Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. It’s appeared regularly on SFist since May 2007, but will be going on indefinite hiatus due to a slew of upcoming travel and other projects.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 42: Battery St. in Northeast Waterfront

Blocker’s scope may confine us to the sidewalks 98 percent of the time, but on occasion we’ll find ourselves on certain blocks that demand a few steps outside the confines of our usual corridor. Nowhere is this more evident than along Battery between Greenwich and Filbert, a tree-lined street hemmed in by Levi’s Plaza on both sides. Granted, there’s not much to do up here unless you’re either an employee on break from one of the area offices, or merely someone always on the lookout for yet another place in the city to laze it up. But it’s a pleasant enough hideaway that’s a leafy antidote to the clatter and clang of nearby Fisherman’s Wharf or the Financial District. And you never know when you may be overrun by a just-passing-through posse of early teens in matching tees.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 41: Folsom St. in South of Market

They don’t come any more rich with Blocker fodder than Folsom between 6th and 7th Sts. You’ve got four lanes of auto traffic zooming in one direction only. You’ve got an infamous ultramega dance club on one corner, and an “urban communal retreat” that certain people just call a big sex cult on another. You’ve got $30 back waxes, the ice cream man, hella lofts. There’s light industry. There’s an enormous, lovely city park. There’s a guy walking down the sidewalk with a black cat slung over his shoulder. Let’s go.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, before the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 40: Monterey Blvd. in Sunnyside

Monterey Blvd. isn’t quite the time warp we’ve seen elsewhere around town—we’re thinking of Mission in the Excelsior; we’re also thinking of Amethyst in Diamond Heights. But just the same, it’s clear that few things have changed in recent years (decades?) on this Sunnyside thoroughfare between Edna and Foerster.

Something else is apparent as well: Several businesses here go out of their way to not let us forget what street we’re on. Monterey Cleaners operates its own plant. Monterey Auto Service is an official brake and lamp adjusting station. Immediate neighbors Monterey Pizza and Monterey Salon ought to join forces and offer some sort of meat lovers’ pedicure special. Monterey Blvd. proudly wears its status as Official Business District of Sunnyside like a big blue #1 ribbon at the county fair.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 39: San Bruno Ave. in Portola

Good grief. You’re really struggling getting your luxury SUV into that space in front of Tena Pro Nails, aren’t you? Do you have an 11 A.M. pedicure appointment? It’s a few minutes after the hour...

Upon quick glance, Portola’s main business drag, San Bruno Avenue, seems acutely workaday compared to a few of its neighborhood-cousins around town. If Russian Hill is a cute little summer dress and the Mission is an old Air Supply T-shirt worn tightly and ironically, Portola is a pair of blue Levi’s—straight-leg ones. And the hair looks terrific.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, before the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 38: Steiner St. in the Lower Haight

Within a minute of Team Blocker’s arrival on Steiner between Haight and Waller, a mammoth tour bus rolls south down Steiner. Hunh? Clearly, it’s coming from Alamo Square up the hill a few blocks...but where it’s headed, we’re unsure. Duboce Park for a game or two of slobberball? Perhaps a little exercise up and down the Sanchez steps? Seems an odd route for a tour coach, seeing as how the Lower Haight has always been one of San Francisco’s most locally geared neighborhoods — as homegrown as its natty sibling, the Upper Haight, sometimes isn’t.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 36: Mason St. in North Beach

We’re well off Broadway — actually, we’re just off Lombard — in the toppermost reaches of North Beach. In fact, we’re not far from where the old neighborhood abuts the landfilled tourist stronghold that stole North Beach’s shore years ago.

It’s OK — we’re safe here from Crazy Shirts etc., although there’s a Bay Quackers vessel rolling by a few steps away over on Columbus. A moment later, an artist — shirtless, but sleeved — emerges for a smoke from Tattoo City at Mason and Lombard on this pleasant spring afternoon. He spots the amphibious truck carting visitors up North Beach’s diagonal commercial drag and can’t disguise a mild scoff. San Francisco loves its visitors from Cincinnati and beyond; it just gets a bit hrumphy when groups of them venture south of Bay St. in bright yellow military transport vehicles dating from World War II. Perhaps it’s not such an unfair reaction.

But today, that debate’s beyond our scope and interest. We’ve landed on this residential block around the corner from Joe DiMaggio North Beach Playground and Pool, and we’re totally looking for action on a sunny Saturday. We find it: live music, street retail, plenty of pedestrian traffic, even a preening housepet.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 35: West Portal Ave. in West Portal

Certain San Francisco neighborhoods portray themselves as having captured a small-town feel amidst the big city bustle. But almost as often, closer inspection reveals these marketing pitches to be all arm without enough follow-through.

