3 days ago
- General
- San Francisco Chronicle
This is San Francisco's widest sidewalk — by a lot
In a far corner of the sleepy Outer Richmond neighborhood in San Francisco, just blocks away from Lands End, a city oddity emerges — a 37-foot wide sidewalk.
The stretch of pavement on Point Lobos Avenue is the widest in the city, nearly three times the size of the average residential sidewalk, according to a Chronicle analysis of sidewalk data from the city. That data has some limitations: Entire neighborhoods like Mission Bay and the Presidio weren't counted, and many street segments in the eastern half of the city are missing.
Still, the Point Lobos Avenue sidewalk stands out even in a neighborhood with relatively wide sidewalks overall — it's large enough to easily walk five people abreast and still have room for passersby walking the other way. The residential buildings along the blocks, many of them built in the 1920s, offer plenty of room for cars to park in their driveways and still not come even close to encroaching on pedestrian space.
It's almost large enough to park a standard size Muni bus.
So how did that extraordinarily wide sidewalk come to be? It wasn't a masterplanned design choice or an experiment to increase pedestrian space. Instead, said Woody LaBounty, the president and CEO of SF Heritage, it was simply 'a quirk of maps.'
In the early 1860s, long before the Richmond District as we know it came to be, Point Lobos Avenue, which began at what is now the intersection of Geary Boulevard and Presidio Avenue and ran towards the beach, was a privately owned toll road. It was a thoroughfare for people living in the then-developed eastern parts of the city to get to the beach, where they'd visit the Cliff House, said LaBounty, who is also the co-founder of history nonprofit the Western Neighborhoods Project.
The road largely tracked in a straight line on what is now Geary, before veering northward at the tail end in order to avoid a hill, he said. When it was completed, Point Lobos Avenue was 110 feet wide, designed for horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses, according to the National Park Service, and a favorite racing road for horse drivers.
But it was after that that the city was granted all the land on the west side of the Peninsula as part of the Outside Lands Agreement in 1866. With that, the city planned the grid system of streets over the sand dunes of the west side and got to developing.
But the existing Point Lobos Avenue complicated that plan: Because the road ticked northward at the end, it didn't fit neatly into the grid, instead slicing through the neat rectangular lots, LaBounty explained.
When property owners started developing those lots, they could only build up to their property lines, which were set far back due to the width of what was once the diagonal portion of the toll road. So, instead of leaving a 110 foot wide thoroughfare in the middle of a city block, the city just filled in the difference with sidewalks, LaBounty explained.
Today, as people amble down Point Lobos Ave towards the beach, it's not hard to imagine a time when horse-drawn carriages ruled the road in the somewhat haphazard patchwork of shapes that make up the almost absurdly wide walkway.
Though it's the widest residential sidewalk, Point Lobos Ave is not the only place in the city to take a very expansive stroll. Several other sidewalks throughout the city are 30 feet wide, and even more are at least 25 feet.
On the other end of the spectrum, some residential sidewalks are as narrow as 3 or 4 feet wide, according to city data.
