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Alamo Square Park, Divisadero, and the Western Addition
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April 25, 2008
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One thing that I love about cities is how often you just turn a corner and find yourself in a totally different place. San Francisco in particular is a city of a thousand disjunctions. It packs more geographic variety into a smaller area than any other major city in America, and it is this constantly changing landscape that drives the creation of small, distinctive neighborhoods.
Given that Rebecca and I like this so much, it is somewhat embarrassing that we have never walked west from our apartment through Alamo Square Park and into the Western Addition. Sunday we decided to fix this.
We'd done our spring cleaning the day before, and despite having friends over the night before, when we woke up that morning the place still felt fresh and new. "I feel like I'm on vacation or rental home," Rebecca said. It was almost lunchtime already by the time we got out of bed -- we'd stayed up pretty late with our houseguests -- and since we'd just gotten our bacon of the month club shipment for this month, we threw some clothes on, walked down to the corner store, and picked up the materials for this month's pear and bacon sandwich.
It was during lunch that we decided to take a walk and eat in the Western Addition for dinner. I don't know why we hadn't done this until now. I can only suspect it's because we thought that it was farther than it actually is. That and the fact that part of the trip is up a pretty steep grade, and Rebecca does hate to walk uphill, a fact that makes her attachment to San Francisco a bit puzzling. Maybe we just hadn't thought of it. With Hayes Valley and the Civic Center directly to the east, the lower Haight and Upper Market to the south, Japantown and lower Pac Heights just up the 22, and Inner Mission just down it, we never really gave much thought to what was on the other side of the hill directly west of us.
The walk was gorgeous. It wasn't necessarily the best time for taking pictures, since the setting sun caused the hill and the parks tall trees to cast shadows in the foreground, but it sure seemed beautiful in person. (Other people have taken better pictures.) Alamo Square Park holds one of the more famous views of San Francisco: postcard Row, a group of Victorian homes with a view of downtown in the background. The park itself is full of giant, old trees.. The only thing that is missing is a place to barbecue.
We hit Divisadero and headed south. On our way we passed a large number of neighborhood stores that could be quite useful to us. I constantly complain that our neighborhood needs a butcher, and while we still don't have one, apparently we have the next best thing -- a butcher in the next neighborhood over, just 10 minutes' walk, or, if you like, 3 minutes away on the 21 line. Country cheese Co., which also carries gourmet olive oils, meats, and condiments, is guaranteed to get a lot of visits from us. I'm also very curious about Cookin', a dense, chaotic purveyor of cookware that was closed and we passed by. Gamescape, possibly San Francisco's only game shop, will likely see us again as well.
We had dinner at Metro Kathmandu, a Nepalese restaurant associated with the Metro Hotel. Capsule review: Buffalo momos, B+; Pickled Daikon, B; Vegetable Korma, B+; Goat Curry, B-; Parathas, B. Pretty-good South Asian, worth another look. I should note that the parathas I had here are the closest in style to the ones that I had when I was in India, but they'd were not nearly as good. I'll just have to keep looking.
We stopped by New Star Ell on the way home. New Star Ell is a corner store that has a fantastic selection of Belgian beer, as well as some great high-end liquor on offer. We picked up a few to experiment with and headed home for a nightcap.
April 25, 2008 in san francisco | Permalink
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Comments
Oh sure... you and your 'fancy' bacon. Rub it in about how great San Francisco is. I'll still be here enjoying my parathas here in India.
Posted by: Joe Arnold at Apr 28, 2008 10:05:02 PM
metro kathmandu huh.. was it really buffalo momos? water buffaloes really ? May be not, thats why it just got B+ I guess.
Posted by: skb at May 2, 2008 2:18:17 AM
Hi There
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Posted by: Niall Harbison at May 14, 2008 10:03:28 AM
