Grab Bag #39

If you owned this house at 2009 Buchanan Street how could you not paint some words of wisdom on the gable scroll?

Something noble in Latin seems appropriate, maybe “Please don't block the driveway” or “Clean up after your dog” (Tersus sursum post te canem).

Blue A2 Circles

Tell me this design doesn’t scream 1974:

In a 1970s preservation effort, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency moved almost 30 Victorian buildings around the Western Addition. (You can learn more at next week’s event.) The agency also used federal programs to provide financial assistance and loans to home owners for rehabilitation projects of older buildings.

There were a number of rehab programs offered in different parts of the city, but at some point there must have been a little money in the budget to get these metal medallions affixed to properties in the agency’s Western Addition A-2 project area.

I’ve long known about the one at 1971 Bush Street, but recently stumbled on another at 2039 O’Farrell Street (looks like it might be time for rehab again)

I spotted another at 1347 Divisadero Street while walking around with Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub the other day. Anyone know where else an A-2 medallion might be affixed? I am on the hunt now.

An old Examiner columnist Guy Wright liked the idea of spending money to rehab old buildings and summed up one of the essential failures of redevelopment housing policy in 1972:

“We have seen the results of bulldozer redevelopment and they weren’t good. Slums were wiped out, but so were neighborhoods. […] The crowding in a housing complex is not much less than in a slum, but it is crowding without the slum’s lively communion. Better to live in a substandard Victorian than in one of redevelopment’s filing cabinets.”

Amen!

Jury Duty Tangent with No Pictures

I recently was called for jury duty. They ask your profession to make sure you have no discernible conflicts or obvious biases related to the parties of the case. I had the ho-hum (although highfalutin) answer of “nonprofit President & CEO.”

I’ve been called to jury duty many times over the years. Once my profession-answer was “juggler.” It’s how I made a (terrible) living at the time.

Both attorneys really didn’t know how a juggler might affect their case, shrugged their shoulders, and I spent three weeks as “juror number 4.”

I also worked as a clown at kids’ birthday parties, making balloon animals at fairs... Sometimes I was a comic magician, meaning a pretty terrible magician, but with jokes. But mostly I was a juggler.

Saying out loud that juggling is your job raises eyebrows. People boldly ask the question: “Do you actually make a living doing this?”

They mean, “How can you pay the rent?” They don’t ask fast-food cashiers such a question, because they know fast-food cashiers can’t make the rent. But perhaps, they think, surprised, that clowns and jugglers rake in the Benjamins. (They do not.) 

To ask a musician or painter, “Do you actually make a living doing this?” would be rude, because such questions are neatly answered in popular culture: the artist struggles to “make it big” and if they are past a certain age and still doing the art, they nobly failed and probably are sad alcoholics who will break your heart. (Don’t blame me; blame Hollywood.) And people think anyone who says they are a writer or poet probably really works in marketing.

On my most recent jury experience, one of the prospective jurors—a man who I pegged as a data analyst for a bank—said that he was an artist.

One of the lawyers followed up. “You are an artist?”

“Yes,” said the data analyst, leaving it at that.

The lawyer asked his feelings on insurance companies and private equity.

The data analyst didn’t have strong opinions.

It was insufferable. We were all waiting there, the judge, the bailiff, the court clerk, the sad sacks in the juror box, the teeth-sucking prospective alternate jurors…

Ask him what kind of art he does! Visual? Conceptual? Origami? Juggling? How does he pay the rent? How does he pay the rent??? And what kind of artist has no opinions on insurance or private equity?

No one followed up. The placid data-analyst-artist was still juror number 7 when I was excused.

Stanyan House

Back to history... Here is one of the oldest surviving buildings in San Francisco, the Stanyan house:

Unlike “one of the oldest houses” I wrote about a few weeks ago, the Stanyan house is satisfactorily old-timey. That front porch just needs a rocker, a hound dog, and a guy playing a banjo.

