Heading Noe where

‘Tis the night before the start of our our tenth – and longest – stay in San Francisco. And the first to be spent in summer in the enchanted city.

We spent a week in the southern neighbourhood of Noe Valley last spring, and whilst much of that time we were elsewhere, we enjoyed its relaxing, civilised atmosphere so much that, when we had to decide where to rent an apartment for four weeks in June this year, we chose it above other likely candidates such as the Mission and the Sunset . This will enable us to acquaint ourselves more with the neighbourhood and adjoining districts as well as providing a good base for visiting other parts of the Bay Area, familiar and previously unexplored alike.

So where is Noe Valley? And what we have let ourselves in for by living there? It sits immediately south of the Castro and east of the Mission in a sunny spot protected from the fog by steep hills on three sides. Its borders are broadly defined as between 20th and 22nd Street to the north, 30th Street to the south, Dolores to the east and Grand View Avenue to the west. Our apartment is on 28th Street between Church and Dolores.

A look at a map of the greater San Francisco area would suggest that it is relatively remote, and it is undeniably off the tourist trail. But public transit and local roads render it easily accessible to downtown and the South Bay respectively. The J Church MUNI Metro line was our constant companion on our previous trip and will be so again, at least for the first half of our stay before we hire a car for the trip to Tahoe.

Noe Valley is a quiet but cosmopolitan residential neighbourhood with a classy small town feel. Its preponderance of comfortable, even affluent, young families has lead to a change in its nickname from the hippie-inspired “Granola Valley” in the seventies to “Stroller Alley” today. But it also attracts couples and singles of all persuasions, notably gay and lesbian migrants from the Castro. A healthy number of artists and writers complete a sophisticated demographic. The population of approximately 21,000 comprises 70% white, 15% Hispanic and 7% Asian, with the remaining 8% coming from all corners of the globe.

It is blessed with a significant number of classic two storey Victorian and Edwardian homes. Broad streets and brightly coloured exteriors have the writers of guidebooks reaching for words like “cute” and “quaint”. Property prices are inevitably expensive.

The neighbourhood gets its name from José de Jésus Noé, the last Mexican alcade (Mayor) of Yerba Buena, the original name for San Francisco. He owned the land as part of his Rancho San Miguel but sold it to John Meirs Horner in 1854. Horner laid out many of the wide streets we enjoy today, and the name “Horner’s Addition” is still used for tax purposes by the city assessor’s office.

The main development of what was traditionally a working class neighbourhood came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Today, its interest for outsiders lies essentially in the eclectic shopping and dining experience to be found along the stretches of 24th Street from Castro to Church and Diamond to Dolores. Coffee shops, restaurants, one of a kind clothing and gift stores and bookshops abound, along with one of the best farmers’ markets in the city.

This will be our fourth apartment – the first two were in Hayes Valley and North of the Panhandle (NOPA) – and, as with previous years, our aim is to blend as far as possible into the local community for the duration. With four weeks at our disposal on this occasion, our “live like locals” strategy has more chance of success than in previous years where we have stayed for no more than a fortnight. We are particularly looking forward to hiking up Bernal Heights, Twin Peaks and Buena Vista Park, as well as reacquainting ourselves with the Mission.

But the extended stay still enables us to satisfy our tourist cravings and revisit the usual suspects such as Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts, Golden Gate Park , Beach Blanket Babylon and Haight Ashbury, and, of course, three pilgrimages to AT & T Park to support the Giants in their (currently faltering~) hunt for back to back World Series titles. Any trip would not be complete without expanding our understanding of the Bay Area, so Berkeley, the Zoo, Castro Theater and the de Young Museum, all places we have criminally neglected until now, are on our list.

Having always , with the exception of our first visit in October, visited in spring, we will be also be able to throw ourselves into four of San Francisco’s celebrated annual events – the Haight Ashbury Street Fair, North Beach Festival, Stern Grove Festival and San Francisco Pride.

Our last two vacations have coincided with Crosby and Nash and Elvis Costello gigs at the Warfield. This year, we move to the waterfront at Pier 27/29 where we have tickets for the concert being given by the Steve Miller Band and the Doobie Brothers at the America’s Cup Pavilion. And finally, a short detour to Tahoe is also scheduled.

