Occupy The Edge
Walking the perimeter of a changing San Francisco
Seventeen hours, 38 minutes. That’s how long it took a friend and I to walk the perimeter of San Francisco. We both grew up in this city and we have seen plenty of changes — we are trying to better understand it and them.
On July 22, 2012, we walked 35-miles clockwise around the city’s four sides, sticking as close to the shoreline or the border as was publicly accessible.
Most of people’s movement through San Francisco happens in the interior as we circulate through neighborhoods, downtown, the Financial District, SOMA, Civic Center (“center” being the crux word) and along transit lines and through transport hubs. Even when we travel across a bridge out of San Francisco the on ramps are blocks away from the the bay and the sea wall.
The shoreline is a physical limit to the city’s expansion. What does it feel like to occupy the edge? To find out, we traced the contour of San Francisco with our feet, one step at a time.
At the end of a street in Bayview with no sidewalks, a man watering his garden greeted us: “Congratulations, you’ve managed to walk to the edge of the world!”
Purple, yellow, and orange flowers bloomed from his front yard, a stark contrast to the shades of tan and yellow on the houses under construction just beyond the naval shipyard fence across the street.
Beckoning to a breathtaking view of the distant downtown skyline, he called out to us once more: “They want a city. We just want a town.”
Unfortunately for the gardener, the city may be coming whether he wants it or not. The Association of Bay Area Governments predicts San Francisco’s population will grow 20 percent over the next 23 years to 969,000 people.
The edge is where some of the only free city space (and some of the cheapest rent) remains. One planned shoreline project is a new Golden State Warriors stadium at Piers 30–32, contrary to what are probably more necessary things like public transportation and affordable housing.
The border between San Francisco and Daly City is a perfectly straight line. It was established in 1898, long before modern developers built ticky tacky houses along curved streets that intersect the border at odd angles. It is impossible to walk the exact edge — it dissects property lines, splitting some houses diagonally in two.
Houses blend into each other, each one a variation of the last. It’s so impossible to know where one county ends and the other begins that some street corners carry signs in both cities’ design styles — blue with small white lettering for Daly City, white with black capital letters for San Francisco.
On the east side of San Francisco, industry dominates. Sidewalks are rare. This isn’t a space built for people. On the west side, hiking paths are clearly defined, and nature is something to be preserved and visited and tourist-ed. Where we found gravel roads imprinted with tire tracks on the east side, we found beaches with human footprints on the west.
The feeling of the edge is emptiness. We walked through a lot of wide, open landscapes, and many microclimates, encountering people who lived in their cars along the shoreline but few other pedestrians. SF needs to grow, but it doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
Anna Vignet is a photographer based in Oakland, CA. She grew up in San Francisco. She’s interested in city planning and how it shapes people, community and stories. Vignet’s work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Californian, Heuristic Squelch, San Francisco Magazine, SF Appeal, and The Architect’s Newspaper.
