Strangeness with Google maps: 'Original Daly City'

I stumbled across this strange notation tonight on Google maps: a place marked "Original Daly City" at the north edge of that municipality directly south of the border of San Francisco:

I suppose that is where the "original" Daly City was founded, though why that should be on a Google map I have no idea.

Things I continue to miss

I hate crowds and I'm too old for such things, but in addition to Litquake, another huge event in San Francisco I missed this weekend was the Treasure Island Music Festival. I don't even know how all those people got to Treasure Island.

This is why I was eager to help my friend Catherine with her solo show in the Fringe Festival last month -- because I get out and participate in the life of the city less and less.

Haven't participated in the #OccupySF protests either, but then, neither are many others. Hasn't quite caught fire here the way it has in other cities. Added the next day: Here's a video from Sunday night's dust-up, shot by the notorious Josh Wolf, giving me a good reason not to go -- I couldn't stand listening to that strident white girl in dreadlocks.

(I'm exactly of the age such styles are supposed to annoy, but I didn't like the style 15 years ago when it started and I was only 40. White people in dreadlocks -- really??)

Today's fake: Indians imitate San Francisco 'school' real estate scam

In San Francisco, an institution known as the Academy of Art University is highly visible around town. Its advertisements are plastered on Muni buses, its own shuttle buses ferry students around the central city, and its logo appears on numerous buildings devoted to classes, workshops, dorms, or other, more vague purposes.

A tourist or newcomer might be excused for thinking the Academy of Art University is a thriving art institution in a town full of artists. But if you've been in town for a while, you start noticing that the AAU's presence constantly increases. More buildings, more shuttle buses -- impressive! You might wonder how they achieve such success.

In fact, the AAU is well known to San Franciscans as little more than a real estate scam. Yes, there are classes and workshops and dorms, and the shuttle buses ferry registered "students." But the quality of the art education offered by the institution is well known to be mediocre. How, then, is the organization apparently growing by leaps and bounds? Basically it works like this:

1. Government grants you status as non-profit educational institution. Under this status, you pay no real estate taxes.
2. Sign up students and help them get gobs of student loan money. The money goes straight to the institution for "tuition."
3. Hire mediocre instructors at low pay.
4. Use the extra money to buy San Francsico real estate. Pay no taxes on it.
5. Real estate appreciates, now worth 2x, 3x or more what you paid for it. Your "educational institution" now owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of prime real estate in a world city. Happy!
6. Award "graduating" students worthless degrees, which they don't care much about, because many of them are foreign students here on a lark. They go home, resume their lives, having had a year or two jaunt as "art students" in San Francisco. Happy!
7. Many students default on student loans -- government and lenders unhappy.
8. City of SF loses ability to collect tax on dozens of buildings. Recipients of city services unhappy.

It works like a charm, and now they're imitating it in India:

... Several new private "universities" have also opened up recently in Himachal. According to a local daily, the Tribune, one of these institutions enrolled students and started offering courses even before it came into legal existence. You might put down this haste to the high demand for quality education among India's overwhelmingly youthful population. But as the Tribune described in a series of reports, the universities not only lack faculties, laboratories and libraries; a few do not meet the criteria for acquiring property in the state.

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals. These sweetheart deals would be somewhat excusable if, unlike most Indian institutions of learning, the private universities offered an education rather than degrees. But they are only interested in extracting steep tuition fees from parents anxious for their children to join India's new economy. Not surprisingly, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates in India are unemployable.

Un-touristy San Francisco: the "Southern Waterfront"

To help inspire me for the next chapter of my novel, I spent a couple of hours driving around what is euphemistically known as the southern waterfront -- the stretch of bay from Mission Creek south to Islais Creek, and beyond. I saw:

Piles of rubble in various states. Some were huge chunks of concrete, either squarish or unshaped; some were piles of smaller rubble, often mixed dirt, gravel, and metal. Some of the piles were covered in various ways, from degrading plastic to very substantial-looking material of rectangular rubber or plastic sheets fastened together with plastic ties. In most cases whatever covered the piles was held down by sandbags, and again these were of varying quality, from thin, degrading plastic to heavier woven plastic.

Vacant lots. These were often weed-strewn gravel, formerly the parking lots or operating yards of industrial concerns and now derelict. At this time of year the only living weeds were usually fennel plants. Many of the vacant lots were fairly clean aside from the weeds; at some point they had obviously been entirely cleared. In other cases the lots were apparently in use as storage lots, but these were often in worse shape than the completely vacant lots, in that they had derelict vehicles that would obviously never be moved.

Sometimes these derelict vehicles were cargo trailers, decades old in many cases, that were parked against loading docks. The buildings behind these loading docks were sometimes themselves derelict and sometimes apparently not.

Fences. Chain-link fences, sometimes covered on one side with boards, and again this was done at varying levels of quality, sometimes giving an impression of solidity, sometimes not. This also depended on how the boards were fastened and painted. But in every case, whether the chain-link fences had added wood on or not, they were topped with strands of barbed wire and usually with razor wire added.

