Category: Urban

Randomly Monday

Saw the new Sylvan Learning Center commercial this morning, featuring yet another annoying, doe-eyed, blonde Mormon child and his annoying, doe-eyed, blonde Mormon mom. When will they just go ahead and start using the tagline “Sylvan Learning Centers: Fixing all the damage those horrible brown-skinned children have inflicted on your child’s education”?

Or maybe: “Sylvan Learning Centers: Cheaper than White Flight”…

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Every time I walk by the old Pacific Stock Exchange and see how it’s been stripped of all its dignity and transformed into an upscale gym, I think about how I’d almost rather that they’d torn the damned thing down. Even if you aren’t a supporter of capitalism — and I realize that a significant number of San Franciscans are rather ambivalent about this particular economic system — you have to wish they could have found some better use for a building with that much history than to turn it into a trendy latter-day sweatlodge for vain, self-obsessed yuppies…

Alas..

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I finally asked around and found out that yes, there is in fact a San Francisco city ordinance responsible for the fact that every building in the whole bloody city is freezing cold all winter long and stiflingly hot during September and October.

Enacted a year before I arrived in the city, the Structural Temperature Equality Ordinance of 1991 required that no heating or air conditioning system of any sort be employed in any San Francisco building unless said system were designed to REDUCE the temperature during the winter and ELEVATE it during the summer. It further stated that no variance of more than three degrees shoud be allowed between the outdoor and indoor air temperature within any building designed for human occupancy…

I think it had something to do with preserving the sensibilities of homeless people without heated or air-conditioned shopping carts…

And yes, I’m making this up. However, keep in mind that (a) there really DOES seem to be no discernible climate control anywhere in this godforsaken city, and (b) our Board of Supervisors is NOT above passing really silly and pointless legislation…

Baltimore to Greensboro

  

We’d grown better able to avoid the ghettos by this second visit to Baltimore, and we saw a fair amount of the city, although our time was a little limited. This time through, we did get to eat at the Overlea and we made it downtown as well. And then it was time to move on…

  

We took the old road, US 1, from Baltimore to Washington and I relived a little more of my childhood as we passed the Laurel Shopping Center, where my mom and I used to hang out while my did went to the horse races (and where George Wallace was shot in 1972). Hechts and the Hot Shoppes have moved on, but the Giant Food is still there, original sign in place…

We met Juan Felipe at a Colombian restaurant with amazing food on Glebe Road in Arlington. He gave us the tour of the town (which is more appealing than I’d remembered) and put up with us until rush hour subsided, while somehow managing to avoid being photographed…

And then there was a very long drive back to Greensboro, which seemed even longer since it didn’t start until 8:00 at night…

Pittsburgh to Baltimore

  

I crawled out of bed before Mark awoke and snuck off to Weirton for some quality time with my Kroger. It was cold as a witch’s tit outside and I actually even saw some snow on my windshield going over the hill, but it all pretty much ended by the time we REALLY ventured out into the world for breakast at Ritter’s. I love Ritter’s…

And I hate Giant Eagle. After a couple of visits, I’ve decided that it is one of the single worst supermarket chains I’ve ever patronized. And I’ve patronized a lot of grocery chains. The stores are a tacky merchandising mess and the employees range from incompetent to down righ surly. Of course, they have a virtual monopoly in Pittsburgh, and it shows. Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest…

 

Today, we toured Shadyside and some of the outlying areas on the way south to Charleroi, which is where Mark’s father and aunt were born. We saw the old family homestead and drove through the surprisingly large and active downtown, before stopping at the Sunoco and getting on the Turnpike. We got a price break because the toll collectors were in the last day of a strike…

Lunch was at a very sucktastic Bob’s Big Boy in a service plaza. And we actually made it to Baltimore at a reasonable enough hour to have dinner there, at a passable pizza place in Timonium, before touring the bridges and tunnels by night…

Pittsburgh

   

Pittsburgh continues to be one of my favorite cities on a purely aesthetic basis. It’s just a quite fascinating place to drive around in, even though I realized I hadn’t driven any at all on my last visit and was therefore less familiar this time than I might have liked…

We had lunch at the Plaza Restaurant, where I was about half the age of every other patron in the place (and which made me consider asking for a booster seat for Mark), and then started finding our way around the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, concentrating today more on the hills and the more dense areas by the rivers. We also visited The Strip so I could visit the old abandoned, factory which had so fascinated me in 1997. It was now even older, even more abandoned, and even more fascinating…

As evening hit, we made a 30-mile trek across West Virgina to Steubenville OH, adding two states to Mark’s list with very little effort. On the way back, in Weirton WV, I saw one of the most beautiful and ancient (but still open) Kroger stores ever, and vowed to return in the morning for a good photo…