Laurel Heights? Sure, it’s leafy and quiet, but since when does Smallville, USA have more salons, antique home furnishing retailers, and high-end fashion boutiques as it does grocers? Bernal Heights? Potrero Hill? We’re getting warmer, but the former’s brimming progressivism and the latter’s choice perch above downtown’s high-rises don’t align with what you get in genuinely small California towns such as Chester or Bishop.

West Portal, however, boasts real follow-through – the retro Space Age streetcar station notwithstanding, of course.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 34: Stockton St. in Chinatown

There’s a woman over there wielding a paring knife, daring the throng to come closer by yelling for their attention every few seconds. There’s a live fish flopping around in an entryway, and not far from that, a bunch of dead chickens in a window. And here comes a couple men, sending fresh loogies flying at low angles. Sidewalk jostling, auto honking, bus exhaust. River traffic is heavy.

Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 33: 24th St. in Noe Valley

Our visit to 24th St. between Noe and Castro invites comparisons between this block and other particularly precious, retail-heavy blocks we’ve chronicled. We’re thinking about the 3400 block of Sacramento in Presidio Heights; we’re also thinking about the 1800 block of Union in Cow Hollow. The inevitable similarities between the three stretches are impossible to ignore, but where we found virtually nothing purposely funny on Sacramento and very little to laugh with on Union, there’s a certain humor here on 24th St. that’s a welcome change from the suffocating self-awareness that often weighs down the atmosphere of most boutique-rich areas.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 32: Bay St. in the Marina

(Harvard.)

In an imaginary world where San Francisco neighborhoods are represented by stars’ hairstyles, the Marina is Bryan Ferry – artfully coiffed, with a subtle smattering of muss to keep the wispy-haired skeptics on their toes. Bay St. between Broderick and Baker, on the western edge of the Marina, embodies this aesthetic as well as any residential block in the district.

Since nothing remotely unusual appears to happen here much – short of the odd cataclysmic earthquake and subsequent fire (see: October 1989) – it’s up to the block’s architecture, immaculately trimmed foliage, and occasional through-walker to provide a bit of Blocker-style backbone. Otherwise, we’re relegated to a piece about all the college alumni license plate frames and window decals slapped on cars parked along this street. Not such an enticing slant.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 31: Channel St. in Mission Bay

Channel St. is the only street in San Francisco where none of the residents live on land. Where a pair of waterfront parks line the entire length of the street (and one of the few remaining creeks in town). Where a long-defunct tugboat and heady pile of fragrant tree bark don’t seem out of place alongside the road.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour (the timing of this special Tuesday episode notwithstanding).

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 30: Polk St. in Polk Gulch / the Tenderloin

It’s the dead of San Francisco winter and 46 degrees — 46 degrees! — but that’s not stopping certain hardy residents of the sizable apartment structure at 1214 Polk from opening their windows and drying their laundry au naturale. We’re impressed. 46 degrees in San Francisco, particularly along this gusty urban corridor between Bush and Sutter, feels like autumn in the Yukon.

This is the southern edge of Polk’s transitional zone, where it emerges from the sleazy chic of “nitespots” like Vertigo and Blur and slowly crawls toward more prim territory northward up into Russian Hill. The upstairs residences on this block are decidedly ordinary, but there’s a dichotomy at work between, for example, the stained glasswork at O’Reilly’s Holy Grail and the $5 haircuts and $20 facials across the road at the International College of Cosmetology II. Of course, Polk St. has always been known as one of San Francisco’s more diverse business thoroughfares.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 29: Leland Ave. in Visitacion Valley

In the tussle over the mantle of San Francisco’s Most Tucked-Away Neighborhood, Visitacion Valley gets our vote...particularly if by “tucked-away,” one really means “neglected.” Geographic and economic isolation have contributed to infrastructural decline - and crime - here for quite some time, although earnest efforts are being made these days to turn the tide.

The block of Leland between Peabody and Rutland is dually zoned for business and residence, so the street is one of Viz Valley’s main drags. There’s plenty of foot and auto traffic here, and the 56 Rutland bus even shuffles by on occasion. Businesses bookend the nondescript strip as post-WWII housing, other small commercial concerns, and a pair of bottlebrush trees fill in the space between. Pretty? Not quite. But, utilitarian? Sure.

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 28: Collingwood St. in the Castro / Eureka Valley

During our visit to this block of Collingwood, between 21st and 22nd Sts., we ask three residents which area neighborhood they most closely identify with. We get three different answers.

1: “Noe Valley – although I guess, technically, Noe Valley’s northern border is 22nd.”

2: (Shrug.) “I don’t know. Maybe the Castro? Eureka Valley? What is Eureka Valley? I suppose you can’t really call this a valley, since it’s up on a hill.”

3: “Do you live around here?”

Not quite the consensus we’re hoping for. But surely we can all agree that the 400 block of Collingwood is San Francisco’s preeminent home of sidewalk birdhouses.