Strange-shaped lots. Sometimes the combination of vacant lots and fences combined to make very strangely shaped lots that were separated from another part of the property, seemingly in an arbitrary fashion.

The Islais Creek grain pier was in much, much worse shape than I'd remembered/supposed. For one thing, it had apparently been torn down along the shore so that it would be impossible for anyone to casually walk out on the pier; in order to reach what was left, including the five-story-tall rusty tower that had something to do with suctioning grain or something, you'd have to have a boat. (During the years 1981-84 when I was a delivery truck driver, I remember occasionally seeing a small ship at that terminal, filling up its hold by way of the now rusting tower. The visits of the ships stopped sometime during those years, and the area was abandoned.) What was left was almost entirely impassable and obviously incredibly dangerous: crumbling, rotting wood that was fallen through in more places than not, filled with rusty spikes and nails and jutting rusty metal bars. The notion that the characters in one of my chapters could do anything like I've depicted them doing there -- aside from falling through the pier, which I have depicted -- is ridiculous. But I'll just have to stage the action on some less identifiable property. God knows there are plenty of rotting piers.

Speaking of which: rotting piers in various stages of destruction, all fenced off by the above-described fences. In many cases, bare pilings sticking up out of the bay.

The shore itself was usually lined with chunks of concrete, covered with slime, which is to say a thick brown and green coating of algae. Whether the concrete was dumped legally or illegally in any particular spot is hard to tell. There are some places where the concrete seems to be of uniform shape and to have been arranged in some organized fashion; these would be the legal places. In other places there are simply slabs of wall, roadway, and other debris, often with jutting, slime-covered rebar.

technorati: San Francisco, Islais Creek, East Francisco

Kaboom at dawn

In my neighborhood I often hear disturbances -- morning, noon and night. Even when I'm sleeping, a part of me is vigilant. But even when I hear something, I don't necessarily rush out the door. Especially if I'm in bed.

Last night, close to dawn, I heard a voice, or maybe more than one, on the street, maybe some other noises -- I was half-asleep. Then a man yelled loudly, "Hey!!" If he had yelled again, I would have gotten up, but there was no more yelling, so I thought maybe I can go back to sleep. Then a car horn started sounding continuously -- a small Japanese car, judging from the "beeeeeeep." It lasted about a minute, and I thought, shit, somebody's just picking up a co-worker -- first he yelled and now he's honking. But after a minute or so, the car's horn shattered into two different notes and then died out. Then: BLAM!

I got up, walked to the front windows in the living room and looked out. A few doors up, a car was engulfed in flames, a ball of fire about 15 feet in diameter. Standing naked in the cold living room, I dialed 911, but by the time I was talking to them, I heard sirens already.

No way was I getting back to sleep after that, and it was almost 6:00 a.m. anyway. So while the firemen put out the fire, I took a shower and got dressed. By the time I got down to the street about a half hour later, the fire truck was pulling away and there was just a cop car, with a cop walking around the scene and making notes. The destroyed car was a small convertible with stuff piled in the back seat -- clothing and books that had partially burned up. Black burned mess, including several partially burned books, were all over the street and sidewalk, sitting in puddles of water.

By the time I left the house to go to church 45 minutes later, even the car had been towed away.

Retro Saturday morning

I just got home from breakfast and a walk with Anna in Noe Valley. In the early 1980s I loved nothing more than to wake up, go to breakfast together in Noe Valley and then take a window-shopping walk. Though I often go there on my own, this morning was the first time I'd done it with someone in years. What makes it great is the combination of pretty good food and the great windows. We encountered a huge family of Italian tourists, too many to count -- at least ten of them. And later a group speaking in French. It was cloudy and just a little bit misty. Great morning.

Now it's back to work on my book.

technorati: Noe Valley, San Francisco

Friday night wrestling, with penetration

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I'll be back again

I'm taking a long weekend to work on my India book, and following my usual pattern, I took a nap about 45 minutes after starting to work, then walked to a nearby cafe. The girl behind the counter couldn't have been more than 24, but she was playing an early Beatles album on the stereo, and I found it impossible to resist quietly chiming in on the harmony line of "I'll Be Back."

"That's a great album, isn't it?" the girl smiled.

"The best," I nodded. But then I couldn't remember what album it was on. ("A Hard Day's Night" is the answer. I was confused because "If I Fell" was playing when I walked into the cafe, followed by "I'll Be Back," and I couldn't figure out what album that might be. She must have had "A Hard Day's Night" on shuffle.) Anyway, it always does my heart good when I see kids in their 20s appreciating the Beatles; I want to give them a certificate of appreciation or something. Then I realize it would be as creepy as one of my parents' friends patting me on the head when I was 8 just because I liked "Sing Sing Sing."

technorati: Beatles, San Francisco cafes,

Urbanity

Lots of media coverage lately about city plans to create a new downtown, or maybe just an extension to the present downtown, in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. [map] The neighborhood has been many things, but most people who live in SF now think of it as a light-industrial zone with housing mixed in, with a leather queen zone along Folsom St. between 4th and 13th, and lots of new condos along Harrison and in what has recently been dubbed the South Beach district.

