Sutro Nights
Guerrero Park Makes The NYT
SFCityscape and Streetsblog SF alerts us to New York Times coverage of Guerrero Park!
Allison Arieff writes:
One of the first three pilot parks was created to transform a dangerous and poorly conceived intersection (below) at 28th and San Jose Streets on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Mission District.
In 1947 San Francisco planned to build a new freeway here, and in preparation for doing so the city tore down or moved close to 200 homes in this neighborhood. The homes you see above on the right-hand side of San Jose Avenue were lifted and moved back onto their backyards to make room for the project. A protest stopped the freeway from happening, but little could be done in the way of reparations for these displaced families. Half a century later, some of those families are getting their yards back — though now they’re out front.
Landscape architect Jane Martin , who designed the San Jose/Guerrero park, had no problem finding treasure in the city’s trash: her park plan uses trees felled in a storm and old air ducting made from stainless steel as giant planters for a broad array of plantings ranging from agave to apple trees.
….These plantings and plaza aren’t just about aesthetics: the expanding array of planting projects along with other traffic calming measures, dedicated pedestrian enforcement stings and new traffic signals, the collision rate for the 11 blocks on Guerrero between Cesar Chavez and Randall Street, where the San Jose/Guerrero park is located, has been reduced by 53 percent since 2004.
(Now only if Google Earth would update their images so all the work I’ve done in my backyard would show up, arrrgh.)
This original intersection seems really shocking now.
A barren wasteland (SF.Streetsblog/Matthew Roth)
This is better.
Thanks once again to Gillian, Jane Martin, Andreas and the city’s Pavement to Parks team, as well as the DPW crew.
BART, Use This Map
Don’t get me wrong, I like my reductio ad absurdum BART map (and if I may say so myself it looks quite good on a black t-shirt). But it was a parody, designed to highlight the half-assed job BART did on its new map with its awkward combination of forced straight lines yet strangely detailed coastline. (And let’s face it, the previous map, even with its Mission curve, wasn’t very good either.)
Behold our friends at San Francisco Cityscape who have just updated what is quite possibly the BEST TRANSIT MAP EVER – zoom of SF below, click the map for the entire Bay Area.
“…we’d like to think that this version combines the simplicity of the BART map with a relatively accurate rendering of geography, and it includes some detail that the BART map doesn’t, like major Muni stops.”
Indeed. I would be very comfortable giving this to anyone visiting from out of town, and would pray that such a map existed wherever I travel.
BART, at least consider replacing the maps inside the cars with this one.
If one didn’t know any better, this SF Cityscape map would make you think the Bay Area has a coherent transit system.
The SF Cityscape folks have created dozens of interesting maps. I particularly like the SF Main Line map, the Spider Map and a plan for the California High Speed Rail map of the hopefully near future (rotated for your viewing pleasure).
Oh, I am so looking forward to the bar car on the trip to LA zipping along at 220 mph.
Hey, here’s an idea – if you have an electric car, you can drive onto the train. You get a charge and you can drive you get there! This idea is of course void if LA were ever to build a subway system like the one below (by Numan Parada, read more about it in the LA Times story).
I swear I will write about something other than BART or Sutro Tower soon. Really.
Sutro Comes ALIVE
Sutro Tower, endlessly scanning the horizon for threats to our fair city.
Stop-motion shots of Sutro Tower along Valencia, from 28th to 17th Street. (The animated GIF might take a few seconds to load.)
But I think it’s pissed about losing another antenna and is about to attack the Golden Gate Bridge.
Kidding! The “north stack” is being digitally upgraded just like the west stack last month. (And it’s well known that the first thing Sutro would like to attack are the container cranes over in Oakland.)
Low-rez animated GIF because it was the only way I could get it to continuously loop. High resolution Vimeo below that pans twice — but you have to click through to Vimeo, and it still doesn’t loop (arrrrgh).
However, here’s a high-resolution .mov that you can make pan to and fro:
- Open it in QuickTime and enable Loop (Command-L) before hitting play
- If you are clever (or bored), hit Command-J in QT, select the video track, rotate the video in Visual Settings, go to full screen, rotate your laptop 90 degrees and pretend you have an AT&T videophone from the movie 2001.
Want more? Esteemed commenter Larry Kenny has an actual zoom lens and has been taking epic shots of the Sutro deconstruction as well as ridiculously tight zooms. You look at the picture below and think, “Hey, nice zoom, Larry.”
And then he turns his zoom to ELEVEN.
That’s just a crop of the ridiculously large picture on his aptly named “large Sutro Tower photo page” that is well worth checking out.
Hyperlinear BART Map
In response to all the straight-liners out there, reductio ad absurdum:
Hey, you’re underground, so you don’t need to see the bay, right?
