Morrie the Toupee Salesman

Some writing, not necessarily self-contained - about my former neighborhood. Feedback is welcome.

Potrero Hill

In 2005, a tourist walking from Market Street in downtown San Francisco and trying to get to Potrero Hill would find it difficult to reach. The two main highways into San Francisco from the south form a Y shape, upside down on a north-oriented map, coming together just beyond the hill and holding it within their arms. To get to the hill from the north (downtown) you have to find the right southbound street, because some halt at the highways, others are diverted around them on the east or west side. Both highways are cut into the ground to the left and right of the hill, though they are elevated before and after. Above the 15 foot cliffs that border the highways, the hill rises even more steeply, creating impressive views of the bay and Oakland to the east, the downtown skyline and the Bay Bridge to the north, west to the Mission, Castro and Haight, and south to Bayview and Hunters Point.

If you manage to find your way underneath the right highway in the South of Market area (forever famous as the epicenter of the 2001 dot-bomb), you enter an empty space right at the base of the Y’s two arms. A decaying driving range , empty lots beside lots of emptiness with signs announcing ambitious building plans. Another half-mile to the south, the hill sits, buffered from the city, almost every inch developed, stone houses and small apartment buildings, two and three story steps covering the hill to its peak. At the bottom, 17th Street is flatland, stretching it’s way from east to west past the Jackson Playground, baseball’s outpost on the hill (lit like a jewel box on winter nights), then out of the district into neighborhoods not quite as apart.

As you go west on 17th, the streets rise picturesquely to your left – Texas, Connecticut, DeHaro, Kansas – at a steep but ruler-like grade, broken by level crossings at the horizontal streets – Mariposa, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd. Climbing up from 17th, shopping districts are perched on the horizontal rest stops on 18th and 20th, a few blocks crammed with stores and restaurants. The vertical streets are classic San Francisco hill country where the demands of verticality often dictate strange little pockets of architecture – narrow lots where one side can be 5 feet higher than the other – and breathless (in all senses) tourists with cameras climb.

Looking west from the hill, the most visible landmark is the large radio tower on Mount Sutro – its red and white spartan ugliness crowning the ridge that bisects the city from north to south. Most of the year, to the west of that ridge, there is fog, omnipresent gray. In the summer, it seeps through the legs of Sutro tower, spreading from the cold pacific 5 miles to the west, searching inland for heat. Each day the early morning fog is visible only as a thin white line on the western hills, the warmth of the afternoon brings the fog clambering over the ridge, a thundercloud growing in weight and height, until it breaks and pushes pseudopods of cold ocean moisture across the eastern half of the city and down the bay, surrounding but not engulfing the hill.

At the end of those days, when the fog’s cold comfort is shawled over the rest of the city, cooling the last bit of sunshine, it’s not hard to think of the past – easy to imagine a young Orenthal James Simpson running up the hill, home from school with football excitement. Or the Grateful Dead standing in the midst of 18th St. daily bustle, here for relief from the adoration of Haight Ashbury, or Jack Kerouac, finding quiet inspiration far from North Beach’s bohemia. In the fictional past, one can almost hear the hoarse roar of Bullit’s Mustang, or the metallic thud of suspension as Lt. Mike Stone and Inspector Steve Keller’s unmarked cruiser’s suspension hit bottom after launching off the lip of one of those horizontal streets. Or even further back, it’s not hard to imagine what it must have been like to look from the top of the hill on the evening of April 18th, 1906, the day of the Great Quake, safe and still alive on Potrero’s island of bedrock, but looking north at the sudden nightmarish flatness of the city.