OUT OUR WINDOWS

Cherry Blossom Season in the Bay Area

We can hear the crowds cheer, which makes us look up from our work to see the replay on the gigantic screen at one end of Oracle Park, two blocks away. We watch the seagulls sailing around like fireflies at night as the people exit and leave behind an enormous heap of discarded food for the seagulls to feast on. We can't see the actual game nor the score, but we get excited when we hear the recording of Tony Bennett singing, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," because we know then that the Giants won their game.

We walk often towards the ballpark to reach the N Judah line that runs on King Street. We frequent a grocery store, pharmacy, or post office nearby. Across from the Giants are brick buildings still showing old retail signs from long ago. One building has bas-relief sculptures attached to walls above the second floor. They remind me of the friezes in ancient Rome and Greece. I look closely at the figures and laugh. Each figure combines human forms with eagles, mermaids, or goats, but they all have catcher's mitts or baseball bats in their hands. Early Giants fans!

Gods and Goddesses of Baseball bas-relief sculptures by Alexei Kazantsev

Since our move to Mission Bay, sporting games have become our latest distraction. We live between the Giants ballpark and Chase Center, where the Warriors play. We've walked to several games at both sites. We cheer with the rest of the crowd as a ball flies into a basket from a great distance or sails through the air over the grandstands into McCovey Cove below.

Across from the ballpark, the newest SF park has opened with a Willie McCoy statue powering a homer toward the grandstands, reminding us of his achievements. The park winds around the Chase Center past Crane Cove, a tribute to the shipyards built after Mission Creek was filled in. The walkway connects one more part of the Bay Trail that continues its huge circle down around the edges of the Peninsula to the East Bay, where it separates to wander to Benicia as well as to cross over to Marin, finally to come back into the City across the Golden Gate Bridge.

We hear the bridge siren sounding again. We shuffle to the window because we know that one of the two drawbridges that connects Mission Bay to the rest of the City will rise soon. We look for a boat on the waterway. There are a dozen houseboats nestled together on our side of the creek. Almost all of them have a boat tied to their docks. They are the only boats that navigate the channel and need the bridges to rise. 

In earlier centuries, the creek was an active participant in the industrial side of San Francisco, and the bridges must have been much more active than they are today. Barges crept up and down the creek to lumberyards, shipyards, and manufacturing facilities, then back out under the bridges to the Bay. Now, the creek flows from the Bay just to Berry Street and to the train tracks that hold the trains coming from the south part of the Bay. Where the creek meets Berry Street, there is a water reclamation yard with effluent discharged from its pumps into the creek. On the city side of the creek, a park fills with walkers and runners, basketball and volleyball players. There is a storage shed filled with kayaks that can be taken out to McCovey Cove during ballgames. No need to raise the bridges for them as they slip beneath the steel bridge girders. The two bridges remind us of what Mission Bay used to be before the ballparks and UCSF arrived. We can see and hear all of the activity of this part of San Francisco from our windows. Looking out our windows, we continue to be surprised at how much we like the energy of a city.