San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Poetry in names of S.F.’s streets
We've had enough rain. We've had enough bad news. It's March now, and winter is almost over. A tough winter, too. A season when seldom was heard an encouraging word.
San Francisco has a lot of problems, as everybody knows. Only last week, Scholaroo, a finance website, conducted an analysis of the best cities to live in during 2023, based on 47 metrics: crime, affordability, health care jobs, and so on. A total of 151 cities were ranked. The best city was Naples, Fla. The worst was San Francisco. We're number 151. This comes on top of the sad end of the 49ers season, the decline of the Warriors, the low expectations for the 2023 Giants.
Surely there must be a league where San Francisco does well. The rain let up for a bit, and I went for a walk to think about it. Up the corner, down the Esmeralda steps to Prospect Avenue, down to Lundy's Lane, down a bit to Coleridge Street, past a little park to Precita Avenue. Streets named for an emerald, good prospects, a famous battle, a poet and a vanished creek, itself named for a Spanish word meaning dam or weir.
That's just a small sample. San Francisco is leading the league in great names. The city itself was named after St. Francis of Assisi, one of the most venerated of saints and the patron saint of ecology.
No other city has both the Golden Gate and the Great Highway, an Embarcadero and a Divisadero, a Telegraph Hill, a Russian Hill and a Billy Goat Hill, a Pacific Heights and Bernal Heights, a Bayview and a Sea Cliff at opposite ends of the city, two crooked streets, one famous and one not. There was even a 1970s TV show called “The Streets of San Francisco,'' a cop show now considered a classic.
There are other cities with great names: Paris, of course, New York, London. But San Francisco has a splendid location too: a beautiful blue bay ringed by hills and medium-size mountains: Diablo, Tamalpais, Mount Hamilton. And the city was built on hills so steep the cable car was invented to climb them.
A small city, too. Only 46.87 square miles. That makes it easy to navigate once you learn its local secrets. Most San Franciscans have pretty much memorized the city: They know the Richmond from the Sunset, the Inner Mission from the Outer Mission, North Beach from South of Market. They are discovering the newer parts of the city, like Mission Bay, and the reborn Dogpatch neighborhood.
And most of all, I think, they like the names that set San Francisco apart. The best description was the one I found in an old book called “The Tower of Jewels,” by R.L. Duffus, who was a newspaper reporter in San Francisco decades ago.
“The streets of San Francisco are an odd mixture of history, accident and dead-and-gone real estate operators,” he wrote. “But they are lovely names, also: Mission, Market and Van Ness, Brannan, Bryant, Folsom, Howard …” And he goes on.
When I was a kid we had to memorize the layout of the city. We knew where not to go, but also the quickest way across the city. It would have been a great crime to get lost in our own city. We had maps of the city in our heads.
I still remember that map. I can see my way on the clanking old streetcar to Van Ness and Sutter — kind of the very northern frontier of our Mission District world — then across the mysterious Western Addition to my grandmother's house at Sacramento and Lyon. The streets flew by: Franklin, Gough, Octavia, Laguna, Buchanan, Webster, Fillmore. The streetcar would turn right on Fillmore then left on Sacramento, past Steiner, Pierce, Scott, Divisadero, Broderick, Baker to Lyon Street. We kids felt like explorers.
I grew up, of course. Or maybe I didn't. Sometimes on a late shift at The Chronicle not so long ago, I'd catch one of the last cable cars of the night at Powell and Market. No lines then; the tourists had gone home.
The conductor rang two bells, and we'd lurch up Powell past Ellis, O'Farrell, Geary, Post, Sutter, Bush, Pine, clank over the crossing at California, coast down past Sacramento, Clay, Washington, around the curve at Jackson and up the hill, Mason, Taylor, downhill a bit and screeching around the corner to Hyde Street, then Pacific, Broadway, Vallejo, Green, Union, Filbert. I'd say good night to the gripman and get off there in the years I lived on Russian Hill. I liked rainy winter nights best when the cable cars were almost empty.
I loved the names of those streets; it was like a San Francisco postcard. Later still I came to admire the sound of the Sunset streets on the other side of the city: Irving, Judah, Kirkham, Lawton, then those Spanish names in alphabetical order: Moraga, Noriega, Ortega, Pacheco, Quintara, Rivera, Santiago and so on.
“Not all the streets were beautiful,” Duffus wrote long ago. “At certain times some of them were dangerous. Some were tawdry. Some, block after block, were shabby and grim and a young newspaperman might associate them with crime, poverty and warped lives …
“But there was always poetry in the names of those streets,” Duffus wrote. That was enough for me.