Nostalgia & History > BART & Muni on 7/25/90

Walnut Creek, California
I took a ride to a place I’d never been to in the East Bay.  These pictures were taken at the station.

Gerry

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Then I rode around San Francisco on Muni LRV1s, built 1978 – 1979 by Boeing Vertol (a helicopter division of Boeing) and retired by 2002.  
Thanks to HT6 for these locations.
4. San Jose Ave approaching Mt. Vernon St.
5. Junipero Serra near Ocean Ave.
6. West Portal Ave. approaching Portola and Sloat

Gerry



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/31/24 04:52 by GPutz.

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Thanks to HT6 for location 7
7. PRW inbound at Sloat and Junipero Serra
8. Two trains exited the West Portal of Twin Peaks Tunnel.
9. This is Lenox Way & Ulloa St.  The West Portal Station was right behind me.

Gerry



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/31/24 04:51 by GPutz.

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Thanks to HT6 for locations 11 and 12.
10. The end of the L Taraval Line is on Wawona St. between 46th and 47th Sts.  The San Francisco Zoo is one block to the left, south.  The Pacific Ocean is beyond the sand berm at the end of the street.
11. This was the view down (west) Taraval St. from 17th St.
12. Ulloa and Madrone.  The houses seem to climb halfway to the stars.

Gerry



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/31/24 04:55 by GPutz.

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These are great pictures.

Did you happen to get any pictures of the buses in these areas?

Jerry Martin
Los Angeles, CA
Central Coast Railroad Festival

Very NICE and interesting series!

Larry

Not one homeless encampment to be seen.  What the hell happened?

LarryB Wrote:
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> Not one homeless encampment to be seen.  What the
> hell happened?

Is this comment really necessary?

Nice photos of both BART and Muni.  I will fill in the missing locations and make some corrections. 
#4. San Jose Ave approaching Mt. Vernon St.
#5. Junipero Serra near Ocean Ave.
#6. West Portal Ave. approaching Portola and Sloat
#7. PRW inbound at Sloat and Junipero Serra
#9. Just behind you is the location where a week ago a family of four waiting for a bus were killed by a 
       speeding motorist.
#10. 46th and 47th AVENUES
#11.  It is at Taraval and 17th Ave.
#12 Ulloa and Madrone

 

Great stuff.  I lived in Walnut Creek for a few years in the early 2000's and that was my morning view if I was headed to the San Francisco office.  Rode those old LRVs a few times while working in The City, have a model of one sitting on my home office desk.  Just need to snag one of those Rapido BART cars to complete the setup.  :)

Nathan

Thanks you.  You must know The City very well.  Gerry
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HT6 Wrote:
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Nice photos of both BART and Muni.  I will fill in the missing locations and make some corrections. 
 

LarryB Wrote:
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> Not one homeless encampment to be seen.  What the
> hell happened?

There were homeless, even when Gerry shot these awesome, nostalgic pictures, but it was different somehow.  We would see the homeless on family trips to The City in most of the places we visited in the 80's-90's.  Our annual trip to The City was at Christmastime as we headed to see the SF Ballet Nutcracker at the War Memorial Opera House.  We would park where the city library is now, and walk through Civic Center Plaza which always had a crowd of homeless.  As I got older, and taller, I don't think my dad worried about walking through there as much with my mom & little sisters.  But no one ever bothered us that I recall (even when I was a little runt), just the usual requests to "spare some change".  When I started working in The City after college in the late 90's, the homeless population had grown, as had the population of the Bay Area overall.  I would see people sleeping in doorways on my way to work, or looking to find a place to sleep in the winter when it got dark earlier as I was leaving work.  And there were 'regulars' that I came to recognize at various locations around downtown.  It got to the point that I would notice when it was someone new, that's how consistent some of this was.  Again, no one bothered me, not even the guys talking and swearing to the voices in their head.  

