Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a weekly series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist each Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

Blocker No. 8: Sturgeon St. on Treasure Island

We’re standing on a giant slab of landfill in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Every residence in sight is a boxy triplex, and most of the cars appear to be about 15 years past their prime. Come to think of it, the block itself appears to be about 15 years past its prime.

If it weren’t for the bay breezes and gulls aplenty, we could be cajoled into thinking we’re poking around the crusty outskirts of Stockton. But no, we’re much closer to home than that. We’re visiting San Francisco’s most marginalized subculture: Treasure Island.

Here on the 1400 (read: only) block of Sturgeon St. – which joins Chinook, Halibut, Flounder, Croaker, and of course, Striped Bass in the island’s school of fishily named roads – there’s not a hell of a lot occurring. Not right now, and perhaps not ever.

Sure, there’s the fellow walking down his triplex’s steps wearing one of those “exact inner structure” shirts popularized by Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap. And down the block, an elderly, mobile-homeless couple living in an RV parked around the corner on the island’s version of 12th St. “borrow” some water from the hose faucet of the corner residence. But aside from that and a couple of woofing dogs on upstairs patios, that’s pretty much it for Sturgeon’s live action on a summer Friday.

Minor trappings of suburbia crop up intermittently, from automatic sprinklers embedded in all the crabgrass lawns, to centralized mailboxes clustered mid-block, to sporadic transit service (MUNI’s 108 Treasure Island bus rolls on occasion). But by no means is this even a middle-class neighborhood...other than the green lawns, many residences display symptoms of subtle disregard: broken bedroom windows...busted garage doors...just a general blasé look, all the way down to the dull, offwhite-on-brown-on-beige-on-brown-again color schemes that were probably last slathered upon each triplex here around 1981. The island’s previous tenant (and current owner), the United States Navy, clearly didn’t give a toss about architectural ingenuity.

The San Francisco mainland – as weird as that may sound to most of us – is only a few miles to the west...but of course, so is the nearest supermarket. And who knows what this presently non-descript block will look like 15 years from now? It could be the dream eco-village certain urban planners envision, it could be condo’d/loft’d out eight ways to Sunday, or it could just be the tired recipient of another 15 years of wear and disrepair. In any event, it’ll be hard-pressed to look any less un-San Francisco-like than it does today.