a great slice

Our nicest morning walk in San Francisco started out in North Beach at Lombard and Columbus.



We walked up the hill to Coit Tower and enjoyed the view from there of the Bay and both big bridges.



Back down to Columbus and up to Grant for a brief stop at City Lights. They've got a nice selection of books, but I wonder how long they'll stay around in an IPAD world.



We walked the length of Grant through Chinatown, picking up some elegant little outfits for the grand-daughter, and made a stop at the kite store. I was disappointed to see they no longer stocked either the Indian fighters or the Japanese hatas.



We went back down Columbus and took a right turn on Green to get to the hole-in-the-wall Golden Boy Pizza. We each had a slice with everything on it and a beer. The crust was crispy, but not tough. Molto gustoso!

time travel

I alluded to this subject briefly on my other blog from a photo-aesthetic perspective. I want to elaborate the topic a bit further here because I think it provides a good illustration of some of the marvelous tools that have recently become available to historians, urban planners and all the rest of us.



I snapped the above picture recently during a morning bike ride. The focal point was the Mini-Cooper, but I was also conscious of the fact that Lee Friedlander had pictured the same place from across the street with a focus on a black dog in 1975 as shown below.



The Street View feature of Google Maps lets me see the scene from the same place and perspective that Friedlander witnessed about thirty years earlier. I believe the Google photo vehicle passed the site four or five years ago based on the way it portrayed the details of the house I now live in a few blocks away.



Google Earth allows a dynamic adjustment of the viewpoint which incorporates composite images built from satellite views, aerial photos and computer-generated 3D building representations.



One fact that emerges clearly in these pictures is that Albuquerque's urban core has changed relatively little over a period of three decades.



By contrast, zooming out a bit in Google Earth, one can see some of the vast suburban sprawl that grew outward to the horizon just since Friedlander's visit to Albuquerque.