San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Visit to old neighborhood unearths youth
Thomas Wolfe said it best: You can’t go home again. That’s true, but you can walk by and look in the window.
That’s what I did on a long walk through the old neighborhood on Potrero Hill the other afternoon. I walked past three of the houses where I grew up. The houses all looked familiar, like the homes that are backdrops in old family pictures.
My family lived for a generation on Potrero Hill just before and after two wars that defined our time: World War II and Korea. The hill was like an island in the southern part of the city ringed by miles of railroad tracks, shipyards, factories and lumber yards. There were two gigantic gas storage tanks on the edges of the hill. Butchertown was not far away.
The neighborhood was pretty in its way, a bit like an industrial version of Telegraph Hill with small houses and steep hills, even a street that was more curvy than the famous crooked block of Lombard Street.
We lived in a narrow world. Potrero Hill folks seldom went downtown. We were not familiar with distant Golden Gate Park and most kids in my grammar school class had never been to Chinatown or North Beach.
Instead, we had a neighborhood full of corner stores, dirt trails through former goat pastures that led to city adventures and an open hilltop where in the windy season we would fly kites on strings so long it seemed as if they dipped and soared high above the city, nearly to the clouds. It was a great place to be a kid.
The adults were working people: they had jobs in the shipyards or on the docks, they were factory workers, cops, firefighters, carpenters, gardeners in the park. Irish, Italians, Slovenians. A colony of old-world Russians with long beards lived on top of the hill. African American families lived in the housing projects on the east side of the hill facing the bay.
Memory is a tricky thing. When I came back last week, Potrero Hill looked pretty much the same —
and very different. How different? The creaky old house on 25th Street my parents bought for next to nothing when I was a kid is valued at $1.3 million on the Zillow real estate website. Families like ours could never afford to live there now. It’s the San Francisco story.
I was in search of an older San Francisco story on my return. I found it, too.
The older houses that had seemed a bit shabby were now trim and freshly
painted. There were street trees. One of the hilltops had been converted into Starr King Open Space, three acres of grass and trees like a green crown atop a hill. The entrance to it is a trail at 23rd and Carolina streets, near our first Potrero Hill home. “Smell the flowers” the sign says. The open space is owned and maintained by a nonprofit run by neighbors. We would never have thought of that.
Twenty-fourth Street runs straight as an arrow
from Noe Valley through the Mission District right up Potrero Hill to dead-end at De Haro Street. The last block is so steep it is still paved with shiny cobblestones, right out of the last century.
At the end of the street is a steep rock formation like a mini Yosemite. We played on it as kids. It was a fort, a pirate tower, a sentinel lookout. It’s still there, exactly as it was. And it’s still a favorite with the local kids.
Maureen Kelly, a neighbor, has lived on Potrero Hill since 2007 and is raising a family there. “The weather is great,” she said, “It’s sunny all the time.” Her son and his friends, “an army of boys” she called them, are able to roam the hill. “There are places to run and rocks for the kids to climb,’’ Kelly said. “It’s beautiful just now.’’
When I was a kid, the big park at the very top of the hill along Arkansas Street was a bit scruffy, a bit wild, almost rural. But the city has paid attention to it in recent years: there’s a baseball diamond, a playground, a dog run, and an open field as trim as a lawn. The park is ringed with trees, and in the distance are the glass towers of San Francisco.
I asked Kelly about her neighbors. “We have some teachers,” she said. “One of them with four kids. There’s an artist, a designer. My husband is a carpenter and there’s a scientist. There are some venture capitalists on the street, too. It’s a mix, I’d say.’’
Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. Somebody else lives there.