Welcome back to Photo Friday - my little way of taking a break from San Francisco Real Estate and instead blogging about our great City’s past instead. All photos are published with permission from the San Francisco History Center and San Francisco Public Library.

It’s been a busy busy week!  And it’s going to be a busy busy weekend!  I’ve been hustling to get several listings ready for market and helping several buyers on deadlines to buy homes in San Francisco.  So being that I need a little break, this week’s Photo Friday post is all about trying to break out of the daily grind have a good time.

Back in 1913, the Barbary Coast had calmed down a bit from it’s earlier days of gambling, prostitution and crime.  But it hadn’t calmed down THAT much:

NEWSCOPY:  “Such goings on! Deah, Deah! Good folks talked about the old Barbary Coast in the same way they do today, and with better reason. This is a busy street scene east of Kearny st., on Pacific, with the sin and gin mills going full blast to make the ‘hot spot of the world’ a bit hotter and more worldly.”

Even if you can’t get your hands on a Schlitz for a nickel, you can get out there and have a good time this weekend.  You can always find something to do in the City!  Be safe and have fun and have a happy Friday!

Tags: Misc Musings from Your San Francisco Realtor, SF Historical Photos, San Francisco History, San Francisco Neighborhoods by Luba
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Welcome back to Photo Friday - my little way of taking a break from San Francisco Real Estate and instead blogging about our great City’s past instead. All photos are published with permission from the San Francisco History Center and San Francisco Public Library.

The word around the weather channels is that this weekend is going to be NICE in the City!  Today, the weather is supposed to hit the mid 80’s in parts of SF.

And when the weather heats up around SF,  people in flock to Ocean Beach to cool down.  Unfortunately, these same beachgoers bring with them trash, bottles, cigarette butts and general filth.  A photo I took with my cameraphone on a hot April day gives you an idea of the aftermath. 

And apparently, people have been trashing the beach since long before I was born. 

Today’s Photo Friday shows the “Sand Cleanup Machine!”  The newscopy that went with the photo in 1948:

“BEACH CLEANUP STARTS-There shouldn’t be any broken glass, cigaret [sic] butts or other annoying refuse in the sands of Ocean Beach any more, now that the city’s new sifting and cleaning machine is in action. The device, which cost $9433, went to work yesterday afternoon. It will take a month to go through all the sand from the zoo to the Cliff House.”

Hmmm… I’m not sure how well the machine really worked, but if people trashed the beach then like they do now, I’m guessing that machine wore out after just a few days of cleaning. 

Anyhow - it’s too nice outside to be writing long blog posts, so this about wraps things up for the day.  Get out there and enjoy the nice weather!

Oh, and please, if you do come to the beach to escape from the heat in the rest of the City, please - be coureous and take your trash with you when you leave. 

Thanks and Happy Friday!

Tags: Green Living in SF, Misc Musings from Your San Francisco Realtor, SF Historical Photos, San Francisco History, San Francisco Neighborhoods, San Francisco News and Events by Luba
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Welcome back to Photo Friday - my little way taking a break from San Francisco Real Estate and instead blogging about our great City’s past instead. All photos are published with permission from the San Francisco History Center and San Francisco Public Library.

I frickin hate parking meters.  Seriously.  I get a few tickets a month at minimum.  I have a budget for the tickets - which is kind of a ridiculous notion.  And I get so many of them that I fantasize about writing them off as an expense on my taxes.  In fact, parking meters are sort of my nemesis

So why the hell am I posting a photo of the very first parking meter in San Francisco? 

(By the way, that’s Mayor Roger Lapham testing the ”First Gadget Installed at Bush and Polk Streets” in 1947!)

Recently, a few things have come along that made me hate parking meters just a smidge less. 

First, came the SFMTA pre-paid parking card.  These things are pretty convenient for the most part.  They come in $20 and $50 amounts, and they’re much lighter than carrying $20 or $50 worth of change with you everywhere you go. 

There are some drawbacks to the cards though - they don’t always work, in which case, you’d better STILL have some change with you, and you have to remember to buy them when you the cards run out of money.  They’re also not rechargeable, which means the card ends up being waste (I thought we are working on being the greenest City ever???  Step it up SFMTA!) 

I still get more than my fair share of parking tickets, even with this card in my wallet - but that’s because my meter usually runs out while I’m in the middle of a meeting, or showing a property, and I don’t make it back in time to the meter to feed it. 

Thursday though - Thursday was different.  Thursday, while I was at West Portal grabbing some lunch at Fuji Restaurant, I set on my eyes on this! 

I was so struck by this special parking meter that I quickly snapped up a pic to post on www.sfcameraphone.com. 

But I didn’t have time to call the magic number to find out about the mysterious “Pay by Cell” message till much later in the day (well after I got a parking ticket while parked in Pacific Heights… grrrr.) 

