Writer based in San Francisco.
The work below has appeared on SFGATE, KQED Forum, the front page of The Daily Californian and, on rare occasion, the back of a parking ticket.
San Francisco's tiled stairway tradition has crossed a bridge
The crossing at Bosworth Street and Lippard Avenue in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood was, for years, a piece of infrastructure unworthy of note. Graffiti ran under the railing, weeds pushed up around the base and worn-out concrete held water stains at the seams. It took about a hundred hands to cut back the overgrowth and wash the structure to gray.
Now it marks a first for the city — a tiled bridge.
Set against a fresh coat of bright blue, its five pillars, 400 square feet in all, are covered in mosaics, with soft semicircles beneath yellow stars and orange-rimmed diamonds tucked under thin parallel lines.
San Francisco has a history of working on its stairs in this way — treating them as surfaces that can hold more than function. There are now north of 900 stairways across the city, and about a dozen of them are tiled sets. On California Street in Lincoln Park and 16th Avenue in Golden Gate Heights, to name a few, color and pattern have long rewarded the slow climb. As of this week, the Bosworth Pedestrian Bridge extends that logic sideways, onto a structure that doesn’t require the same exertion to traverse.
The Leap Day quirk of the Bay Area's Robin Williams Tunnel
Ten years ago this week, California bolted a new green sign onto the mouth of the Waldo Grade, renaming the passage between San Francisco and Marin the Robin Williams Tunnel.
The signs went up on Feb. 29, 2016, Leap Day, which means the anniversary comes with a wink. On paper, the name is a decade old. Technically, it’s only two birthdays deep.
This SF grocery store cashier has been quietly polling his neighborhood for months
For the past six months, customers at Luke’s Local in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow have been getting something extra with their groceries: a question of the day, courtesy of cashier Thomas Viollier, a French-born, beanie-wearing Daft Punk devotee who conducts polls between scanning avocados.
How the tiny 87-person town of Strawberry, Calif., produced an Olympian
Seventy-five miles up state Route 108, where the road narrows and the cell service fades, sits Strawberry.
According to the most recent census, 87 people live here, though the welcome sign counts 86, and it often feels like fewer. Some residents come only for the summer, and one — 26-year-old alpine skier Keely Cashman — spends most of the year chasing winter on international slopes. By simple math, Strawberry may have the highest per-capita share of Olympians in the country.