I love this pic! That’s Hayes Street at Gough. There’s a double-decker freeway where my friend Trusha’s pilates studio is now! And there’s a Moishe’s Pipic where Moishe’s Pipic used to be!
Dang I miss Moishe’s Pipic. And sometimes I still miss the Fell Street offramp, which I guess has been gone for over a decade now. (Good thing I can still experience it virtually thank to this home movie I made on its final day of existence.)
The Bold Italic has this and a whole bunch more early ’90s Hayes pics here.
Make something prettier and pretty people like to move in. Remember the big debate about putting bike paths on Valencia? We all knew what was coming. Hayes valley shocks me every time I go there, which is very rare. Is it all $30 a bar chocolate shops and high end jewelry now? Do they still have the middle eastern joint? Do young weird people even still move to this city?
nope. just boring ass fite wholks.
Good. Maybe they’ll push you bigots out.
The other option is plack beople drive by shooting the place up.
i hate your statement so much. you cant play white guy victim in this game. just close your laptop and walk away forever.
What’s your point, sausage-breath?
KILL WHITEY!!!
Tech kids are young weird people. They aren’t patchouli and poncho weird, but I’m pretty sure they count as social misfits in most other parts of the country.
That might be so, but they work too hard to engage in the kind of weirdness that was common here. I don’t blame them, but I also don’t expect them to be able to do things that a 23 year old slacker that works randomly can do. I have no doubt they want to engage in it, and enjoy seeing it, but it will die out.
Bob thanks for saying something intelligent that recognizes the tragedy of a changing SF without the typical simplistic “artist vs techies” finger-pointing.
Can’t wait for the next big quake so we can get rid of the rest of the Central Freeway.
Were you here/alive when the 89 quake happened? You’d know these jokes are fucking dumb, if so.
So say’s the pasty cat dude who has probably never been though a quake bigger then 4.7.
My dad died in the ’89 quake.
Jerk.
Cool your jets, Maria Callas. Everybody dies of something, sooner or later. You don’t get special consideration for an earthquake.
Pearl clutching about earthquake jokes aside (I thought it was grimly funny), removing freeway connectors will only make SF more gentrified, isolated, and expensive. See: everywhere else the Central Freeway was cut back.
Insult. Insult. Slur. Bile.
This is probably a naive thought since I didn’t live here when that freeway existed. In all the years I’ve lived here, though, I’ve wondered how much more of the city and surrounding areas I might have casually explored if there were the freeway available to get across the city faster. Did it/would it relieve street traffic and ensuing road rage as much as I fantasize it would?
Nope. And the real problem is parking rage. If you can’t park, you can’t explore with a car.
When the freeway dropped cars off directly onto Fell Street, Fell Street felt like a highway for folks trying to zoom to the Sunset or Richmond. I lived at Fell and Fillmore, and it was horrendous. As a pedestrian, crossing Fell felt dangerous and was really unpleasant. The Fell Street overpass that used to cross Market Street at Octavia divided the neighborhoods that bordered Market Street . . . those east of the overpass (Civic Center and Downtown) from the west end of Market Street (Castro and the area around the Safeway). It was a wasteland under the overpass. It was a homeless encampment most of the time, lots of human waste and garbage. Very few folks walked on Market Street if it required traveling under the overpass. As soon as the Fell overpass was removed, traffic on Fell calmed down, and it became pleasant to walk on Market. It did gentrify Hayes Valley where there had been a lot of interesting restaurants and shops that catered to the neighborhood which was more middle to lower middle class even through most of the 1990′s. This is the only part that I miss . . . some of the old hangouts in Hayes Valley. There was even a gym that catered to mostly a gay clientele right on Hayes Street, and Mad Magdas was an interesting tea house.