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Almost a holiday
My life is snowballing out of its rut. First I decided to skip the gym today to give my back a rest. This was yesterday. Then I got a report that the pump alarm was sounding under the building. I went down to check it out but there was nothing obvious I could do, so I’ve scheduled a service call, but not before tomorrow morning, so maybe another day off.Back before I finally found contractors who know what they’re doing Re: our pumps, I was very hands-on and knew the electrical board better than the plumbers did. But now there’s a new board that I haven’t had any reason to become familiar with. That will change tomorrow. I ran both pumps manually and they sound fine. I imagine I could manually pump the tank clear until the alarm stopped, but if there’s a blockage in one or both pumps -- which is what I suspect -- that might not be the best idea. Also, I like the idea of the new owners down there being inconvenienced for a day or so to impress on them the importance of not putting anything down the toilet. Tough love.
And this is the first time the pumps have been serviced since the new shear wall was added, blocking light and easy access to the tank. I’m guessing I’ll have to help them get light over there and my extension cord may not be long enough. Should be interesting.
Since this is a non-routine day, and walking helps my back, I’ve wandered all the way over to South Beach, my old coding days stomping grounds. But first some photos I took on the way,
These images show parts of the building that either date to the time of the 1906 earthquake and fire -- when the building was a structural steel cage, still under construction -- or to the years right after 1906 when it was completed. I suspect they are doing some seismic retrofitting here, so, besides the structure not usually being visible, we will never again see this part of the building as it was then. When finished it will probably more closely resemble the Jimmy Choo shop next door.
But back to my old stomping grounds. I had my old favorite veggie Reuben sandwich (made by the same woman who always made it in the mid-’90s) and now I’m sitting in the garden at Crossroads Cafe. Crossroads is part of the Delancey Street program that trains ex-cons for work in restaurants and other service areas. I had forgotten how cheap their prices are -- half what you would expect for such a nice place, and the Delancey Street Restaurant at the other end of the block is the same -- but I had also forgotten that they don’t offer WiFi.
I think I forgot about the WiFi because it makes so little sense. A familiarity with the routine of passwords and rebooting routers is as much a part of modern cafe culture as brewing coffee.
The last time I was here in the garden it had been torn apart and was mostly just dirt and a few trees. Now it’s back to being a fairly lush place with green grass for the kiddies to chase the pigeons on and flowers and ferns in addition to the trees. All this is surrounded by a rather nice fence (stucco-looking base with ironwork above. And beyond the fence is the streetcar tracks along the Embarcadero that are now populated by both our new LRV trains and the old style streetcars intended for tourist areas. And beyond that is the bay.
(I didn't think to take a photo.)
This area, formerly railroad yards, was redeveloped in the 1980s and 1990s and the warehouse area around it has been filling in ever since. Now virtually every lot is new construction or else remodeled over the past 20 years. With only a few exceptions, it is now fully mature -- in the sense that a forest is fully mature following the successful regrowth following a fire.
This is an interesting new view of SF. In the foreground is the South Beach redevelopment from the 80's and early 90's. The two tallest buildings from this perspective are newish residential towers on Rincon Hill, and behind them are even newer SOMA towers including the not-quite-finished Salesforce Tower on the left.
See the tiny brick building about the middle of the block? That's were I used to work. The building just beyond it with residential looking balconies is brand new. (It rises from a warehouse structure that is preserved as a pretty ugly facade.)
This is looking the other direction. The building behind the Stop sign is even newer and sits where there was a parking lot back in the day.
This is the other side of the block I worked in. The back of my little building looked out over another parking lot where the new brick building at the far end now sits. I'll give them credit for matching the existing, brick warehouse style of the neighborhood.
Now we are a block away at the edge of South Park. What is now a very busy Blue Bottle Coffee location was the original (I believe) offices of Wired Magazine. At least that was where they were when I first visited one of their early employees who had been a co-worker of mine at the Apple Multimedia Lab.
South Park has been tarted up just in the past year. I don't know why, as it looked fine to me before. Note that the very tasteful trash can is both too small and doesn't allow for sorting into the three usual streams.
Looking back toward the former Wired building from the middle of the park.
Caffe Centro, on the left, was the hub of this neighborhood during the dotcom bubble of the 1990s. I was there a lot.
Much too small.
The new play ground on the west side of the park.
The South Park Cafe predates all the tech changes to the area. I first came to this French cafe when a friend worked at an architect's office half a block away. The cafe is one of the few things around here that seems not to have changed at all.
Very shiny architecture in the center of the photo. I'm sure the architect had a wonderfully pretentious explanation for this.
My little alley is also getting close to being fully mature in this sense. Our building is as perfect as it has ever been, and the back four units have been remodeled over the past decade. The building across the alley that had been the neighborhood eyesore has been completely remodeled. The building next to it was gutted (inside and out) down to the studs and is in the process (over a year and hardly moving from what I can tell) of being renovated and turned into condos -- or so I’ve heard. The larger building next door to us is in the midst of a renovation process that started before it sold and has accelerated ever since. They are almost finished painting the outside but may still be remodeling units inside. And now the even larger building on the other corner is undergoing weatherproofing and repainting. Most of the units there were renovated under the previous owner.
The only building that hasn’t undergone expensive upgrades is the one directly across from us. This is where the previous tenant died after spending most of one winter smoking in the rain while coughing up his lungs. Some new tenants moved in but I haven’t seen them recently and for all I know the building could be vacant. (The main entrance of all these buildings is on other, bigger, streets. We are the only building with the main door on the alley.)
I have no idea how much all this work on the other buildings has cost -- too much, I’d guess, for the one that has been in stasis for about a year -- but I know our seismic work, which you can’t even see, cost $100k. All this to point out how expensive it is just to keep modest sized buildings habitable in SF. People may complain about the high rents and high land values (and I think the city should take steps to reverse this trend) yet it is this increase in value that makes all this work viable. In Detroit, or even Chicago, buildings are left to rot because the upkeep is more than they are worth. Here, $2,700 per month rent for a small one bedroom apartment justifies all kinds of cosmetic, but also structural, improvements.
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