Woody Grab Bag #004

More from Woody LaBounty than you knew you needed.

In Praise of Fog

I think of July and “Fogust” as San Francisco’s version of the Montana winter or the Alabama summer: the litmus test of newcomer resolve. Hey, Mr. Newly Arrived Tech Worker, if you can't handle 28 straight overcast July days, perhaps you should move to Fremont. It’s not for everyone.

I love the fog. I’m not talking about overcast skies, but the ground-hugging, spitting, skin-soaking alive fog that prowled every summer of my youth.

Are all childhoods recalled in desaturated colors? My palette is very gray from growing up in the Richmond District. Riding our bikes west on Lake Street into the cotton balls of mist. The pinwheels of water spinning off tennis balls on the slick courts of Rochambeau playground. We called to each other in our games in Mountain Lake Park with whoops that imitated the ever-present foghorn bellows.

We all lived a damp life in the Richmond, Sunset District, Ocean View, and Ingleside. The carnivorous sea mists rotted away car bumpers and fenders. My friend Eamon lived a couple of blocks from Ocean Beach and had an old Volkswagen with a scary fog-bite out of the floor on its passenger side. When he gave me a ride to Sacred Heart High School I had to keep my feet wide apart and hold tight to my history book as the street concrete blurred beneath me.

The mist could miraculously dissolve around lunchtime, brightening and winking out in minutes, and then around 3 o’clock return to roll and roil over us again. I own such sharp memories of stepping out of SFO airport, returning from some place of sticky humidity or baking dryness, and savoring the sea-laced air on my face.

We west-side Morlocks had no knowledge of the Elois in the Mission District, who sometimes lived whole weeks without the gray stuff. For a few years in the early 2000s I lived in Noe Valley. Many sunny afternoons I’d see a bank of cotton layered behind Twin Peaks, the white curtain plucking an ancestral call inside me to return. I’d almost feel guilty being warm. Moving back to the west side and Mr. Chill seriously made me whole again.

Either climate change or a trick of my memory has me sure that fog is a less frequent visitor now. In these latter years of fire smoke, high temperatures, and everyone AQI-watching, the moving marine layer is all I desire. It is the lost lover, the spurned hero banished by public disdain but promised to return when our need is great.

A Lie from The Sunset Breeze (1899)

“Whatever may be said about the climate of San Francisco, one thing is certain—that Sunset District enjoys the best there is in that direction on this peninsula. Now, there is a sort of pre-conceived idea among our downtown people that this section is a special rendezvous for that itinerant sea coast visitor, the king of fog. Nothing can be farther from the truth, and every close observer of climactic conditions in San Francisco will beat us out in the assertion.”

(The author went on to explain that the occasional fogs the Sunset did get were the better kind: “fresh, sparkling fogs, impregnated with the life-giving salt of the ocean.”)

San Francisco Fog is Invigorating

A Warning from the San Francisco Call (1898)

(On walking in the sand dunes of the Sunset District on a foggy day.)

The Moving Dormer

Proof that I look at buildings and old photos too much (yes, I know you don't need any evidence): the apartment building on the southeast corner of Cole and Oak Streets in the Haight-Ashbury has a perplexing roof. In circa 1906, as you can see in the above photo on the far left, a dormer window faced the Golden Gate Park panhandle on the north side of the building. Today (above right), the window has apparently migrated to the west side, taken on a spouse, and produced a little dormer baby.

Looks like there was a fire at The Abbey Apartments about a decade after it was constructed that may somewhat explain matters (assuming the San Francisco Examiner made a small error in putting the building at Page Street):

Long-gone details seen in the old photo include the original finial:

The curved sign on the bay:

And the Branch Bakery and Delicatessen in the cave-like basement (now an apartment):

Speaking of Finials...

Shall we call this finial an architectural element of Midcentury Modern style?

I saw this on the 200 block of Clayton Street, just across the Golden Gate Park panhandle from the Abbey Apartments. Do television aerials like this still work?

We Love the Fog

Vin Found! (Tiny still a mystery)

Back in Grab Bag #002 I posted this image I found on eBay of Vin and the doghouse he made for Tiny the dog and asked if anyone could identify what looked to me like a Sunset District street.

Of course the stellar San Francisco historians on Twitter figured everything out for me.

David Gallagher subsequently found Vincent J. Coll and his wife Dorothy in the San Francisco directory, living at 35 Navajo Avenue. Vin was a glazier. Now all we need to figure out is the breed of Tiny the dog...

By the way, @shabbyfrisco is one of the city's great researchers. She pointed out the houses on Navajo were likely designed by prolific architect Charles Strothoff. Here's an article about him from her great Sunnyside History Project website:

Strothoff in Sunnyside, or How to Love the Utility Poles in the Street

One of a short series of house-based local history—five stories touching on the perennial San Francisco themes of immigration, families, city-building, and self-making, although this post, the last…

Sunnyside History ProjectView all posts by Sunnyside History

That's it. Go out and take a walk, fog or sun!