Previous - 30. Less chatty
Surprises where street grids meet
San Francisco has a typical American street grid, though not quite properly oriented north-south as you would expect. But then a diagonal street, Market, was tossed in with a completely different grid to the south (in SOMA). Besides creating a whole series of devilishly complicated intersections, this merging of grids does a couple interesting things.
This is a fun image. This shows Market separating the SOMA grid at the lower right from the Union Square/Financial District grid at the top left. You can use Maiden Lane and Commercial street to orient yourself if you know SF. Claude Place is missing along with my alley and at least one other mid-block street.
First, as Jane Jacobs pointed out, it creates perspectives ending in architecture on almost every street downtown -- at least when looking in one direction. The lack of streets that seem to run on forever is a key factor in making SF look compact and "different" for an American city.
The second, and I'm sure unintended, consequence of the grid collision, is that it's hard to anticipate where something in the other grid is going to appear from the perspective of the grid you are in. And that -- long lead in -- is what I want to talk about.
The new Salesforce Tower is rising over where the old Transbay Terminal was, and when completed will be the tallest building in SF. Most of the tall buildings in town lie between there and where I live, so I assumed it would not affect the skyline for me. Wrong, as it turns out.
Recently it has reached a height where I can see it, still rising, in a gap between two nearer towers as I walk on Bush street just below where I live. (Where I took those "French" photographs.) A block above (literally) on Pine, the skyline is dominated by what was the BofA Building -- a massive, dark presence only a few blocks from me.
But down on Bush you can hardly (if at all? You can see it from one sidewalk but not from the other.) see that structure due to the hill and other buildings, and now Salesforce is getting ready to take it's place as orientation point for SOMA and downtown.
And I'm serious about the "orientation" aspect. Once it gets its decorative tower cap it will become a visual guide to where the Transbay Transit Center and that whole "new" area of town is and, consequently, where you are in relation to it. It will serve to end, at least in part, the disorientation of the grids. At least I think it will. There's a tiny chance that what I'm seeing is a lesser building also going up in the same area. If it is that building instead (which I really doubt) then Salesforce Tower is blocked and the effect I want wont come to fruition. Time will tell.
Belle Ruin
Yes, I'm still reading this as slowly as I can. Getting close to the end now and there's only one more book.Martha Grimes published Double Double: A Dual Memoir of Alcoholism which I have not read. I'm interested, but I have the feeling I have everything I need to understand her in the Emma Graham novels. I don't really want to know if she is less like Emma than I think. But what got me thinking about this was a passage in Belle Ruin with a bit more detail than usual about Emma's mother.
While every cab driver and diner patron in this fictional world develops more and more of a character, Emma's mother does not. She stays a mystery outside of her cooking. As readers, we have to encourage Emma's independence and isolation -- we don't want her mother suddenly acting parental -- but it is odd and totally unexplained. She's like a cloaked character at the center of the book. In a sense everything revolves around her either as cook or mother or hotel co-owner, yet we can hardly see her. We know more about the cat.
I'm guessing if I read Double Double I would probably get some insight into this, but do I want to know too much? Now I'm sounding like Emma, with her round-about method of gaining information and not asking questions of the most obvious people.
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