A plan is hatched to dam the San Francisco Bay, creating two freshwater lakes and freeing up vast new tracts of land for development. Today this might sound like a grim future, but in 1945 it was fodder for this priceless holiday card from John Reber, the mastermind behind the plan:
(via sparkletack)
Brilliant!
One of my favorite objects ever is this oven mitt shaped like a dog’s head. Not only is it good for picking up pots, it also makes a great hand puppet:
But here’s the best part: when the lights are on, the dog casts a shadow that looks like the dog—arms, body, and all—is hanging from the oven handle:
Today Google Building Maker launched (see the Google blog post). I’ve been dogfooding it at work for a while now, and not only is it addictive, but it’s really changed the way I look at the real world. Here’s a video, although I also recommend you try it yourself:
I’ve modeled several buildings along Dolores St in my neighborhood, and now every time I walk past one of them, I turn it around in 3D in my head and I know exactly what the roof looks like. And sometimes when I see an interesting building, I think about how I’d model it in Building Maker. A gable here, another gable there, a couple of blocks, and voilà.
In college I played a lot of Tony Hawk Pro Skater. The brilliant thing about that game is that after playing it, you look at the real world a little differently—anytime you see power lines strung between two buildings, you think, “I could totally grind across those power lines and then do a handplant on the edge of that building.” I still have thoughts like this years later—the game’s planted little time bombs in my brain, which get triggered by things I see everyday, like a row of benches, or metal streetcar tracks in the middle of the road. I’m sure this part of the appeal of (real-life) skateboarding or parkour is how they transform the real world into a playground.
Anyway, I look forward to having lots more Tony Hawk experiences to come thanks to Building Maker.
Update: Check out the models I’ve made so far—50 buildings and counting!
I’ve been meaning to post about this great article by David Byrne that was in The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago: David Byrne’s Perfect City. He includes the “sensibility and attitude” of the inhabitants as part of the landscape of the city, which I enjoyed.
Also, here’s what he had to say about San Francisco:
Every time I visit San Francisco I ask out loud “Why don’t I live here? Why do I choose to live in a place that is harder, tougher and, well, not as beautiful?” The locals often reply, “You don’t want to live here. It looks like a city, but it’s really a small village. Everyone knows what you’re doing” Oh, OK. If you say so. It’s still beautiful.
I’ve heard this line about SF before, and while there are moments when it feels like a small town—bumping into friends in the street and all that—I’ve never had that “everyone knows what you’re doing” feeling. Also, if you’re David Byrne, doesn’t everyone know what you’re doing anyway?
Today I had the good fortune to tour the construction of the new Bay Bridge eastern span. I grew up looking at the old eastern span from my window in Berkeley, and I vividly remember the 1989 earthquake that crippled it, so the replacement of this creaky old bridge is a big deal to me.
That’s not the Bay Bridge, it’s a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction in 1936. I have a similar photo hanging framed on my bedroom wall. Today I hoped to take a photo of the new Bay Bridge construction worthy of hanging beside it. (I’m still sorting through all the photos, so the jury’s out on whether I accomplished my goal.)
Here’s one shot from today’s boat tour:
Skyway of the new eastern span is split into two parts. Old eastern span is visible at far left.
A couple interesting features you can see above (thanks to our tour guide Bart Ney):
The tour also included some drama on the high seas, as my hardhat was blown overboard by the wind. Luckily this able seaman was there to rescue it:
My hat being rescued
You can see more photos from the tour (not fully edited yet) here:
Bay Bridge—new eastern span construction – Picasa album
I can’t wait until the self-anchored suspension (SAS) part of the span (the one with the big tower) starts going up!
That’s it for now. I’ll probably blog more about the bridge later.
How did the owners of these houses unwittingly save the J-Church line in 1917?
In the 1940s, dozens of streetcar lines got the ax and were replaced with buses. Only five were spared. Four of them (K, L, M, N) survived because they pass through tunnels (Twin Peaks Tunnel and Sunset Tunnel) which couldn’t be used for bus service [nycsubway.org].
The story of the fifth line, now called the J-Church, is a bit more complicated. Between 18th St and 22nd St, the J-Church runs along uses a right-of-way first through Dolores Park and then swinging east through backyards to skirt the steepest part of the hill. Thus the streetcars only have to climb a 9% grade while the traffic on Church St has to climb a 19.8% grade. Well, the right-of-way is too narrow to accommodate buses, and in the the city’s midcentury buses didn’t have enough power to get up the hill.
So the Church St streetcar line lives on, thanks to this strange little stretch of track. But it could have been otherwise—if not for a few cheapskate locals. The SF Municipal Reports from 1917 describe four competing plans. The first three of these plans would have modified Church St to be less steep (using a tunnel or a reinforced cut at the top of the hill). The fourth plan would have constructed a new boulevard for streetcar and automobile traffic that would skirt the steepest part of the hill. But constructing this 70-foot-wide boulevard would have required the city to acquire private property at substantial cost. Residents of a local assessment district would be taxed to shoulder part of the burden.
Property owners voiced their opposition to this tax, prompting the city to downsize the 70-foot-wide boulevard to a 28-foot right-of-way for streetcar traffic only. If this boulevard had been built, there would have been no obstacle to replacing the streetcar with a bus.
Incidentally, MUNI buses elsewhere in the city, both diesel and electric, climb grades above 20%, steeper than Church St, so the city could run a bus up Church St today if they wanted to. Luckily we live in a more enlightened age.
In a future episode of “happy accidents”: how the rush to rebuild after the 1906 earthquake narrowly saved San Francisco from having an even bigger, grander, and suckier civic center.
It’s tough to find a hobo sign nowadays. But just as Depression-era America gave birth to the pictographic language of hobos—indecipherable to others—today’s cities are home to lots of signs meant only for the eyes of a select few:
The above is a (particularly artistic) example of the utility location markings intended for construction crews.
From wikipedia, a guide to decoding these markings:
Maybe someday I’ll collect ‘em all.
(In case you were wondering: “USA” stands for Underground Service Alert, the organization that left this particular sign.)
Howard33 has a nice photoset of these Mysterious Street Markings on flickr.
