Quesada Gardens

Feeling anxious about the election and grumpy about those people on the other side?

Me too.

Getting older and wondering if you are still relevant, if you still have something important to offer to the world?

Me too.

This is a good time for a story that people can be kind, that they can bring people together, and that they can make a difference at any age.

First, let us go back to 1919.

San Francisco was in the midst of a massive bond-fueled effort to improve city infrastructure and streets. In the Bayview, the Department of Public Works prepared to take on the one block of Quesada Avenue running west from Railroad Avenue (now 3rd Street).

City photographer Horace Chaffee took a “before” photo of the job.

The “street” had a jumble of Victorian cottages on either side. While humble, they offered some elegance which the rough, weedy roadway lacked.

(All those luxury 4-wheel-drive SUVs driving around San Francisco now would have been useful then.)

Many of these homes were built around 1903. What was then named “17th Avenue South” petered out against the hillside where the Silver Terrace neighborhood would later be developed. Real estate brokers Lyon & Hoag pitched $350 lots to working men looking for housing near their jobs at the California Fireworks factory, the shipyards, and the meat, poultry, and tallow processing plants of “Butchertown.”

By November 1920, the residents of Quesada Avenue had a newly paved street with a center median. On the west end, a concrete retaining wall made a dead-end of the north half of the block, but offered a staircase for walkers to access the Mount St. Joseph Roman Catholic orphanage beyond.

The Quesada median was planted with Canary Island Date Palms, same as the better-known ones along Dolores Street in the Mission District.

(Over the last twenty-five years, from the Embarcadero to Ocean Avenue, palms have been a popular choice for renewing streetscapes in the city, but they still rub many old-time San Franciscans as “too L.A.”) 

The palms and most of the early cottages survived the twentieth century as the Bayview District swelled in the 1920s and filled in during the World War II years.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the street had become decidedly uninviting. Branching off busy 3rd Street, but not a thoroughfare to anywhere beyond the block, quiet Quesada Avenue became a litter magnet and late-night hangout.

In 2014, resident Annette Young Smith described the median of some fifteen years earlier to KALW reporter Jen Chien: “There was a lot of dead grass, weeds […] It had all kinds of debris: beer cans, liquor bottles, needles of where they were using drugs, condoms. Name it, it was out there.”

It was again time for a remaking of Quesada Avenue, but this time it wouldn’t be a city agency stepping up. In the ground between the old palm trees, neighbors led by Ms. Smith, Karl Paige, and Jeffrey Betcher began planting roses, vegetables, and sunflowers.

The Quesada Gardens Initiative was soon born to beautify the block’s median with collard greens, kale, lettuce, sage, rosemary, lavender, sunflowers, and just about anything that would grow. The neighbors went on to sponsor a mural on the retaining wall, install colorful tile on the concrete staircase, and knit a broader community together through newsletters, a blog, film nights, and art projects across surrounding blocks.

The initiative’s inspiring website says it all: “Together, we are bringing back the days when all who live, work & play in Bayview Hunters Point greet each other by name.”

In the early 20th century, the city improved a dusty-in-summer/muddy-in-winter path for the residents of Quesada Avenue. In the early 21st century, without an election (or the millions of dollars now apparently required to win one) neighbors planted their own garden and metaphorical seeds, shoots, roots, and flowers which reached far beyond their own front yards.

Your first assignment: watch Rooted, the great short film on the Quesada Gardens Initiative by Shayne King and Arne Johnson of Mission Pictures.

Make sure you hear Ms. Smith’s story of going through a tough time (at 17:53 in the video) and the decision she made to start hugging people.

Your second assignment: Take that attitude with you when you walk out of the polls on November 5, 2024. Whatever happens, we can make a difference block by block.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

I’m on the road (probably between Flagstaff and Albuquerque as you read this), but I am going to be pretty thirsty when I return. Would you like to take advantage of the generosity of those good souls who have chipped in to the Woody sociability fund? Let’s get something on the calendar!

Sources

Jen Chien, Neighbors are doin' it for themselves at Quesada Gardens Initiative (KALW Public Media)

Rooted, by Shayne King and Arne Johnson of Mission Pictures.