I am spending the Memorial Day weekend visiting family in San Francisco. I tend to hate the process of arriving. Fighting through traffic and seeming suicidal people trying to eek out 30 seconds off their commutes. And of course the nightmare that is parking in any downtown neighborhood in SF.
But I love when I get of the car and am free to just wander. I think one of the great joys is to just pick a direction and explore. I like seeing the little playgrounds, public parks, water tanks that also are parks hidden in between old buildings. (See side note below). I also love finding new vantage points and cute neighborhood restaurants. I wandered around Nob Hill for the first time and walk around Grace Cathedral and found several photo worthy shots of the Bay Bridge and Transamerica building. Too bad my cell phone couldn’t no the views justice. It was nice seeing people walking their dogs and people still out with their kids at 10pm. I feels very different than in the 90s when it feels like those people would have rushed home after dark. Anyways, I love how layered cities can be and how you can find small delights hidden around random corners. Its one of the reasons I support mixed use zoning like in Hong Kong or Japan. I think it makes a place better to live in when homes and businesses are mixed. Its also way more fun as a tourist since you don’t really have to worry about food and drinks. Can you imagine wandering around the suburbs of Houston on foot? You’d probably starve or get run over. 1/5 Stars. No fun.
Side note:
The Jones Street water tank I ran into is part of the SF Emergency Firefighting Water System. The system was built after the earthquake of 1906 earthquake destroyed the city though a series of fires. The system is considered a civil engineering marvel and is one of the hidden nerd gems of SF. The system is dedicated to fire protection and provides high pressure water like you would expect. The in-genius part of the system is that is designed to be broken by earthquakes. The designers knew that earthquakes break pipes and that you can’t really prevent it or predict which will break. So they used the city’s hilly topography to set up a series of neighborhood cisterns that hold water supplied by a dedicated water pump. The cisterns will provide the local neighborhood with fire fighting water even if all the pipes leading to the neighborhood from the pumps are broken. It means the system is designed to work under a distributed fragmented architecture if necessary. Super cool :D.