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Eric Fischer
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| This map of 1940s-era San Francisco postal district boundaries is for sale on eBay:
Most of the zones have stayed pretty stable since then, except where new zip codes have been carved out on the southern edge of the city and in the central hills to serve areas that weren't so densely built up before. The boundary between 94110 and 94107 has moved a pretty decent distance, though, probably because it became too hard to get back and forth between the Mission and the Potrero when the freeway was built. I'm kind of surprised that the waterfront and not North Beach/Telegraph Hill got to keep 94111 when 94133 was split off from it. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| | Muni maps through at least 2005 labeled the area just east of US 101 and northwest of I-280 as "Apparel City," but the name seems to have disappeared from the latest version. The reason that I was looking is that the Bayview-Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan calls the area right next to this one "Oakinba," for Oakdale-Industrial-Bayshore, a name I had not seen before. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| In the days before the national standard highway sign fonts included lower case, California had its own. You can still occasionally see instances of it, for example on the "Business District" sign above the Oregon-Page Mill underpass:
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| Construction of the new curb line is underway at Vernon and Lee. They have cut a line where the spray paint was before and started digging the asphalt out inside it.
I made a couple of attempts at rephotographing these two old photos of the corner but had a hard time figuring the angle out. Maybe I'll get it tomorrow. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Redpop | | Time: | 11:06 pm |
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| | Fred's Market in Berkeley carries Faygo Redpop! I hadn't seen it anywhere in years and was beginning to wonder if I had imagined the whole thing. I still wonder if it really used to come in stubby bottles with screw tops or whether I imagined that part. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I found Oakland's 1901 sidewalk width ordinance too. Like San Francisco's, it has a long list of streets that don't follow the general pattern, and it turns out that even all those years ago, Piedmont Avenue had its weirdly narrow 7-foot sidewalks. Unfortunately it doesn't give any clue why.
The only street whose sidewalks were any narrower was First Street (which must be the Embarcadero nowadays), 6 feet wide from Washington to Castro. I'm not quite sure how this can be since it also says that they are 12 feet wide from Broadway to Market, but it's too late to argue it now.
( The general sidewalk width rules, if anyone cares ) | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | What's the difference between a tenement, an apartment, and a flat? According to the 1906 San Francisco building code, it's that an apartment has its own bathroom, which a tenement does not, and a flat has its own entrance to the street, which an apartment does not. This would explain why you don't see the word tenement used much any more. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Last night walking to the grocery store, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the long-awaited narrowing of the absurdly wide (110 feet between curbs) intersection of Vernon and Lee Streets is apparently about to happen. Here is a picture of the new south curb line spray painted on the asphalt:
If you want a broader overview of the change, here is a GPS map of me walking along the new north and south curb lines (and the existing crosswalk in between). If I paced it off right, the crossing distance gets 45 feet shorter on the south and 30 feet shorter on the north, leaving only 35 feet of exposure in between.
The reason the intersection is so crazy in the first place is that the south part of Vernon was originally part of Lee Street. When the north part of Vernon was added later, they left the soft curve onto Lee instead of changing the line of either street to make it into a real T intersection. Well, better late than never.
I am also pleased that Google Book Search and the Stanford University Library have finally led me to a pre-automobile-dominance copy of San Francisco Ordinance No. 1061, "Regulating the Widths of Sidewalks." I am less pleased that I no longer seem to be able to find it to link to, but at least I had the foresight to download the PDF while I could, and maybe it will turn up again. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Several months ago I posted an attempted chronology of San Francisco street sign variations. At the time, I believed that flat, square-letter, white-on-blue signs were standard from 1922 through 1951, at which time they were replaced by embossed, square-letter, black-on-white signs.
Octoferret has proved me wrong by finding a photo of the street signs at the corner of Golden Gate and Leavenworth from the November 2, 1946 San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, when the black-on-white street signs apparently began to replace the white-on-blue ones. The interesting part, aside from the date, is that this square-letter sign is flat, not embossed! They must have made them that way for a few years before switching to the embossed ones, and then gone back to flat signs another 20 years or so later.
That intersection also has old nonstandard signs built into the sides of the buildings on the northwest corner, which I neglected to take a picture of when I was there a few weeks ago. I'll have to go back again and get one. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Did you know that the Embarcadero in San Francisco has house numbers? They don't appear on the street signs, but according to the city GIS data, it has them. To be extra mysterious, the last block is numbered backwards for some reason. ( In case you were curious, they are: )
The Stockton Tunnel also has its own numbers independent of Stockton Street, with 1 at Sutter and 99 at Sacramento. The Broadway Tunnel doesn't, though.
