Collections - A Salute to the Branch Library

They sit quietly on tree-lined neighborhood streets. Often surrounded by single family homes , small apartment buildings and bits of retail, the branch library tucks itself gently into these neighborhoods, elegant public buildings at home in these more modest settings. San Francisco and The Bay Area are blessed with many fine examples, many of which are “Carnegie Libraries”. In one of the great…

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"The Doom Loop "- Walking Through Downtown San Francisco

Downtown San Francisco, we are told, is in a “doom loop”. You probably have heard. Everyday, the San Francisco Chronicle, publishes the latest report on employers leaving downtown, retailers closing their doors, wasted public money on poorly managed programs (2 million dollar toilets!), the latest staggering statistics on homelessness, and so on. And if you didn’t hear it there, the national…

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Neighborhood Stories- 3 Houses

Neighborhood Stories- 3 Houses

At some point every day, I go for a walk in my neighborhood in Berkeley. It is a modest neighborhood of mostly one-story bungalows , an occasional apartment building, and a scrappy commercial district . But every few blocks, there is a larger house or building that isn’t part of the pattern. And I am fascinated with these exceptions to the rule. The Fish-Clark House The first of these homes I…

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100 Years of Houses- Walking Panoramic Hill

100 Years of Houses- Walking Panoramic Hill

One of the conundrums of life during the pandemic has been getting meaningful exercise, something more than a neighborhood walk. Fortunately, in Berkeley, there are some very steep hills, and these walks have provided the necessary heart rate elevation. In fact, one in particular, at Claremont Canyon, is so steep that on several occasions I thought I might need to leverage my watch’s emergency…

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The Green Seam- My Pandemic Therapist

The Green Seam- My Pandemic Therapist

If one were to draw a cross section through the cities east of San Francisco Bay it might look like this. First of course, there would be the Bay itself. Then to the east, the gradual rise of the “flats”, peppered with modest bungalows and apartments, then the sharp climb of the East Bay Hills, dense with rustic shingled hillside homes, and finally, topping those hills a string of regional parks,…

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The East Cut

Awhile back, I was having a conversation with someone who lived in the East Bay, near the border of Berkeley , Oakland and Emeryville. In trying to pinpoint where she lived, she said, “you know its right in the heart of NOBE” . I had not heard that moniker before , and was told it was THE hot East Bay area right now. NOBE meant North Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville. That’s NOBE. New names for…

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Cruising The Avenue

10 years ago, after many years residing in San Francisco, we moved to Berkeley, across the Bay. After years of regarding Berkeley and the East Bay as being closer to Europe than just across the bridge, we quickly changed our tune as we discovered the joys of the place. Berkeley might be regarded as a “streetcar suburb”, that is an older inner ring city , not as dense as the center city, but not…

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Walking Across Berkeley- 12 Stops During A Pandemic

Walking Across Berkeley- 12 Stops During A Pandemic

For some time, I wanted to write a post about walking all the way across Berkeley. Essentially, the walk would be a cross section, starting at the Bay , winding through our flatland neighborhoods, and then on up to the campus and the hills. And I finally got around to it….now…in this surreal time in which we find ourselves.

So this post will likely serve as a bit of a time capsule, capturing…

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Dogpatch and Doctors

Tucked all around San Francisco Bay are curious little villages that surround old industrial centers. You can find these surviving villages in places like Point Richmond, ,Alviso, and Crockett. And in San Francisco, there is the old Dogpatch neighborhood centered along Third Street near 20th. I had always been intrigued  by this little corner of San Francisco. It felt to me a little more like an…

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Field Notes- Downtown Oakland- A City In 9 Movements

Field Notes- Downtown Oakland- A City In 9 Movements

Each day for the last 6 years , I have taken the train to downtown Oakland , and headed up to the 13th floor of the office building where I work. I sit in a corner, with a panoramic view of downtown, and the Bay Area beyond. It’s a nice view.

Over the past 6 years , I have taken to walking all over  downtown Oakland at lunch, and I  began to see that Downtown Oakland is in fact not a single…

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Packing Up Home

Awhile back, I figured out I have had 19 different addresses since leaving for college. A long time ago to be sure, but I was still surprised that there were so many. Sure it counts a different dump each of my college years, and then there was house sitting for 4 months on a cul-de-sac in Castro Valley, and 3 months in Oakland in a relationship that crashed and burned, and 4 weeks in a Denver…

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Dreaming Of Summer -The Intimacy of Rome

Dreaming Of Summer -The Intimacy of Rome

I have , on these dark wet winter days , taken to dreaming of summer. One such daydream has me wandering around sun-baked European towns and cities. It seems another lifetime, not just 5 months, that we found ourselves in Italy, each day some variant of that. I decided I would indulge this daydreaming with some reminiscing on a week spent in Rome, and some surprisingly intimate moments.

At first…

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Summer in San Francisco's Richmond- The Art Of The Inside Day

Summer in San Francisco’s Richmond- The Art Of The Inside Day

When I first moved to San Francisco many years ago, there was much to grab my attention. Places and people new, different, even exotic. And I was kind of  prepared for that. But there was one thing that I didn’t know about, and the was this- the fog.

I was instantly mesmerized by the fog. How one could go from baking in 90 degree heat to the east, and a few miles later be subsumed in a chilling…

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Welcome to The Dollhouse- In Praise of the Bungalow Court

Welcome to The Dollhouse- In Praise of the Bungalow Court

  Back in the late 80s, I was living in Colorado, having recently received my master’s Degree in Architecture. Colorado was in the grips of a terrible energy related recession , and it really couldn’t have been a worse time to hit the job market. I eventually found a job, paid $7.00 an hour. But the firm was dying as it turns out, and closed its doors after 6 months. That was followed by another…

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The Crash Pad- Now A Podcast !

The Crash Pad- Now A Podcast !

A few years ago, I wrote a post about a tiny apartment I lived in for years in San Francisco. I shared that tale recently with San Francisco Diaries. Here’s a link: http://www.munidiaries.com/podcast/

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The Everyday Urbanism of East 14th

The Everyday Urbanism of East 14th

A few years ago, I walked the length of San Pablo Ave in the East Bay. It was  a fairly ridiculous endeavor, a walk done over 2 days that covered 23 miles . The starting point for the walk was downtown Oakland, and , as Oakland has a loosely radial plan, this represented one “spoke ” from the center. This amble returned to that theme, and traverses a second of those spokes, one that heads…

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Nevada (continued): So Have I Got An Opportunity For You

Nevada (continued): So Have I Got An Opportunity For You

This is the second part of a post on traveling through Nevada I was driving  south in central Nevada, heading to Death Valley, and I wanted to pull off the road to soak in the vast expanse of this part of the desert , away from the highway. Finding a dirt road , I drove a couple of miles, and then a couple more, and so on , and reached a point where it was possible, as it turned out , to hear…

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