Grab Bag #41

The major league baseball playoffs have begun. Alas, the San Francisco Giants are all home watching them on TV. And as for the A’s... well... let’s not go there right now.

Like many boys, playing baseball with my friends not only included mimicking the signature stances, bat swings, and pitching wind-ups of big-league players, but also pretending to revel in the roar of the crowd after hitting the game-winning home run, completing the no hitter, or winning the World Series.

I was cut early from the freshman baseball team at Sacred Heart High School and that was that. No on-field glory for me.

But I can tell you what it’s like to be in a World Series parade. 

Top three moment in my life.

There’s no way another event can break into the trio of marrying Nancy, watching Miranda be born, and standing next to Jeffrey “HacMan” Leonard waving to thousands of deliriously screaming Giants fans.

The Giants winning Game 5 in Texas may have been my #3 for two whole days. Then my friends Marilyn and Robert Katzman, who owned a historic fire truck, got the call to help out with the victory parade. They were to ferry former Giants on the route. They asked if I wanted to ride along.

I did.

My generation of Giants fans, who started following our hometown team as kids in the 1970s, possessed a chill fatalistic doom-dread about the team. The rare years of competence were sure to end in disappointment, the years of making the playoffs in heartbreak.

We knew it. We waited for it. Fred Breining would give up the grand slam to Rick Monday. Candy Maldonado would lose the ball in the lights. Shawn Estes would hop off 2nd base. The bullpen would implode in Game 6.

The Giants winning the World Series in 2010, the first since moving to San Francisco in 1958, erased that tape. But they won on the road in Texas without the victory roar of a hometown crowd. Our cathartic unleashing of decades of disappointment had to wait for the parade two days later.

Willie Mays and other Hall of Famers had their own cars. On the fire truck with me were lesser stars, former Giants who I guess were available to take the ride: HacMan, Ken Henderson, Mike “Tiny” Felder, Rich Aurilia, Jim Davenport, and Bill Laskey. I wore a shirt, tie, and ballcap. Those in the crowd scouring their mental scorecards of years gone by may have pegged me for a front office exec or an early 90s relief pitcher.

As an imposter undeserving of glory, I tried to keep a low profile and mostly sat on a step above the truck’s running board. Maybe the retired Giants riding with me, who played the game but never won a World Series, felt a bit unsure of their place in parade as well. I don’t know.

The turn onto Montgomery Street through the narrow canyon of office buildings is where the clamor peaked. When everyone is cheering for you, honking horns and ringing bells, your inclination is to laugh and yell something back, anything. I was hoarse at the end, but I don’t know what I screamed to all those people.

The players on the truck glowed. Even HacMan Leonard, whose deadpan was so famous he had the second nickname of “Penitentiary face,” even Leonard smiled. No one couldn’t stop themselves.

We dropped the retired Giants off at the parade-ending rally at the Civic Center and somehow—whoosh—the fire truck was on Van Ness Avenue and driving back to the Katzmans’ home in Ocean View.

I sat alone in the open back. Despite the wind, it was a quiet ride.

Beautiful Gas Stations

I guess we’re not supposed to find gas stations beautiful. We assume there isn’t a lot of effort from anyone to make them so. But San Francisco had some lovely ones, especially the sleek “Flying A” Associated stations.

I once did an interview with someone who worked as an architect for Chevron. We were talking about neighborhood history, not filling-station design. But he proudly pulled out some renderings from his working days. There wasn’t a lot of freedom to riff off the corporate-approved look, but he incorporated Spanish-Revival style tiles to the California station roof lines. He obviously enjoyed the hand-drawing and coloring those architects did before computers.

Here is another beauty, back when Chevron was know as Standard Oil:

Paul Judge did research and wrote some memories on this lighthouse-inspired station in an Outside Lands magazine back in 2020. Check it out!

