the pinakes
from papyrus to pdf

BE A FLÂNEUR

Someone scrawled the phrase “Be a Flâneur” into wet sidewalk cement near my parents’ house. I’m not sure how long it has been encased in concrete, but I know I passed it many times before my curiosity got the best of me, and I googled the word “flâneur“.

I was more than a little enchanted by what I discovered. Adapted from a French noun for “stroller”, it was coined by the poet and writer Charles Baudelaire to mean “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. Magic. I’ve loved walking cities my whole life; growing up I frequently walked home from elementary school via increasingly crooked routes that I called my “AdventureWALKS” (which I then wrote stories about after arriving home; I wonder if my mother saved any of these infantile attempts at literature?).

Now, my preferred form of transit is the bicycle, and I frequently carry my daughter to her preschool in a childseat. But yesterday threatened rain, so we took the train to school. I had an appointment downtown, so after leaving her behind, I hustled on to the financial district via subway. When I was done (getting a filling and finding out my new crown didn’t fit), I was downtown, a few miles from her school with a few hours to spare. And the promised rain was nowhere in sight. So I wandered back via streets big and little, boulevards and alleyways, as big as Market Street and as small as Maiden Lane — I became a flâneur, and lived the City.

As much as I love the bicycle, you see more on foot, moving a little slower, stopping when you want, and not having to dodge taxis and busses. Since I didn’t have my usually ubiquitous headphones, I was especially plugged into my environment — sights, sounds, and all the other senses mixed and mingled to let me know where I was. Thoughts both deep and fleeting get to mingle and float as you walk, slowly turning over and developing into something bigger. Blood flows through your veins a little quicker. Crisp December air refreshes the lungs. Long strides stretch tired legs.

My walk started in the heart of the Financial district, close to where the concrete canyons of Sansome and Montgomery originate off the diagonal slash of Market Street. I walked by the venerable and beloved Mechanics’ Institute Library, on Post Street (the City’s oldest library, predating San Francisco’s public library by more than a quarter century) before ducking into a store on Maiden Lane (Christmas shopping is upon us, after all). After shopping, I walked up Geary past (not into) Union Square.  I still think the new design is unfortunate and uninviting, with an intimidating front face of concrete facing Geary. Then I followed the cable car path back down to Market Street.

My walking route

Mid-Market remains a troubled area for San Francisco, but it makes a fascinating walk nonetheless, particularly with the current “Art in Storefronts” program adding color to the scene. Of course, I also had to trot into the Main Library on my way through — there is always something to look up or look for!

Walking through Hayes Valley after that was something of a revelation. It’s not an area I’m in very often, and even less often on foot. Now, the area has had cute boutiques and upscale restaurants for quite a while now (ever since the tear-down of the Central Freeway overpass that blighted the area), but it seems to have reached a critical mass in which the variety of stores and eateries both on and off of Hayes Street are feeding off of each other’s success in drawing foot traffic to the area. It was midday on a Tuesday and the sidewalks were busy. I spent a few minutes sitting on a bright green bench studying a bright green door in an otherwise gray storefront. I felt simply enchanted by the addition of color to gray.

Taking in the contrast of color I had a mini-epiphany — part of the reason that San Francisco’s Victorians and Edwardians are so lively and lovely is the contrast between the rich colors in which they are painted and the frequently silver-gray sky settled in above our heads. Civic Center is a collection of handsome, gray beaux-arts beauties, from City Hall to the Old Main Library (now the Asian Art Museum) and the War Memorial Opera House. But the European-style boulevards and open areas of Civic Center often seem lifeless, and it is because the opulent stone buildings look drab when matched with our gray sky. But our Victorians, our wonderful, colorful, bursting Victorians — even the modest ones, the slightly faded ones — sing out under our silver sphere.

I got to enjoy many of those Victorians in my remaining walk up from Hayes Valley into the Haight and Castro, with little surprises and architectural novelties along the way. Walking on little streets you see also unexpected glimpses of art and ideas shared with passers-by.

A decorated garage in an alley near Hayes Street

Small, colorful Victorians on Linden

A modern house spiked with color

And of course, from downtown to uptown the best part of the walk was always the people-watching. I won’t elaborate except to say it is delightful to see how meaningless stereotypes can be — you get little windows into other people’s worlds as you walk, snippets of conversations, glimpses of activity and you’re reminded of the infinite possibilities in life and how rarely anyone fits into a singular box — even in just a moment of time.

Near the end of my walk was one of my favorite San Francisco features — obscure public stairs. A hilly city, San Francisco has many shortcuts cut between houses, stone and wood stairways, some with their own street names and addresses (there is something wonderfully romantic and old-fashioned about a street that can only be traversed by foot — no cars, no exhaust, only hustle). Someday I hope to have find and walk them all (this website should help me locate them).

The Roosevelt-Henry Steps

It is rare to have as much free time as I did yesterday, but even when it’s hard to scrape together time it’s always worth remembering to walk a little. Walk alone, or walk with a friend, walk for miles or walk a few blocks, and walk to remind yourself how a city breathes and feels. And let’s ditch the term “pedestrian” — it is so pejorative, an unfortunate surrogate for “bland”, and remember to all be flâneurs instead.