As sometimes happens, we ended up having dinner at the Olive Garden…

Baltimore to Schenectady

   

This was another rather long day. We toured Baltimore in the morning (or in the part of the morning which was left after we finally got up) and had a run of very bad luck accidentally turning onto really scary ghetto streets. I have a pretty high tolerance for frightening neighborhoods, but these were like Detroit scale…

Despite all this, Baltimore is still one of my favorite places. I’ve been spending time in the region since I was a kid, and I fell in love with the city itself when my friend Duncan lived there in the late 1980s. It’s such a strange hybrid of southern and northern, and it’s just plain purty, even the decay…

Anyway, we finally found our way out and had lunch before touring the more comforting northeastern side of town, finding that the neighborhood we like in just about every other city also exists in Baltimore, along Harford and Belair Roads near Northern Parkway and the Overlea Diner, where we wouldn’t actually eat until the return trip a few days later…

We finally left Baltimore by 3:00 or so, thinking it would be about seven hours to Albany. We were a little off on the timing, and all the assorted turnpikes were absolute raging nightmares. There were, however, some bright moments, at least for me. I got my Roy Rogers fix, and also got to romp through an actual A&P in New Jersey. And Mark marvelled at a well-stocked Stop & Shop in New York…

Finally, sometime around 1:00 in the morning, we arrived in Schenectady at Duncan and Rick‘s house…

Greensboro to Baltimore

 

We left relatively early today for the Triangle, Richmond, and Baltimore. It was a very long day, starting with a drive-by through Durham (including my first visit to a Super Target) and lunch in Chapel Hill with Becky, with whom my contact has been too limited of late, through no fault of hers…

We also poked around Raleigh for an hour or two, and Mark seemed to rather like it there. We somehow managed not to have dinner until about 9:00 at a KFC/Taco Bell in South Hill, Virginia. It was 1:00 in the morning before we pulled into out motel in Baltimore and pounced on each other…

Pictures

A new section on the site: Photography. The idea is that I tend to take pictures of some of the same sorts of stuff over and over again, so this is a place where I can post some of my favorites and not have to do a bunch of commentary if I don’t feel like it…

The three themes to start are LA, Fresno, and Mid-century in the Bay Area. More to come. Planet SOMA will continue to be reserved for themes and photo essays centering on the underside of San Francisco…

The rules are that I’m starting fresh with only photos and digital photos. There will be none of the video captures which were mainstays of this site for years, and which will probably continue to pop up from time to time…

You never know what themes might be added after the upcoming East Coast Road Trip whose itinerary the hubby has so conveniently freed me from having to detail, even though I wasn’t really planning to anyway…

Ten Years in a Construction Zone

I’m typing today to the sound of loud saws and hammers. They’re working on the four-unit apartment building next door. It doesn’t phase me as much as it might, because they’ve been working on the same building with the same saws and the same hammers for TEN FUCKING YEARS…

Think I’m kidding? No indeed. I’m quite serious. It all started about 1993 or 1994, a couple of years after I moved into my apartment, when they extended the back of the building and enclosed some balconies, turning the air shaft which provides the windows for my living room and bedroom into a very narrow tube. This wasn’t a problem; I’m not a big fan of overabundant light, although I think my downstairs neighbor was less amused. Actually, I think the city was a little miffed too, as certain permits hadn’t been filed…

For the next decade, the construction continued off and on, sometimes much more “off” and sometimes much more “on”, but always there lurking in the background. Almost any time I sit in the living room during the day on a weekday, I hear the workers chatting away, since the deck where they evidently spend most of their time is about eight feet from my window. This chatter doesn’t really phase me either, since I also hear it at night from the very loud residents of said building. Once or twice when it extended past midnight and was accompanied by (really bad) music, I even called the cops…

Today, it’s a little noisier than usual. We heard some pouding late last evening too, which suggests to me that the noisy residents themselves might be doing some of the modifications. They’ve done enough pouding and sawing over the past ten years that they must have gutted and reconstructed the whole goddamned building at least three times…

Hmmm. I wonder if they have the proper permits this time. Maybe I should check into that…

The Wal-Mart Cometh

Why yes, despite what you read — and despite what people in the Bay Area seem pre-programmed to believe — there are actually places where people (and local businesses) are HAPPY to see Wal-Mart coming. Knowing this part of my hometown as I do, I don’t think this will be quite the cure-all it’s made out to be, but neither do I see it as particularly damaging…

Speaking of huge chains, we had dinner at Ikea last night. As many negative things as I’ve had to say about the place over the years, our last couple of visits haven’t been nearly as horrible as earlier ones. And you gotta love anyplace that can feed the two of us so completely for fifteen bucks…