Look beyond S.F.'s great landmarks to find the real city

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

San Francisco has always been a bit of a myth, a city of fog and good stories, like those Sunday columns Herb Caen used to write. Some of us fell in love with it. But the real San Francisco was always elusive, a city just beneath the legend.
Like a lot of us, I have spent years looking for the real city. So I spent a couple of days at midweek looking for what a blogger called 'the authentic San Francisco.''
I skipped the Golden Gate Bridge, the famous hills, stayed away from Chinatown and the Castro, the cable cars and the crooked street. Instead I rode the N-Judah Muni line from one end to the other, from the ballpark to Ocean Beach, right through the heart of the city.
It's the busiest rail line in the Muni system — nearly 50,000 riders every weekday.
This is not your father's Muni, either; the N rolls down Irving and Judah streets in the Sunset with two-car trains, 150 feet long. And most of the equipment is new and still shiny, designed in Germany and manufactured in Sacramento.
The new cars mean fewer breakdowns in the Muni Metro subway under Market Street, but this is still San Francisco after all and the subway is run using an obsolete computer control system, so every so often everything stops.
It's the ride that counts, and the N car has a good bit of the San Francisco mix: a ride along the waterfront, then in the city's double-decker subway, out in the sunlight by Duboce Park, back in a tunnel, out again into the afternoon summer fog, past the UCSF campus on Parnassus Heights, through two distinct versions of the Sunset District, then a long ride through a neighborhood famous for its sameness, to end up at the far edge of the city, with the Pacific Ocean just over the sand hill.
It's San Francisco in all its famous multicultural mix, hundreds of restaurants from Arabic street food to Pasquale's Pizza, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Singaporean, Mexican. The N stops right in front of Art's Café, on Irving Street, a tiny classic American diner run by a Korean family. There's even a store just down the street that sells illusions.
The N car ride has surprises — poetry embedded in the waiting platforms along the Embarcadero. Here's one by Ember Ward at Folsom Street:
'Whenever I find myself waiting I take pictures / with my mind. / I took a picture of you, / down in the subway station / taking the escalator up…'
I got back on the train at Folsom across from the old Hills Bros. coffee plant and rode north, toward the Ferry Building, then west, to the Sunset. The car was crowded, as usual, but quiet, too. It's a bit of a Muni rule: Passengers are in their own world and strangers do not talk to each other.
About halfway into the ride, I got off at Ninth Avenue and Irving Street, where the N car makes a turn.
My picture of the real city is around Ninth and Irving in the Inner Sunset. If someone were kidnapped by space aliens, taken off to outer space, blindfolded and returned to Earth at Ninth and Irving, they would know immediately where they were. They'd see the mix, they'd smell the fog. It's San Francisco. No place like it.
I walked down Ninth, toward Golden Gate Park, only a block away, past Green Apple Books, past the Sunset Gym ('The beating heart of the Sunset,' the sign says), past a new grocery store, past Misdirection Magic Shop (which sells jokes, novelties and illusions), past San Francisco's Hometown Creamery, back on the N train to the beach.
The ride out Judah Street seemed endless, the avenues rolling by. Gradually the train emptied out, the passengers walking away toward home. I imagine every expat San Franciscan who moved away from the fog lived in the Sunset at one time or another.
People still talk of the sand dunes, football at Kezar, the long streetcar ride downtown. It was an Irish and Italian neighborhood. It's half Asian now.
It is still a distinct west side of the city, as if the rest of San Francisco were another city with its separate problems and concerns. That came to a head last fall when San Francisco voters approved Proposition K to turn the Great Highway into an oceanside park. Sunset people who lost a highway so that other San Franciscans could get a park were outraged. Now there's a recall campaign against District Supervisor Joel Engardio. The election is this fall.
It's the hot political topic in the Sunset this summer, and maybe it's part of a new reality: one neighborhood pulling against the rest of the city.
The N-Judah line is a long trip through a small city, along the bay, through tunnels and cultures, and at the end of the line the train stops at the Java Beach Cafe, another world away.
Here the N line runs around a big curved loop, and after a walk along the beach, one can take a Muni train back to the real San Francisco. It's not far away.