.
The line would also have gone above Mission St downtown, and would have continued along the Southern Pacific rail spur through Noe through the Bernal Cut to Daly city.
This looks to be a part of a larger plan with rather extensive rapid transit, also scanned by Eric, with both subways (thick solid lines ) and elevated (thick dashed lines). I took the liberty of highlighting the interesting suggested routes. Sorry about the teal and magenta, but 1930 optimism caused me to run out of colors. (The thinner black lines are streetcars.) Click to zoom, and lots of interesting details on the full sized version (including a downtown train station on 7th and a proposed highway along what’s now 280 in Daly City).
I especially like the green line running along 17th St, and of course the century-long tease of a Geary line. (Sadly no sign of my favorite idea, the Fillmore / Castro / Noe / 29th line… And you’d think a line under California/Sacramento would be appealing, no?)
Of course, the downside to the Capp line would have been a looming 25 foot hulk over our heads:
Another minor issue would have been its 300 foot right of way (yes, 100 yards, as in a football field). Streetcars underneath, and roads on the side. (Click to zoom.)
This basically would have taken out all the buildings facing Capp, with the backs of those on Mission and South Van Ness facing new Cappistan.
So say we had our Elevated Capp Line. There are several alternate histories possible here:
a) After a few decades of decay in the 60s and 70s, it would have been torn down in the 80s (a la the Boston Orange line):
(Image via AloneArt)
Given what we did with Embarcadero and Hayes Valley, we’d probably have built a nice park.
2) It would have become a beloved part of the city and hundreds of Japanese noodle shops (a la Shimbashi station) would have opened up under the arches, giving us the udon, soba, katsu and okonomiyaki we so richly deserve.
(Image via Luke Robinson/Flickr.)
1959 Giants Opening Day In Color
Giants opening day, 1959, first regular season game in SF.
You can’t see it, but judging from the position of the batter and the pitcher the ball must be between the mound and the plate.
Man, do I want to drink a beer in the sun right now.
Well worth clicking on the image to see the whole thing, a wonderful view of SOMA / South of the Slot and the Bay Bridge.
More baseball posts for the record:
Via Google via Life via mightyflynn via The Tens via troymcluresf (and yes, the thought of a “Burrito Justice History of San Francisco” hardcover edition is intriguing. Any publishers reading?)
(Apologizes to Edward Gibbon.)
p.s. I’m not a auto guy, but is that yellow car at the intersection a Volvo P1800?
Even if not, I do love this ad:
UPDATE: astute reader (and La Lengua resident) aiden notes that our yellow car is most likely a 1955 Ford Thunderbird:
This makes sense since the prototypes for the P1800 didn’t come out until 1959/1960 and I really doubt one would have been cruising around the Mission as a sales campaign, entertaining as the thought is.
On the topic of yellow cars, the front of the Thunderbird reminded me a little of the front of an El Camino. So much so that I proceeded down this particular path of image hackery, the El Camino Corto!
Gender Chromonology
via Doghouse.
Someone please correlate to crayons. Also, someone please map out latin color names to today’s spectrum.
The wikipedia article on green vs blue is rather fascinating. (This is, of course, completely different and far less amusing than Red vs Blue.)
Hailbow
Snow or hail, below are two of the best shots of yesterday’s SF weather drama.
Lentil-sized hail via We Built This City:
scottmeinzer‘s rainbox HDR treatment (via brittneyg). Worth zooming into for the unicorns and leprechauns alone.
Of course, this wild SF weather totally trumps the hail and flash flood in Melborne last week.
Five-Hole Flush
A chart showing water consumption in Edmonton during the gold medal hockey game last month.
I especially like how water consumption was higher than average BEFORE the game — people were getting ready.
Of course, beer consumption was very likely the inverse, though you’d probably need to make the y-axis logarithmic.
Fire Away
How do you defend the Bay?
Late 19th/early 20th century – forts with big guns:
1942 – minefields:
1950s-70s: Nike Missiles.
Good fences may not make good neighbors, but rings of supersonic steel vs Soviet bombers are another matter entirely.
Control centers are squares and launch sites are dots, KML from here. Circles are the Nike’s 25 original mile radius. (Drew them myself, here’s my KMZ. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to generate circles in Google Earth? Come on, Mountain View — they’re freakin’ circles.)
Nike Missiles on Angel Island (SF-91L). Other launch sites included the Presidio and Ft. Funston, and radar control centers (C on the map above) included Mt. Sutro just about every sizable peak in the area.
And of course there’s the restored Nike missile site in Marin, SF-88L:
So what will we have to defend against in the future? My bet is GIANT ANIMALS.
Sadly I still haven’t seen this one. Oh, giant shark, can’t you just leave us be?
And I bet the sea lions left Fisherman’s Wharf to start planning with these guys:
As it endlessly scans the horizon for threats to our fair city, I hope our hilltop savior has secret lasers it can deploy.
Bacon Tragedy in Noe Valley
Duncan and Dolores. Otherwise known as “Why Noe Valley Can’t Have Nice Things.”
Or “Noe Valley Doesn’t Quite Get Street Food.”
Burrito Justice 
