San Francisco is about the size of Boston, and so is its financial district.
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Two grids come together at Market Street, which leads off from the white, beaux-arts Ferry Building Tower, center foreground.
By conventional wisdom, if any city should have an organic plan full of curvilinear streets it is San Francisco, with its hilly topography. Examination of a street map, however, shows no evidence of hills; the grid is as regular as Manhattan’s or Philadelphia’s.
Click here for a larger version of this image.
The grid just clambers straight up and down those hills, magnifying their steepness and necessitating those cable cars. And you’re always sighting downhill to the water. This is the special genius of San Francisco that underlies its pungent character.
In this aerial from 1931 you can see the grid climb up and down the hills. In the foreground South of Market looks bedraggled, and the working port has begun its decline:
Click here for a larger version of this image.
San Franciscans have the best health of any Americans, and only residents of body-culture Miami Beach are in better shape. You should see the legs on the girls. Credit the “mistake” the original surveyor made when he ignored the hills.
Every city should have a mistake as good as this one.
Click here for a larger version of this image.
Two grids come together at Market Street, which leads off from the white, beaux-arts Ferry Building Tower, center foreground.
By conventional wisdom, if any city should have an organic plan full of curvilinear streets it is San Francisco, with its hilly topography. Examination of a street map, however, shows no evidence of hills; the grid is as regular as Manhattan’s or Philadelphia’s.
Click here for a larger version of this image.
The grid just clambers straight up and down those hills, magnifying their steepness and necessitating those cable cars. And you’re always sighting downhill to the water. This is the special genius of San Francisco that underlies its pungent character.
In this aerial from 1931 you can see the grid climb up and down the hills. In the foreground South of Market looks bedraggled, and the working port has begun its decline:
Click here for a larger version of this image.
San Franciscans have the best health of any Americans, and only residents of body-culture Miami Beach are in better shape. You should see the legs on the girls. Credit the “mistake” the original surveyor made when he ignored the hills.
Every city should have a mistake as good as this one.
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