![[icon]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/96897243/580830) |
Eric Fischer
|
| I have been doing a very poor job of systematically walking every street in San Francisco lately, but Octoferret has almost completed it. Google alerts tells me that someone named Allison is 100 miles in.
The Map Room reveals that soon Sony will be making GPS cameras too.
Steph got me a Samsung CL65 for Christmas and it is pretty amazing to have the combination of high quality pictures and automatic geotagging. The touch screen user interface also makes it a lot easier to turn features on and off instead of having to remember what combinations of buttons do what. The only two negatives about the GPS are (1) it takes a while to get a signal, especially the first time you use it in a while, and (2) for some reason it doesn't automatically set the clock to match the GPS time (even though it also records the GPS time stamp in the EXIF). The first problem is probably unfixable given the way the GPS system works, although it would help if they made the user interface show the progress toward acquiring a location fix, but Sony has latched onto setting the clock as a feature the competition doesn't have and will do that. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| Another previously unknown San Francisco street sign variation from the past!
You can't tell from the picture, but these ones were apparently black on yellow.
And if you ever wondered when the bilingual street signs went up in Chinatown, it was in 1968.
Oh, and here are some Oakland street signs too. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| A friend's recent posting (locked so I won't link to it) reminds me of the new year's resolution I meant to make:
When something is clearly not right with my body, *go to a doctor* and have them fix it, instead of assuming that it will get better on its own, because in fact it will get worse and more annoying to treat the longer I wait.
So far I am following it (infection being treated and getting better) but it is still hard to make myself do. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| One upon a time, before San Francisco's Sunset district had its own grid, the 50-vara (north of Market) grid was apparently planned to be extended all the way over there. Here's where the some of the streets would have been and what they would have been called.
 | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I apparently drew these road signs when I was 7 or 8 years old:
Did no-U-turn signs really ever look like that? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Hey, remember that time they added a lower deck to the Golden Gate Bridge?
Oh yeah, I guess they didn't. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| I am getting horribly sloppy about actually writing any of this stuff up any more. The weekend of September 12-13 I spent two afternoons walking around on east-west streets in the Tenderloin (5.4 miles of walking, 4.6 unique) and Nob Hill (8.1 miles of walking, 5.8 unique). Updated map and GPS map.
The giant longitude line marked in the Civic Center is not actually correct, as far as I can tell, or at least is from some other datum.
Amity Alley is unsigned and gated, but the mail was being delivered and the postman and a resident let me walk down it to the end. Cohen Alley is gated and is apparently no longer legally a street.
There is one single family house sitting weirdly all by itself in the Tenderloin.
There are many nonstandard street signs: Golden Gate and Leavenworth, Eddy and Leavenworth, Ellis and Mason, Security Pacific, aka Bagley, and Shannon. The most nonstandard street sign of all is this handwritten one for Lame Lane, which is not legally a street at all, but is apparently somebody's name for the midblock passage from Washington to Clay east of Taylor. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| The San Francisco Planning Department has a new revision of the Better Streets plan available.
One good change is that it increases the recommended and minimum sidewalk widths. It also supposedly has a stronger "discouragement of use of pedestrian push-buttons," as they put it in the summary, than the previous version, but the actual wording on this, as far as I can tell, is almost unchanged. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Thanks to Google Book Search, I finally know that the children's book I could never remember the title of, where people were going around and around in a circle on a raft on an underground river looking for "a better place," was Journey Outside by Mary Q. Steele.
Oh, and the other one I never knew the name of is apparently Ronia, the robber's daughter by Astrid Lindgren. The line we misremembered as "Blood will run now, ho ho!" was actually "Now the blood will run, ho ho!" | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Oh wow -- according to Popular Science from 1915, the pre-1920s generation of San Francisco street signs were backlit and set into the curb!
I wonder how durable they were... it seems like that must have been a maintenance nightmare.
It looks like the picture is at Stockton and Geary, looking west across Union Square. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| The American City reveals that the blue San Francisco street signs of the 1920s were made by the California Metal Enameling of Los Angeles and cost $18 apiece.
But in the picture from the article:
the signs have rounded, not square, letters! Artistic license, or yet another street sign stylistic variation that I have just not seen in person yet?
Meanwhile, another book, from 1919, suggests that before the blue signs there was a previous generation of white-on-brown signs. I would be surprised if I were ever to see one of those. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| If you've ever wanted to see the maps from the 1947, 1948, 1950, or 1951 San Francisco transportation plans, or where the Twin Peaks Freeway, Marginal Freeway, Western Freeway, Crosstown Freeway, Mission Freeway, Central Freeway, Sunset Freeway, Richmond Freeway, or Panhandle Freeway would have run if city planners of the time had got their wishes, I scanned in a bunch of these recently and posted them to Flickr.
Also, I just noticed that the 1913 Report on the Improvement and Development of the Transportation Facilties of San Francisco is now available in full text for free on Book Search, and it is well worth reading if you are interested in that kind of thing. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Valencia Street and Guerrero Street are named after people who lived near Mission Dolores in the 1850s, but strangely, it turns out, neither street ran through the property of the person for whom it was named.
This map is from Candelario Valencia's land claim. It will probably look a lot more familiar rotated and superimposed onto a present-day street map:
The Valencia lands were most of the block from Dolores to Guerrero, from 16th to Dorland. Francisco Guerrero's (or, as it is spelled here, Gueraro) were the remainder of that block, plus another lot on the east side of Dolores between 15th and 16th, plus a large lot northwest of the corner of Alert and Dolores.
Of the other names on the map, Fremont and De Haro still have streets named after them elsewhere in the city. Duboce used to be named after Robert Ridley, but is no longer. I don't know who the Brown was who owned the lot at the corner of 16th and Guerrero through which Gaiser Court now runs. | | comments: Leave a comment |
|
Eric Fischer
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
enf's journal
