Welcoming Division Back to San Francisco

Welcome to San Francisco

If I said it was the ugliest place in San Francisco, you'd be hard-pressed to prove me wrong. It's the aquamarine elephant in the room that's left standing whenever we celebrate the demolition of the Central Freeway. In fact, that stub of a freeway was only partially torn down, only as far as Market Street. And, today, the place where the freeway starts is where the urban renaissance of Hayes Valley ends.

Believe it or not there's a street under there, a street with more problems than just the shadows and noise of the elevated structure. Duboce Avenue, 13th and Division Streets have been combined into a six-lane expressway with narrow, incomplete sidewalks, cyclone fences and driveways, and piles of illegally dumped garbage. If this place is ever going to be a healthy thread in San Francisco's urban fabric, this corridor will need to become a walkable, livable street.

Alley Love in Seattle

Seattle's Crosscut has a nice piece on that city's alleys. Alleys can provide a great pedestrian experience, and Crosscut gives some good examples around the world (including Maiden Lane here in SF) and discusses a design competition with the goal of improving the local alley environment and public awareness thereof.

SF has several dense pockets of narrow streets or alleys. Western SoMa, the Mission District (or what used to be the Mission District) near 16th West of Mission, The Mission District surrounding 24th and Mission Streets, and Hayes Valley come to mind. I'd like to see some minor improvements made to these pockets of walkable urbanity, and I'd like to see new pockets in areas of the city slated for future development.

A Good Day For Alleys

There's a couple pieces of good news in between all the bitchy comments over at Curbed!

The first concerns a parking lot at 17th and Folsom, behind the old Joseph Schmidt chocolate factory (thanks, HersheyCo!). This expanse of asphalt has, according to Curbed, apparently been planned for a park for some time.