Streets
of San Francisco
Sorry
about that title, hard to resist. The city and suburban architecture
is quite unique. There is a
Spanish and Mexican influence to be found in many street scapes, the
one below, Union Street, is as
pretty as it is exclusive. We were on our way to the Presidio and
had found our way to "Cow Hollow".
For Melbournians that is like High Street Armadale.
Little turrets and spires are peppered amongst
the tarred flat top roofs, each pristine home
or shop
painted in its own gelato pastel making the scene
look good enough to eat.
We
saw some
homes being renovated, completely stripped of an outer stucco or timber
cladding their "bones" are
soft
wood,
box frames which in part are then covered in a "skin" of
masonite sheeting. The soft woods were
obviously
rotten
to the frame, it looked very expensive, some were being re-stucco'ed
with a decorative outer skin.
Cable cars exist to trundle tourists up and down the steep streets
to and from particular sights. However, we
actually
chose to
walk the streets and really enjoyed it, I may have had to walk backwards
up a few but
I still enjoyed it. These streets are insanely steep in some areas
and a photograph simply can't capture it.
Lombard Street, below must get thousands of visitors to it in the
brief time we were there around 50 turned up.
A slightly weird behavior of the San Francisco fire department was
to run their trucks around alarms
blaring
(and
I mean alarms
there were two types), and horn hysterically bleating, but there were
no fires or any other
emergency it seemed. We caught the news every night and every night,
nothing. Exercises? Perhaps. We stayed
at the Halcyon Hotel in Union Square and found it to be a bit of a
bargain. The manager was very nice and lived in.
It seemed a few occupants were really residents too, but with only
the occasional brief disgusting sound made
by
our neighbor
when he arrived home at night (I still have no idea what he was doing)
we heard and saw
no one else, and the place was full. See
the last photo below right. We
stayed on the 4th floor, our window
faced the street so we did experience some street noise, which was
not too hard to block with ear plugs (never
leave
home
without them). The hardest thing to block was the light pollution,
we left feedback that the
curtaining
could
be improved.
image
© lee-anne raymond
