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Ocean Ave
Forty years ago this stretch of Ocean Ave. near City College was dead and decrepit. Besides City College itself, up on the hill,
...the most fun thing out here was the street car turnaround by the fire station. When the K-Ocean street car completed it's outbound run, the car would loop around behind the fire station, through a passage between the fire station and the college bookstore, and then the driver would take his break at this old, covered facility built between sets of tracks (or tracks and a bus lane -- I can't quite recall and I can't find a photo.) Just to the north was a sloping mound of dirt that was one edge of an old reservoir in the years before it occurred to people that a massive volume (and weight) of water contained by dirt mounds, with thousands of people living below, probably wasn't a good idea. This is only a few miles from the epicenter of the 1906 earthquake. (OK, more than just a few miles but still pretty close.)
First the K-Ocean line was extended across the freeway to the BART station so you could connect between train and what was now termed "light-rail." (If you could discover where the light-rail stopped, as the signage was possibly the worst I've seen anywhere.)
More recently, the auto-parts store -- and its large parking lot -- were replaced by a generic apartment complex with retail below. I'm sitting in the cafe of the Whole Food market where the parking lot used to be. To me that's progress.
The streetcar turn-around was finally removed and reconfigured for several bus lines, making space for yet another apartment building. And there are now a couple more new buildings added across Ocean. Meanwhile, the old reservoir evolved from college parking lot to an extension of the City College campus.
The street and sidewalks were tarted up over a decade ago now -- though they are still making local improvements -- and the commercial strip west of the reservoir in now looking more prosperous, though one wouldn't call it upscale by any means. A small Target store opened there just recently (I guess you could call it a "small box" store) and more buildings are going up increasing, one supposes, the foot traffic on Ocean. There's even a new branch library.
A friend of mine bought a house a block off Ocean twenty some-odd years ago because it was the only place they could afford in the City. I just checked Zillow and they now value that property at just under a million dollars. (Zillow is not always accurate, it's way off with my condo, but I don't think this is too far off.)
Progress or just change?
I can't really say anything in favor of these new buildings besides that they house hundreds of people -- and a few businesses -- in structures that meet current seismic standards. I've seen worse, but I couldn't pick these structures out of an architectural lineup.It is hard to design buildings that look like "San Francisco" architecture without simply mimicking the familiar bay windows. One local architect has tried to invent new versions of the bay window but, while one is in my neighborhood and I think it's an interesting looking structure, I had to be informed that that's what they were up to. Borrowing space, and light, and views, from the street is something that should appeal to even today's developers, but few of the new buildings attempt it.
To be fair, my favorite buildings downtown, mostly built after 1906 and before 1950, do not have a distinctly San Francisco character either. Their appearance was shaped by the École des Beaux-Arts -- rather than the more recent structures that are shaped by the Bauhaus -- and could probably have been built in any American city of the day.
Here's a perfect way to wrap up this post: A Muni driver just came into the cafe to buy some refreshments before his next run. He at least has many more options than he would have had even 10 years ago.
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