On a Cool San Francisco Night

It was a little chilly and breezy as I wandered east from the top of California Street, in the general direction of North Beach, Chinatown, and a moon rising out of the financial district. The first thing that really caught my attention was this skeletonized zombie-clown hybrid stuck to the back of a traffic sign near the Masonic Auditorium. I don’t know for sure that it has a clear or explicit message, but the evil dunce motif carries plenty of implied messages if you really want to think about it.

I didn’t really have a plan after arriving two hours late for the poetry reading I had more or less intended to get to, but I figured something would turn up if I just started walking. The first thing that caught my attention as I looked down from the hilltop was a tall round brick tower that seemed industrial but enigmatically so. I headed down the hill toward it and was pleased to discover than it was the top of a cable car barn, which I knew about but had never seen.

I had been heading toward Coit Tower, lit up blue in the early night, but I wasn’t committed to reaching it, since it would be hard to find a landmark more overphotographed anywhere in the state. I wanted to look for things that wouldn’t turn up in a tourist’s guidebook, places no tour would ever visit, things nobody from Iowa would even consider looking for.

That turned out to mean graffiti and some more finished wall art or outdoor murals. It wasn’t far from the cable car barn to Chinatown, which is both overexposed and underexposed at the same time. As a famous attraction it draws daytime crowds, but in the early chill of a Tuesday evening in May there were no crowds, all the shops that sell trinkets were shut for the night, and there wasn’t much going on except for diners and drinkers in some of the bars and restaurants.

There was, however, quite a bit going on among the urban foragers, the full-time, professional ones who scour the streets and sidewalks, and don’t mind going through a trash can once in a while. The old gal sorting trash at the can in front of a small Chinese bakery was bagging quantities of baked goods that didn’t look to be in very bad shape, while the neatly-uniformed crew inside the bakery was busy closing.

Every block or so there was another old timer, male or female, either scrounging recyclables or moving slowly along with several bags already packed and fastened to their bike or handcart.

Some had those fancy expandable bags one sees at fancy stores, some just had plastic sacks they’d no doubt acquired under similar conditions at similar places.

As I moved toward Columbus Avenue, the foragers mixed with tourists who were out to have an expensive slice of pizza or cup of espresso. Moving north, I noticed a woman setting up a tripod for her camera; when I turned around to see what had attracted her attention, there was the moon, rising bright and clear above the Transamerica building. She set up her classic San Francisco shot, then headed downhill in the direction of City Lights, to get closer.

I kept going for a while until the crowds drove me off Columbus to Green, then Grant. Except for some frat boys in shorts and unseasonable jock wear hoping to get into a closed pizza shop, there were few if any people away from Columbus who didn’t look like they lived in the City. The joints were full, people inside laughed and drank and watched the basketball game on big screen TVs.

I wandered back toward Columbus when the hill on my left got steeper, just in time to encounter a rather hilariously inebriated street denizen wearing a silvery wig like Carol Channing and some camo outdoor gear. He wanted my attention, but only to claim that he had always expected to end up in a bikini on a beach somewhere, rather than in the breezes outside the strip joints and tourist bars. I told him it didn’t look to beachy on that stretch of sidewalk, and he laughed, but I think he was going to laugh anyway.

I discovered some interesting art as soon as I started moving through the less well-known streets, but the mermaid in the alley was actually on the side of some sort of strip club, which made it feel like some sort of advertisement for the goings-on inside, but there was not obvious connection. I appreciated the sense of color and mystery caught in her expression.

She looks kind of blissed out, maybe because nobody can park in front of her. I’m kind of guessing that she’s a mermaid but the lower half could also be meant to represent some kind of serpent—it was hard to tell.

From there it was a simple matter to stumble directly downhill to Café Trieste, where I grabbed a bag of whole beans and enjoyed the best cup of coffee I’d seen in weeks. It was gentle, but strong, and both smelled and tasted heavenly. There was hardly anyone in the café, either, which is not usually the case when I visit. Three or four people sat at the tables, one grey haired veteran of the Summer of Love was in line before me, acting casual and important at the same time, which left the staff somewhat bemused.

Feeling more alert, I started to head back toward the parking garage. Along the way I zigzagged back and forth between deserted Chinatown streets and dark, empty alleys. The moon showed from behind the skyscrapers down on the bottom of the hill, and provided me with a means of orienting myself when I lost track of exactly where I was, which seemed to happen every two or three blocks.

I rarely get to enjoy the City without being in the midst of a large crowd, whether it's at the ballpark or a museum, so it was refreshing to have the place mostly to myself.

I rarely had to yield the sidewalk while trying to compose a shot, and I could have found plenty of seating in most any bar I passed.

As usual, the blend of languages I overheard ranged from the ordinary to the exotic, including Italian, Russian, Cantonese, Farsi, Arabic, Spanish and one or two others I wasn't sure about, such as the one used by the singing doorman outside the black-tie dining establishment on Kearny.

I'm actually not sure whether stoned Bart or the twin dragons are more quintessentially San Franciscan, but no survey of street art seems complete without them.

Finally, these dolls arranged rather thightly behind a window and a steel grate were just too good to pass up.

#SanFrancisco #wallart #ColumbusAve