(Roughly) Daily

The San Francisco street grid dates to the 1839 plan of Swiss ship captain and surveyor Jean-Jacques Vioget, who laid out the city on a north–south, east–west grid without regard to its topography. Subsequent plans extended the grid, except for its inflection south of Market Street…. and continued the practice of honoring geometry over topography, resulting in some of the steeper streets in the world.

Photographer Dan Ng explored…

What would San Francisco be without its steep hills?

Well for one, if would be much easier to walk around and without much effort. It would be easier to park a car and not have to curb the wheels. We would not have runaway vehicles and tennis balls.

On the other hand, we would not have cable cars, beautiful views and quaint neighborhoods. We would not have the many movies and postcard images to view. In fact, San Francisco would not be San Francisco.

By tilting the camera, I attempted to “level” the hills. These images whimsically portray the streets of San Francisco…flat. But thank goodness it isn’t!

See his more of “leveling” photos: “The Streets of San Francisco… but Flat?”

And on the subject of city streets: using OpenStreetMap, Andrei Kashcha’s City Roads project lets you enter any town or city in the world and generates a map of all the streets within its city limits.

* Mervyn Peake, “Rhondda Valley,” Collected Poems

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As we seek balance, we might spare a thought for Paul Lorin Kantner; he died on this date in 2016.  A musician, he’s best known as co-founder, rhythm guitarist, and occasional vocalist of Jefferson Airplane, a seminal San Francisco psychedelic rock band of the counterculture era.  He continued these roles as a member of Jefferson Starship, Jefferson Airplane’s successor band.

Coincidentally, one of his his Airplane co-founders, Signe Toly Anderson, died on the same day.

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