October 29, 2006
The Geary Street Project.
The plan was simple -- meet at the corner of Geary and Market and walk all 6 miles to the ocean and take photographs the whole time. And sample the different kinds of food along the way. And maybe pop into a bar every so often for a pint or two.
This was all inspired (at least I was) by William Vollmann's fantastic novel The Royal Family -- "a love letter to San Francisco on some levels," Vollman writes. One of the book's many highlights is a chapter entitled "Geary Street" ("a love song, from the ocean to downtown"), and here's an excerpt (cribbed from this blog):
The tale of Geary Street is the tale of life itself, which begins, as did the first prehistoric unicellular organisms, at the ocean. In that very first block somewhere in the mists of Forty-Eighth Avenue, which almost touches the low sea-horizon and the wet silver-tan sand of Ocean Beach, Geary Street, here known to meter maids as Geary Boulevard, as indeed it will remain all the way to Van Ness, already foreshadows the business character of its adulthood... Geary Street -- Jack-of-all-Trades-Street, we ought to call it. We can bully ourselves into pretending that Geary is something special, but it eschews preciousness; if only lava were to seal it off for five centuries, anthropologists would love it. Shunning Haight Street's narcissism, Clement Street's dreaminess, Geary Street expresses pure functionality, like a well-made Indian arrowhead.Two beers and a huge roast beef sandwich later, we had only just crossed Van Ness at 1 pm and we wusses were faced with the notion that this may be physically impossible. (It was also 70 degrees out with hardly a cloud in the sky.)
Special K and 40 ducked out at Masonic (40 actually needed to pack for a trip); Big Al and I kept walking until the mid-30s in the Avenues once things weren't as interesting. But there's no denying the diversity of the neighborhoods we were walking through: Union Square to the Tenderloin to Japantown to the Fillmore to the Russian / Irish / Chinese / Korean sections in the Avenues.
The geotagged map is linked to in the picture above; otherwise the Geary Street Project set can be seen here. (Big Al's set is here; not sure when Special K and 40 are putting theirs up!) Another photo/walking tour may be scheduled in the near future.