 |
San Francisco's southwestern
corner is often ignored in
guidebooks to the city,
partly due to distance from
the city's historic center,
partly from its relative
newness and partly from a
well-earned reputation as
the place fog calls home.
Nonetheless, there's a lot
to explore in the area's
three major neighborhoods:
the Outer Sunset, Parkside
and West Portal.
Welcome to Planet Eisenhower
Visitors to hilly West
Portal may notice something
odd: Mixed in with the
modern stock brokerages,
coffee stores and
home-furnishings boutiques
are an odd sampling of
businesses that would fit
nicely into a museum display
about the Eisenhower
administration: bars with
those '50s rec-room
fireplaces and diners with
Korean War-era Formica
countertops. Ocean Beach
This time-warp effect stems
from the neighborhood's
geographic isolation from
San Francisco's hipper
precincts, in spite of a
Muni tunnel that connects
West Portal with downtown.
Another factor is that West
Portal residents tend to be
solidly middle class --
primarily firefighters,
teachers, health-care
workers and small-business
owners, according to 1990
census data. A third element
is the neighborhood's phobia
about chain businesses, only
a very few of which have
gained a foothold.
West Portal's heart is the
retail strip along West
Portal Avenue from the Muni
tunnel to 15th Avenue, which
is surrounded by densely
residential
mini-neighborhoods tucked up
in the surrounding hills.
A Vibrant Urban Suburb
The Outer Sunset and its
neighboring Parkside
neighborhood used to be
largely desert -- literally;
the area was entirely
covered by sand dunes. The
district got its name when a
former city assessor,
Aurelius E. Buckingham, went
into the real estate
business and sought a name
that would dodge the area's
reputation for gloom. A real
estate boom followed the
1906 earthquake and fire as
San Franciscans fled the
shattered and burned
downtown areas toward new
housing. The completion of
streetcar tunnels from
downtown to West Portal
(1917) and Judah Street
(1923) only accelerated the
boom.
By 1924 the San Francisco
Bulletin was writing
headlines like "Home Seekers
Conquer Sand Wastes of
Sunset," and the process of
paving over the dunes was
largely complete a decade
later, when the San
Francisco News wrote,
"Little more than a dozen
years ago, a Hollywood
motion-picture company shot
desert scenes [in the
Sunset]. The company set up
its headquarters near 36th
Avenue and Ortega Street,
and by angling his cameras
so that sand dunes hid
Golden Gate Park to the
north, the director created
the illusion of a vast
desert."
The Outer Sunset's main
retail drag is on Irving
Street, between 19th and
27th avenues, while the
Parkside's is along Taraval
Street, roughly between 15th
and 30th avenues, continuing
with lower density
practically to Ocean Beach.
Connecting the two
neighborhoods are the
numbered avenues and Sunset
Boulevard, which runs
between 36th and 37th
avenues from Lincoln
Boulevard to Sloat
Boulevard. Although Sunset
is heavily trafficked, it's
also heavy with trees and
grass that separate
nonmotorized travelers from
the cars, making it a great
walking, biking or jogging
route. Visitors can also
take walks on the beach,
hear concerts and opera at
Stern Grove during the
summer, visit the San
Francisco Zoo and watch hang
gliders launch from the
cliffs at Fort Funston.
While West Portal remains
wedded to its largely Irish
and Italian roots, the
Parkside and the Outer
Sunset are much broader
reflections of San
Francisco's ethnic
diversity; while more than
half of these neighborhoods'
residents are white (mostly
of Italian, Irish and
Russian extraction), more
than a third are Asians or
Pacific Islanders, and that
proportion is expected to
continue growing in the
coming decades. From block
to block, it's difficult to
predict whether you'll come
upon a hofbrau, a Thai
noodle house, an Irish bar,
a Vietnamese restaurant or a
Chinese dry cleaner, adding
to these neighborhoods'
attraction for visitors.
As in West Portal, the most
common occupations for Outer
Sunset and Parkside
residents are firefighting,
teaching and health care --
stable, middle-class jobs
that give San Francisco's
west side a more politically
conservative cast than the
city as a whole.
Taraval Street between 15th
and 25th avenues has what
the Inner Sunset boasted 10
years ago: cheap and
multiethnic cafés,
restaurants and service
businesses oriented toward
neighbors, plus light
traffic and parking that's
not only possible but also
actually nearby.
|
|
|
|
|
|