Grand boulevards and ornate gardens slicing through the Mission

That strip of parkland between Mission Street and South Van Ness was gonna be called “Mission Arcade.” And the one running east-west was “Mission Parkway.” And how helpful would those diagonals be when biking from Dear Mom to El Rio??

Bernalwood dug this up; here’s the story:

A few weeks ago, I took Bernalwood’s Cub Reporter to visit the new Exploratorium. While we were there, we wandered down a long hallway and into the Bay Observatory Gallery at the northeast corner of the museum. And in the Bay Observatory Gallery, we found a very cool collection of maps [...]

[T]he Cub Reporter was fascinated with a map visualization created by the amazing Eric Fischer (which quite speaks well of her).

Simultaneously, your Bernalwood editor was intrigued by a map of an ambitious redevelopment plan that envisioned San Francisco as a kind of Paris by the Bay, with grand boulevards and ornate gardens slicing through our familiar street grid.

Read on for a bunch more maps and history.

Now let’s rock out:

One Response to “Grand boulevards and ornate gardens slicing through the Mission”

  1. rick says:

    it sounds like an elaborate gentrification scheme. good thing this evil was stopped!