Southsi-eed!

This week, all eyez are on our Fair City. Usually this means bad news: our mayor must be sniffing strange orifices again, or coke-addled activists must be demanding human rights for transgendered squirrels.

But this time the attention is because the MLB All-Star Game is attracting thousands of nerdy baseball fans in their adorable metal-pin-spangled caps and autographed throwback Steve Garvey jerseys.

If we accidentally watch any of the festivities on the TV box, between commercial breaks we'll see many shots of sea lions eating sourdough bread bowls on the cable car ride to Alcatraz. We'll see high-def throngs of Koreans and Buffaloans watching hippie street clowns juggle Rice-a-Roni boxes on the Golden Gate Bridge while the Journey remix of "The Humpty Dance" thumps over a tie-dye boombox. We'll see Robin Williams making silly noises and pimping his drecky new movie Father Stanky or whatever it's called.

What we won't see is anything south of the ballpark, where hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans live and sleep and schlepp and smoke and breed and occasionally die. The neighborhoods on the south side of the city aren't special like the Frommer's Guide neighborhoods. Once you get past the Mission and Noe Valley, you won't find any of the city's great restaurants or attractions, just rows and rows of peeling houses and divey drink-holes. And most people who have lived years and years in SF's sunny Happyvilles have never had occasion to experience Portola, Excelsior, Sunnyside, Lakeside, Ingleside, Visitacion Valley, Bayview, or Crocker-Amazon. Hell, even Google Maps Street View stuck to the freeways.

Here's a tiny sample of what these deprived folks are missin'.


(click on the pic for detail)

1. The Madhouse. I chronicled this house of wacks a couple years ago, and the proprietor of this mess seems to have taken a turn for the worse. On the upside, if you check the lower right corner, it looks like they've been doing some painting. Honestly, I would pay anything to take a tour of the inside of the house, preferably in the type of hazmat suit you'd use to clean Whitney Houston's bathroom.

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2. Giant graffiti in the CCSF parking lot. Tragically, City College will be replacing its stadium-sized parking lot with some fancy arts center. Tragically, because the public will lose the monstrous graffiti which can be seen from space. The Moose is loose, baby!

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(click below for more)

3. Water tower in John McLaren Park. Seen from most anywhere on the south side of the city, the best thing about the water tower is the view from it (below), which includes both Twin Peaks/Mt. Sutro (right) and the even taller Mt. Davidson (left).

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4. Lake Merced. Except for the hum of distant cars and the occasional lost golfer, it's hard to believe you're even in a city when you're standing on the wild shore of Lake Merced. That is, until you see something like this:

In case you're wondering, that's the Gavster's office line. I tried it. He was totally cool; tonight we're gonna go see Beach Blanket Babylon on some Bali Tiger Dust he scored from Chris Daly. Yeeeah. Now that's the San Francisco we know.

Comments

[Mags]

"Steve Garvey throwback jerseys."

Niiiice.

[porkwatson]

Warning -- a lot of what they call Bali Tiger Dust on the street is actually cheap-ass Brazilian Puma Powder.