San Francisco Sightseeing Articles

Intrepid explorers of San Francisco regularly stumble upon the many ghost streets that still hide all over town, rewarding the patient pedestrian for their diligence. Mostly they are on hillsides where steep grades impeded road building at earlier moments in history, but they're still presented as if they were through-streets on the maps.

A tour begins with an old map and lots of photos below the break.

Other ghost streets can be found not on foot but by exploring old maps, where one can enjoy the strange city that extends well into the bay off the southeastern shoreline. I've heard rumors, or maybe I saw a story in the Chron decades ago, about families that continue to pay their property tax annually on parcels that are well into the bay and thoroughly under water. On this 1909 map of the Yosemite Creek area, streets going NW/SE are numbered and alphabetized but they later got real names. The perpendicular grid of alphabetized streets were eventually given real names (similar to what happened in the "outside lands" of the Richmond and Sunset). But on this 1909 map, Jennings, Ingalls, Hawes, Griffith, and Fitch (J, I, H, G, F) are followed southeast into the bay by E, D, C, B, and A streets, and five further blocks with the names, Ship, Dock, Tevis, Von Schmidt, and Pollock before arriving at "Water Front" boulevard. Obviously these streets were never created since the bayfill on which they depended never happened.

My favorite ghost streets are short blocks, usually either bedecked with amazing gardens tended by loving neighbors, or else just odd stubs that continue to defy the rigid grid-imposing city planners of days gone by. In these small patches of nature, sometimes groomed, sometimes not, we can free our imaginations from the sterile symmetry imposed by endless blocks of asphalt crisscrossing the city. When we whisper to each other "One Lane for Food" or other equally "preposterous" depaving notions, the ghost streets echo back to us a knowing wink with a survivor's resilience. Probably the best patch of ghost streets in town is the Filbert Steps and its cross "streets" Napier Lane and Darrell Place. The Grace Marchant Garden that fills most of the Filbert right of way on the east side of Telegraph Hill is one of the true ecological treasures of San Francisco, home too to a big flock of much-celebrated parrots.

I live near 24th and Folsom which gives me a good staging area for visitng the ghost streets of Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, and both Noe and Eureka Valleys. There are many more than I can fully list or display here, and yes, you can take that as an invitation to get out there and explore! But a couple of my favorites on Potrero Hill are Kansas between 22nd and 20th, and 19th Street between Rhode Island and DeHaro. Potrero Hill in particular used to be a favorite walk many years ago when you could walk up the hillside below McKinley Square and visit the amazing community garden at Vermont and 20th, or take this Kansas ghost path uphill, continue to 19th, and then go right (east) to the ghost of 19th, popping out above the high school and then skirting the Potrero Commons that once graced the slopes above the old Northwest Pacific railroad tunnel (the train's right of way makes another ghost of transit past, cutting diagonally northwest from Potrero Hill through the Showplace Square area before petering out in the confluence of Potrero, Division, 10th, and Brannan Streets...).

A real undiscovered treasure close to the intersection of Corbett and Clayton that I wrote about not long ago in the context of historic water wars and the charming garden that's been planted on the corner, is Al's Park. This curious ribbon of whimsy and nature rises from the mural on upper Market Street (next to the pink historic Joost House) and emerges on Corbett. My 1995 Thomas Bros. map has it labeled as 19th Street (multiple ghostly incarnations for 19th!) but Google's Satellite map doesn't show there as being any public right of way there. Enter Al's Park from Corbett and enjoy a strange, almost 19th century-feeling slice of eccentric San Francisco land use.

Source: streetsblog