Some people think more urban density is a good thing. I wouldn't mind having lots of six or eight story buildings, instead of the two or three story buildings that represent most of the older housing South of Market. (The area burned entirely in the 1906 fire, so all of them date from after that, though there are many examples of post-Victorian apartment flats on the side alleys.) I've always liked the eight or ten story apartment buildings you see around town, in the Mission for example -- like the ones near 25th and Valencia (such as the one on the left side of this photo). That would be a good kind of urban density. But I have the feeling that's not what they're planning.

technorati: San Francisco, urbanism, South of Market

Having fun over there

Breaking my previous record, I posted five entries in one day over at sf.metblogs. The tiger story, she has been good to me.

It occurred to me, as I was updating the fourth, news-filled post, that the tiger story is on the verge of becoming a classic SF story, like the JT LeRoy hoax, the dog mauling, and my favorite of all time, the Condor Club bouncer who was killed by Carol Doda's piano. (In that incident, which happened around 1980, a bouncer was killed while having sex after hours with one of the club's strippers on top of the piano. The piano was rigged to descend from the ceiling with Doda on top of it, her grand entrance. While the bouncer and the stripper were fucking, the piano's mechanism somehow got started, and the piano began rising toward the trap door, which was closed. The dancer was nimble enough to jump off, but the bouncer weighed over 300 pounds and couldn't get off the piano, as it rose to the ceiling, crushing him to death. Best! Story! Evar!!1!)

The 2005 chili finger story came close, but regrettably it happened in San Jose.

Let's see how the tiger's tale measures up:

Sex - no
Money - no, at least until the lawsuits start
Death - yes
Bizarre factor - yes
Celebrity - yes, when you include the lawyers
Happened largely in SF - yes
Took advantage of SF liberal fantasies about itself - yes

Clearly all that it lacks is sex. Sigh.

Mission accomplished

Today I took two colleagues from the Long Island, NY office of the big company I work for, along with a local co-worker, to lunch at Bar Bambino in the city. Since the two visitors had done North Beach the previous evening, I was careful to explain that this was the Mission District, that it had been Irish and Italian for many years, and was now Latino and Young Bohemian. I explained how nearby Mission St. was working class like a busy street in Queens, while a block away Valencia St. was full of upscale bars and restaurants.

After listening to me expound for several minutes, one of the visitors said: "So... Mission District... does that have anything to do with Mission furniture?"

That led me to explain about the Franciscans and Mission Dolores and the scene in Vertigo where James Stewart follows Kim Novak into its cemetery, and that it was the only cemetery in San Francisco, since all the other cemeteries had been moved out of town to Colma which was, I said, on the other side of San Bruno Mountain from our office in South City. When I added that Colma was known as the City of the Dead for its predominant population of corpses, they thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard.

technorati: San Francisco, Mission District

Foggy, foggy

It's real foggy in the city, has been for a couple of days now. Last night really took the cake. On the way home from church -- where we celebrated Maundy Thursday -- I had to take a freeway detour and swung by the ballpark, where the Giants were playing the Padres. The lights of the ballpark glowed weirdly bright through the fog, like the brilliance of the Mothership at the end of Close Encounters, while all other lights were muted in the murk. Tonight's game, against the Dodgers, should be a classic San Francisco affair, sold out and full of fast-drinking fans who'd rather fight than shiver...

Of the things occupying people's consciousness in the city these days, you've got the Critical Mass kerfuffle that erupted after the local paper's high-profile columnists Matier & Ross publicized an incident that took place last Friday. The first story linked to above is not wrong in saying that a debate is "raging" on internet comment threads and blogs, though it's not exactly unavoidable. To me, the interesting thing is that while Matier & Ross take an anti-Critical Mass stand, leading to pro-cycling people expressing their outrage at this biased approach, without the M&R column the whole incident would have disappeared without a trace. Now the whole subject of Critical Mass and what the monthly event means is all over the internets, and people are talking about it. The result: Matier & Ross can cement their reputation as being take-no-guff moderate-conservatives who freely voice their contempt for the unwashed anarchist masses, and the pro-bike people can scream at how they were victimized over and over, first by the panicky suburban driver in the middle of the flap, next by the police who refused to take the incident seriously, and finally by the MSM.

Sounds like a win-win for everybody, because San Franciscans just aren't happy unless they're staking out a position on some issue, like bicycling or sex toys or Google Ad Words, that is ultimately trivial.

Finally, check out this strange internet-business columnist who customarily uses lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation marks! and strangely placed bold-faced words!!

And finally, a postscript to a classic San Francisco story: the lawyer couple who were involved in the infamous, uber-classic Dog Mauling Case, have been disbarred in California. You gotta wonder what took so long.

technorati: Donna Bogatin, Critical Mass, Matier & Ross