Highlands Pasture

Potrero Hill is ignored by tourists and even half ignored by San Franciscans.  To be sure, it has a reputation not completely underserved based on a perception of a high crime rate in housing projects on its periphery.   But the top of the hill is solidly middle class with pretentions to upper-middle.  One finds early 20th century single family houses and flats with the occaional back yard banya a la russe. See if you can find a house in the neighborhood with a monthly rent for less than three thousand bucks.

What Potrero (Spanish: pasture) does have is better than average views both of the rest of the City and the bay and downtown with the added advantage of sunny views of other people's fog. 

 

 

Afternoon fog about to envelop St. Ignatius.
The dome behind the two towers can be seen.

 

 

This small picture doesn't do the view justice.  Potrero's views of the downtown skyline are awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Potrero even has a crooked block resembling Lombard Street.  It's along Vermont Street from 20th to 22nd.  Same houses, same stair steps and maybe one or two graffiti that you won't find on Lombard Street, which after all is covered with tourists from Asia or Iowa who are too demure to write their thoughts down in public places.

 

 


Winding block of McKinley Square along Vermont Street south of 20th
(Full disclosure: a big fat graffito right of stairway was cropped from photo.)

 

Draw, pardner.
3rd Street draw bridge at China Basin in front of PacBell Park.

Picture postcard style mural at bottom of hill, at corner of Connecticut and 17th Street.  The high school football player in the right third is neighborhood native son O. J. Simpson, who upon closer inspection, apparently has been made into persona non grata in these parts.

To digress from the topic -- do you notice that the previous picture looks as if the the area above the building were made transparent, so that no sky color is present.  In reality, the picture was taken on a dark day (how appropriate for the subject matter!) and equalized to a standard brightness.  (I did not really have to perform this additional doctoring.)  This has the effect of clipping gray, the actual color of the sky, to white.    This is a JPEG image.  Whenever you see a white sky on a JPEG image, you can assume that some level clipping has been performed, at least if it's in a place where the sky is never white. 


Where bears are made.
You can stuff your bear on the tour.

 

Basic Brown Bears, a teddy bear factory on left and Anchor Steam Beer brewery on right.  (Both these places are on Deharo Street at Mariposa.)

 

 


Where beer is made.
Old style black and white for old style suds.

This image was made in color and the colors were converted to gray scale intensities.  A little black and white gives a respite from a Disneyesque world.  Steam beer is serious business.
 

Left- Farley's, 1351 18th Street, between Missouri and Texas Streets.  One of two neighborhood coffee houses (this one's my fave) and working office for many a laptop programmer.

 

Right- Chez Maman or Mom's Place, 1461 18th Street, between Connecticut and Missouri Streets.  Small French eatery with counter seating.  The same proprietor operates Chez Papa a few doors down with table seating.

             

It was a very good year.
1936 Buick, parked outside Farley's.

 

This is a GIF image.  Compare it with the mural further up which has a white, transparent looking sky.  In this photo, everything surrounding the car was masked so that the environment really is transparent.  If this image were placed on a colored background, everything not touching the car image would be the same color as the background. 


Christopher's Books
400 18th Street at Missouri