City & County 14: Street trees of the San Francisco Bay Area
Welcome back to City & County, with a post of photos primarily taken in this newsletter’s namesake, City and County of San Francisco. This is the first post since 2020, when I thought, like many, that writing a newsletter would be a way to pass the time during the Covid-19 pandemic. As an academic who primarily writes scholarly papers, finding the motivation to write a newsletter has proven difficult, so at least for the time being, I’m going to try something different with City & County, which is to post photo essays instead.
As background, my name is Alan Wiig and since last posting, I left my position as professor of urban planning and community development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston to take a job as a professor of geography at the University of Florida in Gainesville. While I have plenty of photos from north central Florida, the images that follow were taken earlier this month on a quick research trip to San Francisco to study the city’s plan to raise the entirety of the Embarcadero waterfront including the famous San Francisco Ferry Building by about seven feet to protect the downtown business district, the BART transit network, and adjoining neighborhoods from sea level rise, a megaproject that, assuming construction begins soon (no start date has been given because the US Congress has to approve the majority of the funding, which will come from the federal government), will take decades and cost upwards of $13 billion (link to the draft plan).
While walking all over San Francisco, and then also in Oakland and Berkeley to see family and friends, I ended up noticing the diversity of street trees and how prominently they stand over the sidewalk and adjacent buildings, contributing to the urban forest in environments otherwise composed of concrete and asphalt.
And as an appendix, James Turrell’s Skyspace at the DeYoung Fine Arts Museum, with coyote warning signage in the background.
