Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Tenderloin vs. Tendernob



So San Francisco isn't a very big place. At all. For being such an epic "big city", that is. Yet there are sooo many different neighborhoods and different dynamics.... different demographic in every neighborhood... different scene,... different fashion,.. Shit, we did a whole fashion show in September just pointing out and playing up the fashion differences in FIVE of those districts.... Civic Center, Upper Market, Financial District, North Beach, Marina, SOMA, Lower Haight, Upper Haight, the Castro, The Mission, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, The Tenderloin, Hayes Valley, Western Addition, Outer Mission, Bayview, Hunters Point, Richmond, Sunset, Noe Valley, Twin Peaks, and on and on and on and on...

Anywho. The Tenderloin is the so-called worst neighborhood in the city.... nothin' but crackheads.... prostitutes... drug deals... crime... scum.... etc. I've never been too spooked by the 'Loin,... I spent some time there before moving to the city and have always had this odd infatuation with the homeless community and rough neighborhoods... So the TenderNOB is what people call the area that is the Tenderloin connecting to Nob Hill.... Not nearly as rough and much more tolerable, supposedly.

...My friend Kelle would beg to differ. Kelle lives in the Tendernob area... Has never really minded it, but recently told me a story that has pushed her a little closer to the edge of planning an exit in the future. Kelle was walking up the the street, maybe a block from her apartment. A horrendous smell hit her nostrils and she gasped in disgust. She walked quickly to try to get home and escape whatever the awful scent was, but first was stopped in her tracks by a blood curdling scream behind her. A woman behind her pointed in the road to...... A HEAD.

... a severed head.

....in the middle of the road.

...wearing a motorcycle helmet.

...with guts and body goo coming out of it.


ROUGH SAUUUUCE.

In other news, some interesting facts I stumbled upon in my daily internet cruising. Light reading for a nice little Wednesday. Hit it.

* Denim jeans were invented in San Francisco for the Gold Rush miners who needed tough, comfortable clothing

* Irish coffee was invented in San Francisco.

* Francis Ford Coppola famously wrote large portions of The Godfather Trilogy in Caffe Trieste, the first San Francisco coffee shop, established in 1956

* There are over three hundred coffee houses within the city boundaries of San Francisco

* Al Capone spent five years in prison in Alcatraz.

* The original Spanish name for San Francisco was Yerba Buena, meaning "good herb" or"good grass".

* Nicknames include "Baghdad by the Bay", coined by columnist Herb Caen, and "The City that Knows How".

* In Star Trek, Star Fleet HQ is located just north of San Francisco.

* "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" was written by a gay couple, Douglass Cross and his partner George Cory in 1954. Tony Bennett's recording in 1962 made the song famous.

* San Francisco is built on 43 hills.

*The crookedest street is not Lombard Street , Vermont Avenue between 22nd and 23rd is the "crookedest,".
Filbert between Hyde and Leavenworth is the steepest street at 31.5 degrees.

* The population of San Francisco at the end of 2004 was 744,230 people

* San Francisco has the highest number of homeless inhabitants per capita of any major city in the United States.

*.Washington Square Park at Columbus & Union is not actually a square because it has five sides. But then North Beach isn't a
beach and the statue in the middle of the park is Ben Franklin not George Washington.

* Behind New York, Moscow and London, San Francisco is 4th in the world in terms of numbers of billionaires living within its city limits, while having less than 10% the population of the the other three cities.

* Soon after the Golden Gate Park opened in 1890, John McLaren, the park's designer added a free-range zoo that was home to elk, bears, goats, and buffalo. The buffalo are the only ones that remain.

*. On Mar. 21, 1963, Alcatraz federal prison island in San Francisco Bay was emptied of its last inmates at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

2 comments:

  1. It's me V. I love all of these fun facts!!!! The book I have "walking San francisco" has a few if these. If you haven't been to Alcatraz you should definitely try and go. It's pretty interesting but pretty creepy!!!!

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  2. hi char! drummond here. well, drummond's hands typing. based on direction from his cranium, which is still attached to my neck in case you were wondering.

    did you know the real innovation by mr. levi was the rivets? held the trousers together for those miners that spent 6 months straight wearing the same pair of pants.

    send me an email sometime!

    drummond

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