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.

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Blocker, No. 15: Baltimore Way in Crocker-Amazon

Just as Four Corners National Monument exploits the fun one can have straddling multiple political boundaries at once, the 100 block of Baltimore Way between Naylor and Cordova holds a certain appeal for anyone looking to “experience” the “magic” of San Francisco’s southern border - the only city limit in town not inconveniently drenched in salt water.

Baltimore Way, on the lower tier of San Bruno Mountain’s northern flank, is fairly quiet on a weekend afternoon, and the air is surprisingly sweet with the scent of honeysuckle. One resident is in the throes of some kind of home improvement in his front yard, a Giants broadcast spilling out of his portable radio. An elderly woman shuffles down her home’s front steps to water a couple potted plants. A fellow sporting the decades-spanning white tank top look smokes a cigarette in his driveway as he asks us why we were looking at his house a minute before. He seems placated by our response that we’re working on a cover story for Life about his block – which, incidentally, crosses into Daly City, Gateway to the Peninsula, just west of his home at the corner of Baltimore and Cordova, before returning to San Francisco a bit further west.

As suburban as this scene may seem, we’re going with a fresh angle here. Castro Valley? Foster City? Them’s some suburbs. Crocker-Amazon? We call it an urburb – an area that, while clearly not possessing the pulse of a true urban environment, maintains a geographical link to the city as we know it. The addresses on this block are all San Francisco ones. San Francisco is not a suburb. We’re no math wizzes, but by the transitive property, that makes Crocker-Amazon no suburb.

Certain homes here offer more charm than others. The yard at 181 Baltimore is a ghastly display of concrete and chain link, while down the hill, 120 is a construction zone, complete with a portable latrine next to the driveway. Elsewhere, 191 is slathered in a South Beach blush of pastels, while 197 keeps the Christmas faith all year long with its dangling icicle lights (“supposed to have been gone by now,” sighs one of its residents). Hefty palm, pine, and bottlebrush trees in various front yards provide temporary rest stops for the neighborhood’s avian population, and the world’s oldest paint-roller rusts away atop the sidewalk wall of one home’s back patio.

It’s around this point when a very shirtless and mustachioed guy zooms – literally, zooms - by on rollerblades that sound hemi-powered. He practically leaves a wake of smoke behind, and he’s gone in a blink, leaving us to wonder how much faster he could have traveled had he not been wearing a pair of Bill Clinton’s un-aerodynamic jogging shorts. (Sorry, no photo available.)

BART trains whistle by below adjacent to Interstate 280, and we take note of how those symmetrical homes terraced on the hill a mile or two south of the freeway are now in our midst, just up the way, across the DC line. As for this block of Baltimore Way, other than the expansive vistas that fan out in three directions, there’s not much that sets it apart, other than perhaps the unusual center median at its west end, anciently paved and weeded over. But it beats the hell out of Four Corners, where there are neither bay views nor redolent honeysuckle on sunny summer afternoons.