16th Street pathway to dreams schemed as well as scrapped
a new urban theory to consider: If you want to see what a city is really like, take a single street and follow it from one end to the other. Pick an ordinary street and see where it goes.
I picked 16th Street, because it runs from the hills to the bay and slices through the oldest and newest parts of the city, different San Franciscos next to each other, like a layer cake of many flavors. “Little pockets of individuality,” says Ken Sproul, who grew up here and thinks about the city a lot.
I began at the dead end of 16th, just beyond Flint Street, on Corona Heights. Sixteenth stops at a chain-link fence, but there is a dirt trail, up the red rock side of the hill. It leads to an urban nook, ringed by trees and grass growing wild. There is a grand view, too, and it’s so quiet you wouldn’t know you are in the city.
But you are. San Francisco jumps at you heading down the hill to Castro Street, past a row of handsome Victorian houses. They must be well over 110 years old, beautifully maintained and worth a fortune.
Sixteenth crosses Market Street at the foot of the hill. It’s an intersection in more ways than one — it’s where the Castro meets the western corner of the Duboce Triangle; a lively corner of gay life.
There is a somber mural here dedicated to people who died of AIDS. Across from that, at 16th and José Sarria Court, is the Harvey Milk branch of the public library. Sarria was a native son, famously flamboyant and, when he died four years ago, he got a funeral fit for an empress.
Sixteenth Street continues east, past apartment houses and flats. There are cafes with outdoor tables and, on school days, crossing guards help kids cross the busy street.
The Mission Dolores Basilica is on one corner of 16th and Dolores, just opposite Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, one of the first gay and lesbian synagogues. St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, with services in English and German, is on the south side of 16th. Just up Dolores is the old mission itself, built in 1792. The city was born here. That was then.
Between Guerrero and Mission streets, 16th used to be pretty dicey, but now it is lined with restaurants and bars, hip with new life and a Latino flair. Near Mission is the Roxie Theater, offering a noir film festival this week.
If you want to see noir, check out the BART station plaza at 16th and Mission, which has an aura of vague menace and a cast of street people to match.
Heading east on 16th from Mission is the big brick Labor Temple at Capp Street, a survivor of the days when the Mission was the heart of life for the city’s working people.
There was industry all along this stretch of the street, even a steel mill. That’s over. The last big one, a cement plant near Harrison Street, closed not long ago.
“It’s changed, it’s difHere’s ferent,” said Roberto Hernandez, of the family-owned Double Play Bar and Grill at 16th and Bryant.
There’s talk — but nothing definite — about major housing developments at the suburban-looking shopping mall on 16th between Bryant and Potrero Avenue. The weather is good, and downtown and the big Mission Bay project is not far away.
But the present is a bit dismal as 16th ducks under the elevated Bayshore Freeway. Here is the site of one of those shifting homeless tent cities, a community of outcasts.
A block or two beyond, you will see Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts and along tree-lined Kansas Street, an area that looks like a textbook example of the reuse of old industrial buildings.
This part of town used to be full of factories and railroad tracks. There were greasy-spoon cafes, favored by truck drivers and other working stiffs. Now Wolfe’s Lunch, where 16th meets Wisconsin Street, has flowers in the window and fine food on the menu. The old and dingy Triangle Sandwich Shop at 16th and Third streets has vanished entirely. The site is part of the UCSF Mission Bay campus. There ought to be a historical marker.
Instead there is a steel sculpture at the brand new Daggett Plaza, showing birds and plants that used to live in Mission Bay before everything was paved over.
Next to that is the Potrero 1010 apartments, two sleek silvery buildings where studios start at $2,885 a month. UCSF is just around the corner and a Google bus stops two blocks away.
Sixteenth Street crosses Third Street, where the new Warriors arena is under construction. The end of 16th is next to a chain-link fence with a sign in letters 4 feet high: THE FUTURE IS HERE.