Neighborhood - Alfredo's San Francisco Guide

	West Portal
	Between the Sunset And The Fancy Mansions

The Tunnel Exits
(Looking NorthEast)

This is such a classic experience - you have been working downtown, slaving away all day among the tall buildings and the maddening crowd, it's five o'clock, you take the trolley home, you're underground in a dark tunnel the entire time...and then...you emerge into the sun, you emerge into this. This wonderfully quiet low-density cute little neighborhood. You sigh. You're home. You can see the whole story in this picture. Downtown is several miles behind the giant tripod antenna Sutro Tower. You have travelled underground all the way from downtown, under that mountain, and you have emerged out of the baby-blue arched tunnel exit you can see at the back of this picture, where the tracks lead in and out of the tunnel. That orange-and-white thing is a MUNI trolley approaching into the tunnel. The cute stores on the left are, thanks to adamant neighborhood resistance to mass marketing, mostlyl non-chain stores owned by people with a sense of local character. Because of this, there is a real sense of place here. That exactly is what I like about West Portal. In the next picture, let's go right to the tunnel entrance and point the camera to the right.

The same tunnel exit, the view to the left
(Looking SouthWest)

We are at the tunnel entrance now. The tunnel entrance in to our left. You can see the embedded tracks in the pavement. That guy seeming to stand in the middle of the street is a MUNI employee, they're some kind of MUNI traffic supervisors. I say this very tongue-in-cheek; West Portal is the 'wrong side of the tracks' - since on the other side of the tracks across Portola Boulevard you have St. Francis Woods, which is really mansion city. Compared to them, West Portal is the poorer cousin - if your cousins are paper millionaires. Beyond West Portal lie the vast unwashed masses of the Sunset (again, tongue in cheek) which is one of my favorite neighborhoods. Therefore, West Portal is the gateway, the go-between, the Sunset wants to live in West Portal, and West Portal wants to live in St. Francis Woods. So much for the socioeconomic portion. Here in this picture you see the camera pointing down some small side street, the main drag is going off to the right. All those people at the corner are schoolkids from the nearby parrochial school waiting at the bus stop. The school is uphill to the left of me, on the hill atop the MUNI tunnel we just saw. All those cars are coming off Portola Boulevard, unseen in this picture, Portola is the main artery cutting diagonally across San Francisco from downtown in the upper right, to the Sunset in the lower left (it's named Market Street when it's downtown). Along the way, Portola passes by West Portal, and that's why all those cars are people coming home from work. In the next picture, I am simply going to turn around and give you a view of where that small blue car is headed.

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So this gives you an idea of what is to the right of the tunnel entrance. If your trolley comes out of the tunnel and heads to the right, like these cars, then it's headed for the Sunset. Do you see that street taking sharply off to our right, where that big yellow line on the pavement is? That's where the schoolkids came from. About a block uphill is where their school is. To the left of this picture you see the size of the houses in this area, large and detached but not quite mansions. As the street recedes and curves away toward the background, the houses become a bit more modest. In the next picture, I will show you that.

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West Portal Avenue is two or three blocks at the bottom of this downhill, on the right. At center-left, against the sky, you can see Sutro Tower again. Here we have hiked uphill from the main drag, as the West Portal area morphs into the Sunset. You can see the houses are still nice and well-maintained, but smaller and no longer detached from each other. The hill in the background is "Forest Hill", another area that is, like West Portal, part of the whole "West of Twin Peaks" district.I'm splitting them up because although they belong together, they each have their different character. We have strayed to the boundaries of West Portal, so let's walk back down to the main drag, back to the area of the very first picture.

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The "Back Streets" of West Portal
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Something about this picture tugs at me. In the gloaming light, it's picturesque and homey and fancy and comfortable, all at the same time. I took the picture on the way to see my barber Karen. It's the kind of sight you're likely to see as you walk the residential parts of West Portal, and I included it both for its emotional je-ne-sais-quoi and for its you-are-there qualities.

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