A few scenes from the Oakland Coliseum last Sunday before I left California. We caught an Uber from the Marina District through Oakland to the Coliseum for the 1pm game, San Francisco Giants v. Oakland Athletics. It was my first time visiting either Oakland or the Coliseum. A hot afternoon in a fun atmosphere where functionally everyone there was a local, regardless of the team they were rooting for.

The A’s ended up winning 6-5 in the 10th inning on an error.

I’m back in Philadelphia today after a great few weeks on the West coast, first in Seattle, then Napa, and then around the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’ll share a few more scenes this week from the past few weeks. I stayed in North Beach/Fisherman’s Wharf area most of last week before meeting up with friends who moved from Lower Pacific Heights/Japantown into the Marina District. We checked out a beer garden/open house style night at the California Academy of Sciences; the penguins were my favorite part of that experience.

Spent some time working outside in Union Square during a beautiful afternoon/evening last Friday, before meeting up with friends and heading to Fort Mason’s “Off the Grid” event featuring gourmet food trucks, beer, etc. A somewhat chilly but good time.

I do love San Francisco, because despite the ways that it shares in the derivativity of other major cities, so much of its aesthetic, architecture, and cultural character still seem distinct. That’s worth taking pride in, even if few can afford it.

If your timing is right, to visit Mission Dolores Park is to visit a place where the world seems to have more color. It was that way when I visited last week, as clouds swept over downtown San Francisco. The elevation of Mission Dolores, combined with its terrain, make it probably the most remarkable city park I’ve seen. It’s the sort of place that feels like a truly dignified public space, a part of the public square where everyone can put aside whatever it is that they do professionally, and be human beings together.

A trend I see in public parks in Philadelphia is that they are tending toward professionally managed public spaces, wherein some event is either about to begin or there are paid minders milling about. Dolores, Washington Square Park, Rittenhouse Square—these are public squares designed in the older model that seem resilient all on their own merit, even if they’re not.

Mission Dolores’s history is rich, since San Francisco assembled the modern parkland in the early 20th century, to its function as a Jewish cemetery in the 19th century, to its Spanish roots in the 18th century:

Mission San Francisco de Asís, or Mission Dolores, is the oldest surviving structure in San Francisco and the sixth religious settlement established as part of the California chain of missions. The Mission was founded on October 9, 1776, by Lieutenant José Joaquin Moraga and Francisco Palóu (a companion of Junípero Serra), both members of the de Anza Expedition, which had been charged with bringing Spanish settlers to Alta (upper) California, and evangelizing the local Natives, the Ohlone.

The settlement was named for St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, but was also commonly known as “Mission Dolores” owing to the presence of a nearby creek named Arroyo de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, meaning “Our Lady of Sorrows Creek.” …

The original Mission was a small structure dedicated on October 9, 1776 … located near what is today the intersection of Camp and Albion Streets, about a block-and-a-half east of the surviving Adobe Mission building, and on the shores of a lake (supposedly long since filled) called Laguna de Los Dolores. …

The present Mission church, near what is now the intersection of Dolores and 16th Streets, was dedicated in 1791. At the time of dedication, a mural painted by native labor adorned the focal wall of the chapel. The Mission was constructed of Adobe and part of a complex of buildings used for housing, agricultural and manufacturing enterprises (see architecture of the California missions). Though most of the Mission complex, including the quadrangle and Convento, has either been altered or demolished outright during the intervening years, the façade of the Mission chapel has remained relatively unchanged since its construction in 1782–1791. …

The Mission chapel, along with “Father Serra’s Church” at Mission San Juan Capistrano, is one of only two surviving buildings where Junípero Serra is known to have officiated…

Earlier this week I walked along Fisherman’s Wharf and eventually ducked into In-N-Out for lunch. I took my platter outside into the little Anchorage Square courtyard and enjoyed the summer afternoon along with my meal. Visitors from Asia, Latin America, and Europe passed by, speaking to one another in their native tongues, as I sat and ate. That’s one of my favorite things about San Francisco: it’s like an open-air version of New York, a place where the world comes to visit, but you have more of a chance to see and meet some of these folks out and about than you do in the comparatively denser and sometimes more claustrophobic New York streets.

That’s something else, specific to Fisherman’s Wharf, that I thought about. Namely that Fisherman’s Wharf feels like a much more relaxed, more tolerable Times Square. If you want to visit New York and pay for Olive Garden in Times Square, amidst the chaos and noise and gimmickry of Times Square, more power to you. You can do something of the same thing at Fisherman’s Wharf, but it’s an Applebee’s here, and generally most of the natural world worth admiring remains free. Avoid the junk.

When I wrote on the aesthetics of streetcars earlier this year, I didn’t realize that San Francisco hadn’t simply conserved some of their streetcars but, in fact, chose to maintain many different types of historic streetcars from cities across the country. I was told that these run specifically along Market Street and loop near the San Francisco Ferry Building. I snapped these photos when I arrived back in the city on the ferry the other day. There are many different types: I noticed streetcars with origins as varied as Detroit and St. Louis, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and of course San Francisco among others.

I particularly lined the gun-metal gray of the Philadelphia streetcar at the top, which I snapped near Fisherman’s Wharf. I like it not only because I think it’s beautiful—as fitting for Philadelphia as a dramatic black and yellow is for sunny San Francisco—but also because it dates to 1938, and that’s the same period that my little 14 year old grandmother was boarding perhaps this particular streetcar on her way to Chestnut Hill Academy in high school.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.