I always want to share the nooks and crannies of Southeast SF with people– and Sunday, 11 friends and strangers (nice to meet you!) converged on my neighborhood for a tour of Dogpatch and Bayview.
Here’s the route we took (click through for an interactive map with Point Of Interest descriptions):
Starting off in Dogpatch, some friends & neighbors set up a surprise table of muffins, fruit, and mimosas (thanks!)
We then rode past the Potrero Power Plant (finally shut down only a few years ago: I remember when it spewed dark smoke outside my window). Not that long ago it generated a third of San Francisco’s electricity, but we now bring in power from Pittsburgh via a massive underwater cable. The electrical substation in front of the old power plant still audibly hums, though– I’m not sure what it’s doing.
After passing Building REsources (a great yard of used and recycled doors, tubs, lamps, and other building materials), we turned onto the new-in-2012 Cargo Way bike path and followed it down to a yard of feisty, friendly goats-for-rent:
A sudden 3-minute rainstorm had me reconsidering the day, but it passed and we rode out to the very tip of Heron’s Head Park (old landfill across from what used to be a sugar processing plant), renovated in the past few years into a nice small park with various long-billed birds wading in pools.
From there, we rode the new Bay Trail extension dirt path across the water and along a fence…
…down to India Basin Shoreline Park.
This park has barbecue grills, strange plants, a playground, warm, sunny weather, and great views across the bay– I don’t know why it’s not more of a destination. And if you explore, you may find the large pink anchor in what looks like a miniature helipad:
A few more twists and turns, a hill through a residential neighborhood, and on a street of nondescript garage doors, a space ship under construction:
She said it was designed with help from kids at the local neighborhood house and was heading to Maker Faire and then Burning Man. The planets plasma-cut in thick plates of steel as steps were a nice detail.
A few blocks later, the gap in the fence at the South end of Griffith I’d stumbled across last weekend was open, letting us ride out onto the dirt at Yosemite Slough.
There was new white PVC irrigation pipe laid in the mud everywhere… but it was unclear what for.
A few more paths, a series of tagged walls, piles of old railroad ties next to vestigal tracks, a razor-wire-topped fence with an open door in it….
And down we went to Candlestick Park and Candlestick Point Recreation Area, the first state park in California in an urban area. We managed to not hit any suicidally-trail-crossing squirrels, cruised out to the windy pier, admired the East Bay… and then headed back by a more inland route.
A quick Trouble Coffee coffee + toast stop later and out to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for open studios:
Most of us went our separate ways at that point, but a few of us stopped by the Speakeasy taproom on Evans, then detoured down to the beautiful disrepair at Pier 70, which I’d figured we wouldn’t have time to see. Old ship-repair buildings, scrapped Muni buses, and warning signs galore:
A fine day– while everyone had different interests, I was glad to help escape the ordinary…