2006 Bush Street was assessed as part of a citywide architectural survey in 1976 and the sheet's field notes read simply “Early American Dreamland.”

Planners use a lot of descriptive jargon in their evaluations these days. “Early American Dreamland” is hard to beat.

Charles H. Stanyan was chairman of the supervisors’ Outside Lands Committee of the 1860s, tasked with figuring out the best way of divvying up the western half of the peninsula for San Francisco. Golden Gate Park was a creation of this group and as their reward the committee members got panhandle streets named after them: Ashbury, Clayton, Shrader, Cole, and Stanyan. 

Bush Street was the first direct path to the future “Outside Lands” when a toll road was created in 1854, the main draw being a connection with the then out-of-town cemeteries around Lone Mountain. The Stanyan residence, a kit house shipped from the Eastern Seaboard to San Francisco, predated the the toll road, maybe even by a couple of years.

The front porch must have provided a great view of the rented gigs, carriages, and horse-drawn transit cars traveling back and forth.

Five generations of Stanyans lived in it up into the 1920s. By the 1940s, when the Japanese community filled the surrounding blocks, families by the names of Ikuta and Nakamura rented 2006 Bush Street.

Photographer Dorothea Lange took a photo of the house in April 1942 to show the homes lost by people of Japanese ancestry when the War Relocation Authority interned them in concentration camps.

The Stanyan family sold the property in 1974, the same year it was designated city landmark #66.

Wheelbarrow Man

I have my obsessions, you know: goat carts, moving buildings, roadhouses, and people who make a stunt of crossing the United States in unusual ways.

PBA Galleries had an auction item earlier this month that gave me a new story in the last category. Here’s a guy who pushed a wheelbarrow from San Francisco to New York... with his wheelbarrow.

Usually transcontinental travelers went east to west, and that is what one Lyman Potter did, showing up in San Francisco having pushed a wheelbarrow 3,000 miles across the country from New York. But Leon Pierre Federmeyer was unimpressed and thought he could do better. A $1,500 bet was arranged and an amazing race back to New York started on December 8, 1878.

But first, L.P. Federmeyer had the above carte-de-visite taken so he could sell copies along the way. Capitalism, you know.

Oh, the wacky adventures they must have had. The pair spent Christmas together at Virginia City, Nevada. They wheeled their burdens through Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain snowstorms. Federmeyer hit Cheyenne, Wyoming in early March with a 300-mile lead on the old champion.

In April he hit Topeka, Kansas, where a local reporter gave a description of Federmeyer’s 100-pound kit: “The wheelbarrow has a box on top, in which are the victuals, clothing, etc., which he carries. The wheel is made of wood, is solid and bound with a substantial steel tire. The right handle is somewhat damaged, and the board above the wheel is split. He says this was done when he was blown off a high trestle in the mountains.”

If pushing a wheelbarrow across the country in all sorts of conditions sounds exhausting, consider that Federmeyer would also exhibit his endurance-walking for paying audiences during stops along the way.

In Kansas City he pushed his loaded wheelbarrow around an indoor gym from seven in the morning to 10:30 at night (with two meal breaks) and received half of the admission receipts for the extra steps.

On July 24, 1879, after a journey of 7 months and 16 days, Federmeyer won the bet and trundled into New York City at least 1,100 miles ahead of the bogged-down and exhausted Potter.

His photo sold for $187.50 at auction.

I didn’t bid.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

Whew, I have been busy. While I’m excited about the event next week, I will be ready to have a drink with someone when it’s done. Great thanks to Karen K. (F.OW.) for contributing to the Woody beverage fund. She and many others are owed a round on me!

Sources

“Potter Again,” The Daily Ogden Junction, December 29, 1878, pg. 4; “The Wheelbarrow Men,” Daily Silver State, January 8, 1879, pg. 3; “Potter Outwalked,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 25, 1879, pg. 3.)