Geary, meanwhile, counts up to 8399 in a normal pattern, and then the 8400 block jumps back to be the underpass of Masonic Avenue, from Baker to Collins.
Not so secret, but weird: Diamond Heights starts numbering at 5000 instead of 1, probably to avoid confusion with Diamond. The single block of Kamille is mysteriously numbered 3100. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| If anybody is interested in a map of Oakland that names a truly overwhelming number of neighborhoods (many of them containing just a block or two), may I recommend the Realty Union map of 1912?
In this one, the Piedmont Avenue business district is called Thermal Hill; the residential blocks to the west are Highland Terrace (which is what appears on our title deed), no relation to the Highland Terrace of today near Highland Hospital. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| The Map Room turned me on to Historic Aerials, which collects aerial photos of US cities from various years.
Previously I had thought that the Bernal Cut (San Jose Avenue) in San Francisco didn't have any freeway-style ramps until the construction of I-280 in 1960-63, but it looks like I was wrong.
Judging from the photos on the site, in 1946, the Cut had two automobile lanes in each direction and an intersection with Arlington Street. The Southern Pacific track lanes were already empty by this time. By 1956, the Arlington intersection had been converted to a ramp, and there were three lanes in each direction, with the southbound lanes split between the former streetcar and Southern Pacific rights of way under the bridges. By 1968, I-280, the Monterey Boulevard ramp and the St. Mary's pedestrian overcrossing had been built, but the lanes still split around the bridge supports. By 1980, the bridge supports had been rebuilt to provide a clear span and the lanes no longer split. The J Church extension was built in the median between 1987 and 1991. The 2005 photos catch the lane reductions that happened that spring.
It was only a few years ago that I bought a spiral-bound book of badly halftoned, black and white aerial photos of the city because it was the only way I knew to get any at all. Times have changed.
A couple relevant photos from the library: Four lanes and one track, January 27, 1942; Split six lanes, July 31, 1953 | | comments: Leave a comment |
| What's the most common name for an intersection in the Bay Area? If the Census Bureau's TIGER maps can be believed, it's probably 3rd and Main, with 7 instances (94037, 94561, 94519, 94597, 94022, 94401, 94965).
If TIGER could really be believed, the answer would be a tie between Madrone and Redwood (94516, 94060, 94509, 94060, 94509, 95033, 94973, 94939) and 3rd and C (94089, Oleum, 94509, 94541, 94956, Sunol, 94901, 94587), both with 8, but several of those appear to be "paper streets" with no physical reality behind them.
Some day when I have some free time it would be fun to go out and take pictures of the "other" Market and Clayton, Church and Market, 16th and Mission, Market and Van Ness, 23rd and Potrero, 4th and Mission, and whatever other particularly iconic intersections have doppelgangers in other cities. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Yesterday we got a Safeway ad in the mail with a little map directing us to the corner of 51st and Broadway -- with 51st Street marked as the north-south axis.
Googling around for "(west|east) on broadway" turns up other cases of people giving directions within Oakland and instinctively referring to Broadway as an east-west street. Some of them are talking about the area above Rockridge near Highway 13, where Broadway really is nearly east-west; others near Jack London Square where I have the hardest time thinking about it in those terms.
My new theory is that whether Broadway is north-south or east-west depends upon which freeways you use most often. If I-880 or SR 24 is important to your life, Broadway is east-west because it is perpendicular to north-south I-880 and parallel to east-west SR 24. But if you think of I-580 as the central axis of Oakland, Broadway is north-south because it is perpendicular to I-580, which is signed as east-west.
All this makes me want to go back and try to find references to Broadway during the short period when today's I-580 was signed as the north-south I-5W instead, to see if that made any difference. But even then, it was cosigned with east-west US 50, so it still might have felt strongly east-west to people who used it.
(Any opinions from non-drivers?) | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Caltrans is replacing the signs on I-580 that are mounted in the exit gore with new ones mounted in front of the exit (and therefore less likely to be run into). For a few days, old and new exist side by side.
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| It is, I think, the last surviving pre-1963 sign for US 101. The greenout above the shield would have read "BYPASS" at the time it was installed.
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Eric Fischer
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