I hadn’t actually realised until I wrote this just how busy we are going to be!

San Francisco – your “wandering one” is coming home again.  

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What No Golden Gate Bridge or Cable Car?

Only after we returned from our latest trip to San Francisco did it occur to me that, during the ten night stay, we had neither visited such perennial favourites as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Palace of Fine Arts or Alamo Square, nor taken a single ride on a cable car.

How can you travel nearly 6,000 miles to one of the most popular cities on earth and not take in its most iconic locations I hear you say? Surely, you are missing out on the greatest experiences it has to offer?

That is not, however, the way I see it. Rather than accept that this represents poor planning and an opportunity missed, I rather view it as a sign of our growing maturity as visitors to San Francisco. The fact is that we no longer feel the need to tick off as many of the guidebook recommendations as possible, tiring us out unnecessarily in the process.

The nature of our time spent there is increasingly taking on a different, more relaxed, you might even call it ordinary, tenor, one that more closely mirrors that of how we live at home.   Being in San Francisco has become such a familiar and regular part of our lives, somewhere we visit more often even than the places we love in our own country, that it has assumed that status of our second home, and, therefore, somewhere we neither  have to pretend to be what we are not, nor have to do what we feel we ought to do.

Choosing to stay some distance from the tourist enclaves of Union Square or Fisherman’s Wharf, as we did in Noe Valley this year, allows us to do as much, or as little, as we feel on any given day.

If all we want to do is to hang out at the apartment in the morning, watching the Bay Area news on TV whilst catching up on household chores, before strolling out to a neighbourhood café for lunch, followed by gift and food shopping and then returning to the apartment for a glass or two of wine on the outside private deck whilst watching the world go by, then so be it. We then might eat in in the evening – or we might try out one of the local restaurants. Or we might decide to take the metro downtown and eat in Chinatown or North Beach.

The point is that we are at liberty to do as we wish, not as we feel we ought to do to make the most of the trip and the not inconsiderable expense. Of course, it has been the happy conversion from hotel to apartment living over the past three years that has enabled us to do this.

And if it sounds to you that living in San Francisco has become less exciting for us, even routine, even a chore, then you could not be further from the truth. Whilst I can comfortably claim that we now feel at home in the city and, for myself in particular, probably did so before I ever visited it, I am tempted to suggest even that we have become, in a small way, San Franciscans, interested in its politics (with a small “p”), culture and, undeniably, its sport – just as we do at home.

And remember – those wonderful attractions are still a short drive or a bus or taxi ride away.

Nor is it the case that we no longer go sightseeing – far from it. On our recent trip we may have bypassed some of the more renowned locations, but we made a conscious effort to sample new, and nearly new, experiences, some of which were long overdue. These included a tour of City Hall, exploring Nob Hill, the Castro and Hyde Street Pier in depth, reliving the Summer of Love on the Flower Power Walking Tour, sunbathing in Dolores Park, and spending an afternoon in the excellent California Palace of the Legion of Honour.

Attending two Giants games at AT & T Park and a thrilling Elvis Costello concert at the Warfield, as well as eating out at more traditional restaurants such as John’s Grill (in the Maltese Falcon room) and the Daily Grill (Lefty O’Doul’s was too busy) added real richness to our stay.

And we still found time to take in several of our favourite spots – Golden Gate Park, including the Japanese Tea Garden and Stow Lake, Sunday brunch at the Cliff House, dinner at the North Beach Restaurant, Beach Blanket Babylon, Haight-Ashbury, the Ferry Building and the depressingly under threat Gold Dust Lounge.  And, of course, a spot of DSW shoe shopping for my wife in Union Square – now, heretically, resident in the former Border’s bookstore (the shoe shop, that is, not my wife – though she might like to be).

Having read the above, perhaps the vacation wasn’t quite as relaxing as I first thought!

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Western Diary Day 13: Our House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House

I’m going to break with tradition by starting with an account of the evening.  We witnessed an astonishing show by David Crosby and Graham Nash at the legendary Warfield Theater on Market Street.   My already sore throat took a fearful battering at 11pm belting out the encore numbers Teach You Children and Chicago from their Crosby, Still, Nash and Young (CSNY) days. 