When I finally got to call the magical number, its magical voice told me to visit www.cell-parking.com for more information.  (It also told me that it recognized me as a new user and asked if I wanted a free use of the system - to which I yelled “hell yeah” but it didn’t hear me - so I think I’ll have to call back again to get information on the free use thing.) 

Once I visited www.cell-parking.com, I tried to sign up for the service, until I realized that I don’t have my license plate number memorized, and that it was too damn windy for me to go outside and look at the plates on my car tonight. 

But I do plan on registering for the service tomorrow.  And I do plan on using it and seeing how it works.  And if this magical “Pay by Cell” thing isn’t new to you, and you happen to know all about it and have used it before, feel free to leave a comment here to let other readers know how you like it. 

And let me know whether you think it will help me to stop having to shell out big bucks for parking tickets every month at expired meters across the City. 

Oh, and until parking meters are able to wash my car for me while it’s parked, this probably is the first and last time a parking meter will ever excite me. 

Happy Friday!  May the meter fairy take good care of you!

Tags: SF Historical Photos, San Francisco History, San Francisco Local Resources, San Francisco Neighborhoods, San Francisco News and Events by Luba
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And I’m not talking about Real Estate!

In addition to working with a handful of active buyers and helping several sellers get their homes ready to go on the market in the next couple of months, I’ve been working on a few new projects over the last several weeks.  One of these projects is The Avenues Blog. 

Why The Avenues Blog?

Well - I live of out here in the Outer Sunset in one of the most beautiful places in San Francisco (overlooking the Pacific Ocean!) and while a HUGE part of the City is taken up by the Sunset, Parkside and Richmond districts, it often seems like the Western side of the City is overlooked by the majority of the City’s residents.  So … I decided to do something about it, and to blog about the side of the City that I’ve called home since I was 2 years old.

Don’t forget, I help home buyers and sellers ALL over San Francisco, but I have a soft spot for the foggy hoods a lot of people forget exist. 

So swing by The Avenues Blog.   I plan on posting there a couple of times a week - but if readers like you start providing me with input, ideas, suggestions and photos, you might see even more frequent postings.  I hope to get feedback from y’all along the way to make The Avenues Blog as awesome as possible. 

So please, add The Avenues Blog to your blog readeres or save it as a favorite - and don’t forget to tell a friend!  :-) 

Tags: Misc Musings from Your San Francisco Realtor, San Francisco Local Resources, San Francisco Neighborhoods, San Francisco News and Events by Luba
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Welcome back to Photo Friday - my little way of taking a break from San Francisco Real Estate and instead blogging about our great City’s past instead. All photos are published with permission from the San Francisco History Center and San Francisco Public Library.

I was catching up on the local San Francisco blogs and ran across a post on SFist about an event that was held at the San Francisco Armory titled the Mission Bazaar (a craft and performance expo).

You might remember the Armory in the news recently when it was purchased by kink.com for $14.5M in order to use the building as a porn studio. But apparently, there’s room there for more than just porn, and the owners want to share the building with the public by opening it up for more events than just the recent Mission Bazaar.

But the building had a story long before kink.com put it into the news.

According to Wikipedia:

The building was constructed as an armory and arsenal for the United States National Guard in 1912–1914 and designed with a castle like appearance in a Moorish Revival style. The structure was built as a replacement for the old San Francisco Armory in the Western Addition, which had been destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. In addition to its role as an armory and arsenal, during the 1920s, it served as a venue for sporting events, such as prizefights. The Armory served as a stronghold and rallying point for the National Guard in their suppression of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike (an event known as “Bloody Thursday”)The building closed as an armory in 1976, when the National Guard moved its facilities to Fort Funston. After 1976, the building was largely unused for the next 30 years, though in 1978 the building was registered as a Class 2 historical landmark in the National Register of Historic Places. Several spaceship-interior scenes in the movie Star Wars were filmed there, and the San Francisco Opera used the large inner court of The Armory for set construction and rehearsals until the mid-1990s. By this time, The Armory was in a heavy state of disrepair. Various uses of the building were proposed from 1996–2006, including self storage units, a rehabilitation clinic, a gym with a rock wall, a dot-com office park, a telecommunications switching center luxury housing, and low-income housing. Many of these proposals were marked by acrimonious debates between various community interests. Concerns over gentrification, social and environmental impact or the unsuitability of the structure for various uses resulted in none of the various plans for the structure reaching fruition. The building eventually came to be described, variously, as “a herd of white elephants“,”cursed”, and “not a friendly building”.

Frankly, I think the kink.com purchase of the building was likely the best thing that’s happened to the historic landmark in years. The graffitti has been removed, broken windows have been fixed and the building from the outside looks clean and respectable these days - and the new owners are even kind enough to open the landmark to the public for events like the Mission Bazaar. Pretty cool.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s little look back on a slice of the City’s past.

Have a good weekend and don’t forget to pull out your umbrellas - rumor has it that there’s a chance of rain.

Tags: SF Historical Photos, San Francisco History, San Francisco Neighborhoods, San Francisco News and Events by Luba
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