(By popular demand, black and white t-shirts are available on Zazzle. Why in the hell are black t-shirts so expensive? Any other more reasonably priced vendors out there?)
For the record, I like most of what BART did on their new map, just not the part in SF. I’m all for straightening out wiggles, but the curves of the Mission are important.
Geofftech.co.uk has an excellent archive of alternate takes on the iconic London Tube map.
The literal version:
vs the same area optimized:
This is obviously better, but note that many ‘curves of significance’ are preserved — St. Paul’s, Regents Park, Covent Garden, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus…
There are tradeoffs however, as highlighted in this surprising map made by RodCorp — the dotted lines connect stations that are less than a third of a mile apart (where it would be quicker to walk than ride):
(If only we had such a dense network of metro lines to have to worry about such things.)
One last argument — Baker St to Waterloo is about the same distance as Powell to 24th. Two maps, same scale:
And here is how each transit map depict(ed) the curves along these routes of roughly the same distance:
UPDATE: More relative map comparisons in this exciting post.
New BART Map Disrespects History
I am not liking the new BART map:
The old BART map:
The new BART map, with its laser-like cut from downtown to suburbs, is a slight upon the history of this city. Mission Street curves — deal with it bitches. You can feel it between Civic Center and 16th. Don’t fuck with the Old Plank Road or I’ll challenge you to a duel.
(Oddly rotated by 45 degrees to fit the tyranny of the WordPress 450 pixel width limit…)
Plus they are increasing time between trains to 20 minute from 15, despite raising fares. Seriously — are they trying to get fewer people to ride BART? Thank god they’ve got the customer service angle figured out. Idiots.
UPDATE: Intense discussion on how far one should go to simplify a transit map let me to create this hyperlinear BART diagram in a reductio ad absurdum exercise. New post here, comparing how the London Tube map handles curves on the same scale as the BART map.
I must say it is growing on me. (But I still want to Preserve the Curve.) More discussion in this post, with a surprising scale comparison to the London Tube map. Not what you’d expect.
No-Notice St. Luke’s Planning Meeting – Tonight at 6:30 PM
Our friends at CPMC have decided to throw a party but not invite the neighbors.
A meeting regarding the future of St. Luke’s will be held tonight (Wednesday the 16th) at 6:30 PM in the Administrative Conference Room. (Enter from the main entrance on CC, go straight past the elevators up the ramp, first hallway on the left.)
CPMC’s PR agency theoretically called people living nearby, but no one we know on Duncan, Tiffany or Guerrero got invited. If you live nearby please go and let them know your thoughts on their plans.
Current tower and layout:
Proposed 110′ replacement tower on current doctor’s lot:
If you go, please tell them we want them to build the medical office building on the corner, not a 110′ foot that is being pushed through in dark of night.
The future of medicine, our neighborhood and the viability and vitality of St. Luke’s, is not in the inpatient hospital building they propose to build in the Physician’s Parking Lot, but in building an office building where doctors see their patients: outpatient offices, urgent care, ambulatory services.
Morning Lightning
Holy crap — here’s where all that noise came from Saturday morning. WBTC points us to this epic shot of a lightning-enshrouded Golden Gate Bridge taken by Flickr user fgfathome, looking south from the Coast Guard station.
And a note from the National Weather Service — this was the first time San Francisco has seen rain on those days.
A 2-DAY RECORD RAINFALL WAS ALSO SET AT SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL
AIRPORT TODAY. ACCUMULATED RAINFALL TOTALLED 0.27 INCHES AND BECOMES
THE FIRST TIME IN RECORDED HISTORY RAINFALL WAS SEEN ON THESE TWO
DAYS.
Morning Thunder
Dear mother nature — I’m all for thunderstorms, a rarity here on the west coast. But at 5 o’clock in the MORNING? Seriously?
Please wait until at least 10 next time. (But thank you for watering my lawn.)
Slice of Blight
Eric Fischer pointed me to this 1948 SF Department of City Planning map showing where they felt “blight” existed. WordPress width slice below, full map here.
The yellow sections indicate neighborhoods. Note that the Mission is nearly 100% blight! Hooray, let’s built a giant highway through the middle!
(Interesting Noe and North Beach also got the blight map, especially since all three neighborhoods really haven’t changed all that much in the past 60 years.)
Of course, being blight-free was no guarantee of not getting Tom Petty’d. Here we see a rather flabbergasting interchange planned for the Sunset at Irving and 6th Ave:
Click the image for a larger mosaic showing convenient freeway access to Kesar Stadium and the feed in to the highway running down Oak St. Thank the transport gods for the freeway revolt.
As always, more on Eric Fischer‘s Flickr stream.
Burrito Justice 