It does seem like things changed after we moved away in 2006.  I think it's a variety of factors, from substance abuse, to mental health issues, to an insanely high cost of living because of limited housing and a dearth of new construction, and of course politics/policies.  The cost of living one is interesting though as the Great Recession in theory should have helped as home prices collapsed more than 30% (fortunately a few years after we sold our condo and left), but I think that actually helped accelerate the problem in some ways as many people lost their housing to foreclosure (either their own or their landlord's).  Then the costs skyrocketed right back up, in many ways worse than before when it comes to housing costs.  And San Francisco is infamous for talking and talking and planning and dithering and bickering for anything to be built - look at how long it took the eastern span of the Bay Bridge to be replaced after the Loma Prieta quake.  That happens for almost any size project now.  There have even been some large apartment developments that have burned during construction, and the lots sat vacant (some might still be).  

Before we moved away, I might have seen a tent here or there in the East Bay, but over the years of traveling back (and riding BART a lot), I've noticed more and larger encampments in a variety of places, some that hadn't been there before.  While there was always a problem, I think the size/scope has changed dramatically in the past 15-20 years.  And the various programs, and now rules California is trying to put in place to force new housing, really aren't enough and feel a little bit along the lines of 'too little, too late'.

My former employer did loans and investments in Loan Income Housing projects around the country, and one of my roles was to support some of tech platforms used to analyze those types of deals.  Years ago I was able to visit an apartment complex in San Francisco that included a city senior center that my employer had invested in partnership with the developer.  The complex had been finished for a year or so when our team visited.  It was a nice place with good amenities and the senior center was very nice.  It had been built in the older, more industrial part of town that was very slowly redeveloping.  The old tracks to Hunters Point ran nearby, and some of us took the nearby Muni T line back to downtown afterwards.  We had two ladies giving us the tour, one from the developer and the other who was the manager for lack of a better term.  During our visiting we were appalled to learn how huge the waiting list was in San Francisco to try and get in to a place like that, or any kind of subsidized/low income housing anywhere in The City.  Even with my income at the time, I would probably have been considered poor/low income, or close to it, based on our family size because the market rate rents for a place big enough to squeeze us all in were beyond crazy (ok, I was going to say astronomical).  After our visit, I even got to poke around some of the numbers that were used to analyze the deal and it was really interesting to see what it took to build a place like that and then run it.  One thing I picked up from talking to the lady from the development company was how long the process was to get funding arranged, let alone deal with the construction hurdles.  And she mentioned projects to be built at the former Candlestick ballpark and the challenges happening there.  All in all, while that program is great, it's just not enough to get housing built in the quantities needed.  

The other thing I will say is that a lot of this is self-inflicted.  San Francisco for as long as I can remember, clear back to pieces by Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle that I read growing up, has fought tooth and nail to not become 'like Manhattan'.  What does 'like Manhattan' mean?  Depends on who you ask!  Generally, any large development, anything that alters a 'historic' building, anything really tall, or super tall and skinny.  So any large project brought out protests and complaints, along with lawsuits and/or political fights.  It wasn't that long ago that people were protesting the private buses Google and others were running from San Francisco to their offices down the peninsula.  The buses were running because public transit wasn't fast enough, reliable enough, clean enough, etc.  Instead of fixing that, let's block the buses by laying in the street!  And to add to the list of weird rules in San Francisco, did you know they have a law that prohibits buildings over 40 feet from casting a shadow or adversely impacting parks and public recreation lands in The City?  Proposition K, passed in 1984, makes building tall buildings a real challenge now.  San Francisco has a lot of park space, including downtown.  I stumbled on ones I didn't even know about over the years, and there are cool little "privately owned public spaces" at some of the downtown buildings, some of them like the Crocker Center are rooftop gardens.  So you have to do complex shadow analysis to figure out how your proposed building does or does not cast a shadow on a park, and hope you get through all of the other complex planning requirements, hoops, and hurdles to actually get the building built - before you pass on of course!  

I know this is a very long-winded answer to Larry's very simple and direct question, but it just goes to show how complex and convoluted the whole thing really is now, and that there are no simple or easy fixes.  It's really sad as I love the Bay Area and still consider it "home", more so than where I live now.  It's where I grew up and I spent the vast majority of my first 30 years there - I've still lived there more than here, for now.  If it could work, I'd seriously consider moving back.  But I just don't see it ever working for me while I have kids at home to raise.  Seeing Gerry's photos and writing all of this does make me think I need a trip "home" this year.  

Nathan

Nathan,  Thank you for the history lesson.  Gerry