Sunset Stories

Golden Gate Heights stairway tour

SF City Guides offers a twice yearly neighborhood tour of the very stairways we traverse daily throughout Golden Gate Heights, which climb our residential streets and connect dramatic chert outcroppings and tucked-away parks with marvelous views of the city skyline, the Pacific Ocean, and beyond if you catch it before the fog rolls in.

On a mild Saturday afternoon at the base of the 15th Ave stairway, a group of neighborhood enthusiasts gathered to hear about the history of the Outside Lands, pick out city landmarks and native plants in between climbs of 100+ steps, and stand on the original architecture circa 1930s.

An extension of the Inner Sunset tour and other bits of neighborhood history I've picked up over the last seven years, it was especially interesting to find neighborhood developer Henry "what you can build with two nails his does with one" Doelger's home on Pacheco and 15th, and confirm local reference to Grandview Park is Turtle Hill.

More photos in my Flickr Places set.

My birthday is the biggest street party of the year, Bay to Breakers

The City of San Francisco just so happens to throw me a party for my birthday every year about this time, and it just so happens to be the biggest, and my most favorite event of the year: Bay to Breakers.

Diving into the tens of thousands of cheering revelers at eight-o-clock on a springtime Sunday morning, into home-spun costumes and mobile creations, full of the camaraderie and cocktails of this very distinct brand of fun, is a truly infectious and unmistakable occasion. B2B transports native city-dwellers and visitors, runners and walkers, gawkers and hawkers, altogether into a crazy cloud of technicolor, roiling from one side of the City to the other. And for one anything-goes-at-this-moment morning, everyone here is a friend, and everyone here is home.

Just any good thing is transient in nature, it's also never the same. All manner of celebration is on display at B2B: a birthday spanking from the Spatula Fairy, an invite for a hole-in-one and a beer pumped from a golf bag, gaggles of Germans, of Vikings, of Elvises (or is it, Elvi?), multiple Supermans and Spidermans that find one another in the fray with superhero ability, runners who finished the race and double back to walk the course in its revelry, and, despite the usual challenges of so many people in the same space at the same time, city crews spectacularily cleaned the streets so that by early afternoon it was if this giant street party never happened.

I love San Francisco!

Happy birthday to me!

Suppenku(e)che 15 jahre geburtstag

I've had Suppenkueche's anniversary party on my calendar since last year, one of my favorite joints in the City, and German to boot.

Their anniversary party is salted with lovely bubbly, Fabbi the owner suspendered in Lederhosen, and a new theme each year, expressed on T-shirts, coasters, and hanging from the ceiling. This year is the German Cycling Cup, navy blue, birds, and their 15th.

And just like other German-American parties,is peppered with fun-loving strangers. I always walk away having had a good time.

New Blog!

Welcome to my new weblog. I decided to switch from Blogger to Typepad while attending the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Unfortunately, neither company can tell me how to migrate my content (143 posts!). Despite the claim that Blogger content can be imported to Typepad, there is no such function in Blogger. And I refuse to copy/paste 143 posts in a beautiful, sunny, Saturday afternoon.

So, if you want to see any of the old stuff, it's here.

Happy Blogging!

Mmmmm.... muscle cars

With a loud rumble and consuming smell of gasoline, a convertible '65 Mustang labeled BABY MAC sidles up to the L-bend of the street and into the Friday dusk of Bay street, and a man dressed head to toe in a white track suit split by two blue vertical stripes muscles out of his muscle car Which is, of course, also split by two vertical blue stripes. And dice for valve covers. Only 1,500 cars of this make were made, so it makes sense that people stop and stare. Though perhaps not as often than during the classic car frenzy of the 1990s.

The Beer People

In the middle of making small talk with the Mario, our friendly neighborhood checker guy about the Arrogant Bastard Ale among my small pile of dinnertime groceries that his friends were always drinking but that he'd never tried, and beginning to tell him about my BeerLabels.com friend Cory, when I realized the fatal error of forgetting a wallet to pay for the upwards of $40 ringup.

"You wanna I suspend the order?" Mario cocked his head to one side, holding up the tab in question, but I was already sheepishly making the arrangement to abandon ship return with a life vest.

Back at the checkout with the proper accoutrement this time, I waited in the penance line again for a proper ring this time of the suspended purchase.

"See? I put a fifty-cent coupon on it so I'd remember you guys, the "beer people," Mario said when it was my turn, peeling away the chartreuse and hot pink square from the short waxy white scrap as I hovered over the touchscreen console.

"I'm gonna try that Arrogant Bastard," he declared, as if our exchange had never been interrupted. "Since it guess it's not, you know, a male kind of thing."

Hey, whatever I can do for gender equality, man.

SF International Beer Fest

Just like driving a car and your first kiss, public drinking is a rite of passage. Eventually you either come to enjoy it, overcome it, or keep your distance. Drinking beer is where one begins, and those that enjoy it pilgrimage to those well-organized warehouse parties called "beer fests." Last weekend, San Francisco welcomed the 25th Annual International Beer Fest to Fort Mason.

Though a pale comparison to the original Oktoberfest in Munich, these gatherings are nonetheless inherently entertaining in terms of native dress, attraction to brightly-colored coaster-and-bead-things, tendancy to gobble fried food and suck down ciggies without abandon, and, with the emptying of each plastic cup, the inevitable steady escalation of slurred pick-up lines, slipping on smelly spills, fumbling to get a number in a cell-phone, and downright funny unfocused foreplay.

A volunteer at the Spaten booth, it was a treat to get to watch the natives gleefully participate in these rites, from behind the beer-soaked tablecloth, mouth full of pretzel mix from Pier 23 booth next door, and taking without question the lager, pils, bitter or dark beer we filled their plastic shot-cup necklace with -- downing a few along the way, of course.