House Moving

For San Francisco Heritage’s 2024 gala on September 5, 2024, I did a presentation on the dozen Western Addition houses moved by Heritage and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in November 1974. Here’s an online version of the story if you couldn’t make it to Herbst Theater:

Visit the SF Heritage YouTube channel for more videos from the gala and footage of houses on the move.

Making Plans 1

Check out the model photos of Yerba Buena Center shown at a 1973 exhibition and recently uploaded by my friend David Gallagher to his SFMemory site:

When architects used to hand-draw elevations, they also sometimes hand-craft 3-D models of their plans. A fading art form!

Making Plans 2

Up-zoning plans in the city are sort of paused until after the election and the 50-story tower at Ocean Beach is now only planned to be eight stories, but there are still rumors of a YIMBY push for opening up the shoreline to tall towers.

There is nothing new under the Sun(set District). Check out this Miami Beach-ish proposed development from civil engineer Jacques Paul Kourkene in 1967:

That breakwater on the left was intended to extend Ocean Beach and warm the water for swimming. (Kourkene: “Water pollution could be controlled and fog could be eliminated by using propane gas ionization, which would precipitate fog into rain well out at sea.”)

The rest of Kourkene’s pitch will sound familiar to those following land use discussions in 2024 except he differs on modern claims that upzoning will make housing more affordable: “Property values would rise immediately.”

Beachside Park

Speaking of the Great Highway...

In addition to everything else we’re voting on in the November election, here in San Francisco there’s a ballot measure proposing to close the Great Highway permanently between Lincoln Way and Sloat Boulevard to create a park, or at least a no-car zone.

It’s a very contentious measure, particularly on the west side.

To my knowledge, no park-ifying plans have been made for the eventuality of the measure passing. So I offer a 1901 design suggestion by architect Curtis Tobey, Jr.:

OK, to be fair, Oceanside Gardens, the Coney Island of the Beach, was planned for farther north, between Balboa and Fulton Streets. It was never built, but the site did grow from a carousel and some shooting gallery concessions into Playland at the Beach, a seaside amusement zone which closed and was (sniff) demolished in 1972.

The Great Highway berm between Lincoln Way and Sloat Boulevard was not originally created for cars, but for a railroad.

A spur line beside Lake Merced connected to the Southern Pacific lines running between downtown and San Jose. In 1893, a northern extension was laid to transport construction materials to Golden Gate Park for the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition.

After running along the berm, the trains turned east on Lincoln Way and on into the heart of the fair site around 9th Avenue.

There were real concerns that the monopolistic Southern Pacific would finagle a way to make the temporary line permanent, and it was years after the fair ended that the tracks were pulled out.

The Great Highway as we know it was improved and landscaped in the late 1910s and early 1920s. While constructed with automobiles in mind, the idea of a grand esplanade to promenade upon was part of the vision, a cohabitation of walkers and machines.

The sea wall between Balboa and Fulton Streets was intended to extend all the way down the beach, but the plans were cut back, giving us that abrupt jog in the road and a less esplanade-ish experience south of Lincoln Way.

That flat, straight stretch of concrete used to be unencumbered by intersections or lights and an excellent venue for drag-racing. And police officers practicing stunts like this:

I hope the statute of limitations has run out as I write that when I bought my 1963 Buick Electra, I opened it up that first night on the dark, empty Great Highway.

One of the Electra’s “features” was an adjustable alarm buzzer in the speedometer dial. I don’t think it went higher than 90 mph, so my memory of that evening pushing the Buick to three digits is a grating “bzzzzzzzz.”

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

Thanks to Ted B. and Jeff B. for their contributions to the fund that tops off the Woody fluids and makes him (me) socialize more by bribing people with free beverages. (What a clear mission statement for a non-tax-deductible venture.)

Perhaps you would like to chip in, unless you are saving your dimes to buy this inflatable cow, which I would totally understand.

Sources

“Ocean Beach Lido Plan May Be a Chinese Wall,” San Francisco Examiner, August 27, 1967, Real Estate Section, pg. 28.