How those guys, who are ten years older than me, must feel this morning after some serious hard rocking for almost three hours does not bear thinking about.  It helps to have a hot band, of course, which included not only Crosby’s multi-talented son but also the former bass player for Jackson Browne and erstwhile lead guitarist for Steely Dan.

The two sets encompassed the whole career of both performers, getting off to a steaming start with The Byrds’ Eight Miles High, introduced by Nash as “this one’s for San Francisco” – hmm, I wonder why!  This was followed by Long Time Gone and Marrakesh Express.  Given his serious health problems over the years Crosby’s voice is still a remarkably powerful and expressive one, most evident on Almost Cut My Hair, Camera and Wooden Ships.  Nash led on a number of other songs that he had penned such as I Used to be a King and Military Madness and the singalong Our House.  Their harmonies on Guinevere and more recent songs such as Don’t Dig Here and Lay Me Down were as good as ever.

We could not have had better seats – although we were in the back row in the stalls we were raised above everyone else so had an uninterrupted view of the stage.  Apart from the bovine perfume of the mens’ restroom (at least I think it was the smell of the cow), the Warfield is an incredibly evocative venue.  There are numerous bars and cheap food is available  (Janet and I had a large plate of nachos with sour cream, cheese and guacamole for just $6, although between us we succeeded in spraying my brand new trousers at least twice with the over-full paper plate it was precariously balanced on.

The only drawback was the two middle aged women, both recently made single (I can hardly think why) sat next to us who persisted in a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ throughout the show as if they were groupies from the early seventies when Crosby and Nash first performed together.  The one next to Janet kept leaning across her to grab my arm as if there was some secret code between us about certain songs.  When I asked her if she knew for whom Graham Nash had written I Used to be a King about, she nodded at me maniacally several times before reverting to a single sad shake of her head to denote she really had no idea (it was Joni Mitchell by the way).

A great concert in a historic, characterful venue but we nearly didn’t make it.  I had bought the tickets through Ticketmaster on the internet which meant we had to collect them at the box office before the show started.  We left our apartment at 6.15pm in the expectation that we would get to the theater by 7.00pm.  Twenty five  minutes later we were still waiting for the bus whilst five had gone in the other direction.  We resolved, therefore, to hail the first available cab that passed.

On getting into the cab I asked for the Warfield Theater.  The taxi driver, who was admittedly very pleasant, asked if there was an event there tonight and what time we needed to be there.  After I had explained this he suddenly asked ” Warfield – is that on Van Ness or Sutter”?  “Market” I replied.  If this were not bad enough he then threw us around in the back of the cab as he mounted the kerb on a right turn, and then spent the remainder of the journey sneezing violently, further causing the cab to lurch in every direction.  Although there was an argument that HE should have paid US for the fare I was so relieved to have arrived at the Warfield alive that I tipped him even better than I usually do.

In the morning we had driven over the Bay Bridge to the former naval base at Treasure Island.  We had only been there once before on our first visit in 1995 and that was at night to take photos of the stunning view back towards the city and the bridge.  To be frank, whilst we wandered around for an hour or so, we didn’t find much of interest (we did not visit the winery that has been established there).  It did, however, give us the opportunity to see the new east span of the bridge close up.

One restaurant that we had been planning to visit in San Francisco but never managed it is Green’s at Fort Mason, one of the most celebrated vegetarian eateries in the U.S.  It is ironic that we should finally visit it after we have, following more than twenty years as vegetarians, recently resolved to eat seafood and chicken.  Unfortunately, we picked the day when they were not serving lunch.  However, the takeaway (“to go”) counter was open, and we were allowed to sit in the restaurant to eat our sandwiches and salads, affording us fantastic views across the Marina to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Prior to returning to “our house” to prepare for our evening out we strolled along the Marina, even on a Monday afternoon a hive of activity with joggers, cyclists (many of whom were en route to “biking the bridge”) and assorted ball games, the most intriguing of which was what appeared to be a mini Spring Training baseball camp for teenage boys, involving separate hitting, catching and pitching practice sessions. 

We took the plunge (but only after the seemingly perilous climb!) of driving on Fillmore as a short cut back to the apartment.  After a glass of wine at a local cafe on Baker and Fulton we began our preparations for our eventful evening.

Which brings us back to where we began.

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