San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Set foot on a journey that never ends
The spring rains that rolled in from the Pacific at the end of the week should be gone with any luck, and San Francisco should be washed as clean as it ever gets. So, it's time for San Francisco's favorite outdoor sport. It's not what you think either: It's walking. The only way to fly.
San Francisco is a great walker's town. Not only is the city famously scenic, but it has dozens of distinct neighborhoods and odd corners: hills, stairs, streets, alleys, a city of surprises around the corner, beautiful and ugly both, sometimes on the same city block.
If you will forgive a personal note, I have to report how walking and newspapering intersected. When I was a kid, I delivered the San Francisco News, an afternoon paper, on Potrero Hill. I walked because the hill was too steep for a bike and it was easier to navigate the somewhat shabby housing that was on my route.
The newspaper moguls required us paperboys to collect the bills ourselves, so when I walked the route to collect I got a look inside the houses. Sometimes the subscribers were deadbeats, trying to stiff me over a $1.25 bill. Two doors away, another guy would sometimes hand me $10. “Keep the change, kid,” he'd say. “It's payday.” There were adventures, too: big dogs, scantily clad housewives. “Every block is a short story, every hill a novel.” William Saroyan wrote that about San Francisco once.
Years later, walking and newspapering intersected again, when I was an editor at The Chronicle, working on a section called the Sunday Punch, and one of my writers was Margot Patterson Doss, who had a weekly column called San Francisco at Your Feet. Doss loved the city with the passion of a transplanted San Franciscan — she was born in Minneapolis and worked in the Midwest. She thought walking was the only way to truly know the city. She told me once she walked 6,000 miles a year and had 42 pairs of shoes. She wrote a dozen books, was on television and wrote her walking tour column for 30 years and three weeks exactly.
So I think of Doss when I embark on my own Sunday walks. You should, too, because she was the mother of this noncompetitive city sport in San Francisco: These days you can walk with historians, with city guides, with dogs, with urban reporters, or even with the ghost of Norton I Emperor of the United States. Back then she had the field to herself.
It is always best to be sure your walkabouts include your own neighborhood, the back side of your own hill, your next street, your own block. Know it like the back of your hand. No place like home.
After that, you can walk at random or have a theme: a particular neighborhood or a park. Or maybe a street.
Sometimes there is the path less followed: the city's alleys. Alleys belong in a city: back alleys, alleys that lead nowhere, dark alleys, and alleys full of light, food and drink, like Belden Alley in the Financial District. There are alleys that look like Europe on Telegraph Hill and alleys that look like Asia in Chinatown. “Alleys are hidden discoveries,” said Gabriel Metcalf, an author and president of SPUR, an urban think tank.
My own favorite alley is Kerouac Place, only 60 feet long. It connects two worlds: Chinatown and North Beach. Nearby Cooper Alley, with a mysterious and perhaps tragic past, is the narrowest street in the city — you can stand in the center and touch both sides.
Some people like to take long street walks, end to end. There's Market Street, the city's fascinating, sometimes frightening main stem, and Mission Street, the longest of them all. Mission runs from San Francisco Bay, all the way through a new Financial District, through the Mission District, the Excelsior, out on and on, over the county line to the Top of the Hill Daly City to Colma, city of the dead. The 1,000-foot-tall Salesforce Tower is on Mission Street, and so are dozens of pawnshops and sidewalk vendors.
You can walk and still be surprised. My pal Don Cohn invited me to an April Giants game. I hadn't been to the ballpark since the end of last season, and in the meantime, a whole set of highrise apartment buildings had sprung up along the south bank of Mission Creek, like mushrooms grown over the winter. I used to walk in that area not so long ago. It was empty and forlorn. I called it the Seacoast of Nowhere. And now look. It deserves another Sunday walk.
A true San Franciscan is drawn to the water, drawn west to walk down those Sunset District streets with those musical Spanish names because they end at the western edge of the continent, along the Great Highway, the best name for any street anywhere.
San Francisco is a town with splendid names: Embarcadero, Divisadero, Golden Gate. Even the names of the hills are good: Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, Potrero Hill, Lone Mountain, the lordly Mount Olympus and the humbler Billy Goat Hill, where 30th Street turns into a goat trail.
The Billy Goat Hill trail connects with a lateral trail up through a modest forest to join the Crosstown Trail, one of the wonders of the 21st century. The trail runs from Candlestick Point diagonally across the city to a point near Lands End nearly 17 miles away, over hill and dale, bay to ocean, “A San Francisco trail for San Franciscans who think they've seen it all,” Peter Hartlaub wrote in The Chronicle.
But of course nobody's seen it all. A reader told me the other day that at extremely low tide, you can see a complete automobile that somebody drove in the bay at Warm Water Cove.
And last week, I noticed a sign describing the city's vanished waterways. One of them is Yosemite Slough, way out in the Bayview. I've never been there. It may be worth a look.