Octopus Hearts
Walking in Ingleside
In her great new book The Feminist Art of Walking, Morag Rose writes “who knows what the heart of the city is? There has to be more than one; every city is an extravagance of octopuses and we all love different aspects of the same place.”
I often feel like there are pieces of my heart all over San Francisco, which seems fitting given its a city where many people leave their hearts. Just the other day, I was walking on Franklin Avenue, a busy thoroughfare lined with tall buildings and choked with cars. As I walked up the drab sidewalk, a flash of iridescent green appeared as if by magic. It was a hummingbird flitting in front of me, eventually darting back to wherever it came from. An unexpected burst of beauty that almost made my heart stop. A reminder that there are glimpses of magic in even the greyest parts of this city.
A few weeks ago, I had errands to run in the southern part of the city and decided to walk the few blocks that I had missed in the Ingleside neighborhood in my quest to walk every street in San Francisco.
I lived in Ingleside over a dozen years ago when I first moved to San Francisco, and I have mixed emotions about the place. I fell in love with the city there, but the neighborhood was perpetually overcast, becoming especially foggy and cold in the summer. Ingleside, a mixture of working class families and students at the nearby San Francisco State University, was in the process of being gentrified. My roommates and I, students and people with low-paying jobs, knew we were going to be pushed out when our landlord stopped returning our calls about pests and repairs. A notice raising our rent by over 50% came soon after, and so ended our time on Ocean Avenue.
The day I returned to walk down Ocean Ave, the sun shone bright and the air was warm. A perfect spring day. I walked past the McDonald’s, one of the few drive-thrus in the city. I had a roommate who would go there often, befriending a man who split his time between the McDonald’s and a laundromat down the street, exchanging fortunes for cups of milky coffee.
Down I walked, past the tiny library with its huge sections in Russian and Chinese, past the taco place and the Laotian restaurant. Past a coffee shop/bakery/gambling parlor where I used to occasionally treat myself to greasy breakfast sandwiches before work and old men would spend the day doing scratch cards and various lottery games. I peeked in — the old men were still there, but the baked goods were sold out.
I was amazed how much was still the same. Yes, there were shiny new apartments where a gas station used to be. My old office was empty, the bottom floor of the building converted from a laundry mat to a seafood store. But the little nail salons and Chinese restaurants and hardware stores mostly seemed unchanged, and I felt an overwhelming and surprising nostalgia.
Eventually I turned left onto Jules Avenue, the street I needed to walk. I could understand why I’d skipped it — Jules is quite steep. I started the climb, walking past the St. Emydius Catholic Church and the CYO center and the tidy homes with trees and flowers in the front.
Jules eventually dead ends into another street, so I turned right and climbed an even steeper hill for a block until I reached a tiny park. There are a few of these parks scattered across the tippy-top of the hills in Ingleside — places that were too steep or rocky to build on. Or maybe they were left open as a little memorial to the open fields of wildflowers that spread over Ingleside before being paved over for housing in the 20th century.
I always loved these little green outcrops when I lived in here, especially since the neighborhood is weirdly devoid of parks. These tiny parks were a beast to get to, but that little pocket of nature with its sweeping views of the ocean and the city made the ascent worthwhile.
As I climbed up past the poppies and other wildflowers, looking out over the ocean and across to Sutro Tower, I was startled to realize that Ingleside is one of my hearts of San Francisco. It was often tough to live there, a precarious time in my life, but it was also magic.
