RUST AND RESPECT

Rusting water pipes

Stepping out of our apartment building, I hurry across the street to my quick respite from concrete: a walkway lined with trees and bushes. Several alleys of trees in our neighborhood give me the chance to walk underneath their welcoming limbs away from the streets lined with buildings. Bill and I also live a short distance from the canal behind Oracle Park where kayakers paddle during baseball season in hopes of catching a home-run ball. The canal is alive with seagulls, herons, and cormorants who roost along the edges. The canal is also the entrance to Mission Bay, a former industrial area, where we live. Walking around the neighborhood, I have been hard-pressed to find new drawing inspiration. Instead of my usual trees, acorns, people, and birds, I find lots of buildings and massive steel beams. Some artists love to portray this industrial look, but I'm not one of them.

Steelworkers of America

While we lived in Danville and Aptos, I could walk out the door and find natural objects to pick up and take home to draw and paint. Not so here in the city. As I walked around the streets what first interested me were the rust-colored street plates that dot the pavement. They aren't plain; instead, the surface is covered with wave-like patterns, perhaps an interpretation of the water that surrounds the area. The covers are the color of rust or Burnt Sienna, one of my favorite colors. I began looking for more rust.

Along the waterfront, we walked part of the San Francisco Bay Trail, which circles the Bay. The trail comes off the Golden Gate Bridge, runs on the Embarcadero, and continues south beyond Mission Bay, Dogpatch, India Basin, Bay View, and Hunter's Point where slaughterhouses, the Naval shipyard, warehouses, lumberyards, and steel mills once were located. For a long time, this area was the backwater of San Francisco where early immigrants pitched their tents and irradiated ships after atom bomb testing in the 1950s docked. Now the area is rapidly transitioning to condos, tech and medical offices, parks, and athletic facilities though Hunter's Point still has a superfund site where toxic waste keeps being found even after the initial clean up.

Abandoned buildings at Crane Cove Park

When Bill and I walked the trail, we came to the surprise of Crane Cove Park, a small beach and playing field named for the two monster metal cranes at the side of the park. I saw a feast of rust across  from the small beach behind chain link fences that surround the Union Iron Works National Register Historic District. The park is part of a tribute to its previous history as an industrial area and to the workers who built ships and loaded freight on to barges, especially during WW II. Beyond the fences sit abandoned brick and sheetmetal buildings ready for redevelopment. As we walked past the fences to 20th Street on Pier 70, we saw the beginnings of reclamation of the area. Restoration Hardware has moved to the former Bethlehem Steel Building at the entrance to the pier. Inside the brick buildings that line the street, we saw room after room of computers. The area is trading heavy industry of the past for the modern tech equivalent.

In just a few spots along the trail, we watched the remains of the natural world with shore birds circling the water to come in for a landing and to dry their feathers in the sun.

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Read more about the Mission Bay area here:

John King's 2019 article about the Pier 70 project:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/At-San-Francisco-s-Pier-70-everything-that-s-13693328.php

What Mission Creek looked like in the 1920s:

https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Creek_1920s

San Francisco Parks Alliance:

https://sanfranciscoparksalliance.org/projects/blue-greenway/#/home/page

Tour of the Blue Greenway (taken 7 years ago) which gives a full view of what the rehabilitation includes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDAuxjq2PcA&feature=youtu.be