The Muni & Dolores Park Through Time
One of my favorite things on the internets is when old dudes upload a few hundred classic shots of San Francisco to Flickr so I can squander a few hours looking at them. This afternoon, I had the good fortune of noticing that "petespix75" put up a gang of pictures from the 1950's to the present day (side note: Pete has traveled the world by bike, plane, train and boat and never stopped taking rad pictures). I particularly dug all his photos of the J Church rolling through Dolores Park because 1) it's always neat to see a bunch of Muni shots from the same location, 2) I spend a mess of my free time in DP already and 3) it amuses me to see that throughout history, the city actually used to maintain Dolores Park. I mean, fuck, look at that grass! And flowers! Hell, there is even a picture of a gardener watering the grass. I cannot remember the last time I've seen liquid that wasn't piss or Olde English get dumped on Dolores soil by man. Anyway, if you like what you see here, be sure to browse through his other SF photos (also, he's got some mean Boston photos too):
June 1963
June 1963
Mission Dolores in May 1963
Oct. 1981
June 1983
June 1983(all photos by petespix75. Each photo linked directly to its Flickr page)
Comments
I remember riding the J Church for the first time as a kid and being fascinated by that part that winded through people's backyards.
@njudah: My grandma took me and my little bro on a crazy safari from our house in Noe Valley to some part deep in this neighborhood called the Mission. This was circa 1988. She'd read about it in the paper and was fascinated by the prospect of spying on people through their backyards and then trekking all the way down 24th Street, which was touted as an intense cultural excursion and where we never really trekked save for burrito runs (and mostly we got those from Simon's in Noe Valley anyways.) We ended up at St Francis Fountain, and I actually haven't eaten there since then. MY how everything has changed (pretty much everything mentioned here, yet somehow remained the same...), and I'm only 30.
Thanks, UA, for the lil' walk down memory lane! :-)
St. Francis Fountain still is a worthwhile place to visit on 24th, stuck in a time warp. Had some apple pie a-la-mode there just last week.
Cool post.
One of my favorite shots of DP is at the end of Casualities of War when Michael J Fox gets off the MUNI at the top of the hill and walks through the park .
(and um, yeah, they have a sprinkler system now. it pops up from the ground at night. the real problem is they have a shitty drainage system, which i guess will be fixed when they redo the park grounds.)
The old system for draining lawn water and rain worked well as the pictures show, but when they put in the shitty drainage system it screwed the irrigation drain system. It is too bad that there are so many shitty people like Kevin, or they could rely on the normal drainage system. The should not have installed the shitty drainage system.
so the city DID used to be clean...
What year did they put the poor drainage system in? cause it looks like the old drainage system was better then the new one. Progress.
good piece kevmo. mi mom approves
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