While poking through some of my bookshelves last weekend, I stumbled across two old San Francisco street maps from the 1940s. As you might expect, most of the Bernal Heights street grid is much the same today as it was then, with one big exception: The Bayshore Freeway wasn’t built until the 1950s, so the eastern slope of Bernal looked rather different.
The construction of the freeway reshaped some aspects of the neighborhood in ways are still visible today; most ominously by turning Faith into a dead end street. (METAPHOR ALERT!!!)
But let’s take an even closer look… with a Burrito Justice-style overlay of a circa 1940 map and a contemporary Google map:
Look closer, and we see more detail. Impressively, Bernal’s streetscape survived the creation of the Bayshore Freeway with relatively little disruption or dislocation. Only two small streets disappeared entirely: Adam and Eve:
So while the physical damage to the neighborhood was relatively minor, the metaphysical damage was significant, considering that the freeway cut us off from Faith and Joy, while wiping out Adam and Eve so thoroughly that no trace remains. Talk about being cast from Eden…
Cosgrove Street, marked on the map there just south of Joy, is now no more than the parking lot of the Silver Crest Donut Shop / Bar / Restaurant. Metaphors there?
My house was apparently moved from to its current location when the freeway was built, but I have no idea where it lived originally.
Are you in the yellow house on Holladay which is basically where Eve used to be? I was told that that house was moved from down the street at some point. (I live on the first block of Holladay, right above the disappeared streets in question.)
No, I’m actually all the way over on the west side of the hill, which is why I’m really not sure WHERE the house may have been moved from. I mean, it seems like moving it all the way over from the east or south side would have been really difficult, even in the 40s.
getting rid of adam and eve has a downside, metaphorically? and you need named streets to have faith and joy? just think for a moment what our forefathers have done to native american remembrance
Yes. Because there no native american names left in our geography at all. None at all.
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