Sunset District

Exploring Playland's Past

Ocean Beach Bulletin was lucky enough to score an early copy of the new book, “San Francisco's Playland at the Beach: The Early Years” by local historian James Smith.  While the history of a lost oceanfront amusement park might not be your thing, the book is packed with 400 photos and illustrations of the park in its glory years.  OBB explains:

Smith’s book shows some of the best-known Playland rides in their earliest incarnations: the Aeroplane Swing; the Dodg-Em bumper cars; construction of the Shoot the Chutes water ride that was the first big attraction to the area (excluding the carousel and perhaps the Pacific Ocean). Check out the 1920s kids waiting in line wearing paperboy caps, ties and knickers. View the extravagant nuttiness and racist iconography of Topsy’s Roost, a dining and dancing venue with slides from elevated “chicken coop” booths to the dance floor below. Topsy, a ragamuffin character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” smiles in pickaninny glory on the restaurant façade. San Francisco was no island of racial sensitivity when it came to selling chicken dinners in the 1920s.

The post goes on the talk about getting beat up for your It's-It money and whiskey being sold in coffee cups.  Sounds like it was my kind of place.

Read on or buy the book.

Dispatches From The Sunset

Reader Jarvis chimes in with the difference between living in the Mission and The Sunset:

I see this truck with the cool-kid ninja EVERYwhere.  But, I live in the Sunset; I'm sure seeing this kind of shit happens all the time when you live in the Mission and life is so cool that you don't have to make videos about how cool it is to remind yourself it's cool.  But it ain't like that in The Set.  Yeah I said ain't, I'm a cowboy…

Dunno about that.  Pretty certain we take a lot of video/photos to prove to ourselves that our neighborhood is worth living in.  Also, “The Set” is way better of a nickname than “The Mish.”

Plus, as Beej noted, there is some hella rad sidewalk graffiti (aka the harbinger of hip) over there:

Cool Kid Travels: Eau de Crooklyn?

Last week I was in Brooklyn and stumbled across Bond No. 9's latest scent “Brooklyn.'” The Brooklyn perfume consists of a combination of grapefruit, cardamom, cypress-wood, geranium leaves, juniper berrie, cesarwood, leather and guaiacwood, (wtf is that?)  and for a mere $220 you can actually “smell like” Brooklyn. Don't really know where they came up with this weird ass combo to encapsulate the scent of the “edgy metropolis.” To me Crooklyn smells like wasted youth and decaying bodies but, I guess that really isn't marketable.

If San Francisco's neighborhoods were bottled up into different perfumes, what would these neighborhoods smell like? And what is the price you'd have to pay to smell like them?

Mission: Taco trucks, piss, cheap beer, expensive coffee, trustafarians. Price: One call to your parents to please, please, please let you use daddy's Amex one more time.

Haight: Drum circles, midwestern runaways that didn't get the memo that punk is dead (see: dirt, b.o., and dreadlocks), bong loads, DMT. Price: Panhandle for 48 hrs straight and pray some unwitting tourists feel bad for your 3 dogs.

Marina: The scent of entitlement, hair product, fake tanner, axe body spray, shame, chest bumps! Price: The cost of running for mayor.

Tenderloin: Crack, garbage, meth, cheap blow jobs (see: rotting teeth), poor life decisions. Price: Eagerness to give cheap blow jobs.

Noe Valley: Upwardly mobile snobbery, babies, french bulldogs (read: shit), the new car smell. Price:  Raising 2 kids, paying for private school, a vasectomy

Sunset: Isolation, depression, pseudo suburbia. Price: Moving anywhere else in the city

Castro: Rainbows, unicorns, leather daddy's leather, lube. Price: An evening at Boy Bar.

Chinatown: fish, lost tourists, the dirty 30, dumpsters. Price: Shitting yourself.

North Beach: Pizza! bros, day old strippers. Price: One lap dance.

If you have anymore ideas go ahead and throw them into the comments, and if you want to add anymore neighbs that I didn't cover, i.e. Pac Heights (I'm not sure what rich smells like) go ahead and do it.

lollergeddon: "Burrito triggers SF bomb squad, disrupts Muni N-Judah rail service"

The terrorists just won the war:

A suspicious package containing a burrito disrupted San Francisco Municipal Railway Service in the city’s Sunset District early Tuesday and prompted a response by the bomb squad.

A witness on the scene reported the package was found to contain a burrito.

I’m worried for our safety.  Are trigger happy BART cops going to ‘bust shots’ in my chest because I’m hungry for some rice and guac at 2am?  Trick question.

(via Bay City News)

FINALLY

I really want to say that this isn’t around the corner from Wang Insurance. I mean, I really want to say that. But I can’t, because this is around the corner from Wang Insurance

As T.S. Eliot once said, “I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.”

And as some idiot on the internet once said, “hah hah hah wiener jokes!  I stagnated at 12.”

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