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Blocker: 200 Country Club
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.
View the map of all published Blocker episodes.
Blocker, No. 16: Country Club Dr. in the Parkside
A stone’s throw from Lake Merced and San Francisco Zoo, there’s a secluded land where the scent of freshly cut and watered grass wafts through the air. Where the juniper bushes are neatly sculptured and the single-family houses are defiantly unattached to one another. Where untidiness of yard and home is possibly met with scorn and derision among whispering neighbors.
On Country Club Drive between Berkshire and Ocean, landscaping is king, putting green lawns and rock gardens remain all the rage, and the number of residents in the 20-39 age bracket appears to be minimal, at most. This block may be an allergy sufferer’s or Mission hipster’s nightmare, and its name may portend false images of Chase and Hilary Whitebread whizzing off in their electric golf cart to the first tee, all bent out of shape about how “the help” failed for the third time this month to feed Shrilly the Pomeranian her Alpo Premium. But, holy smokes, the street’s called “Country Club Drive,” and it’s in San Francisco. We could not resist its pull.
Country Club’s boxy, two-story homes date from an era when this country was gorging itself silly at the American Dream Smorgasbord. Street parking here is remarkably deficient, given the driveway space demanded by numerous two-car garages. One fellow has squeezed his Cooper Mini into a space on the street, but if you’re a visitor driving an Oldsmobuick or any sort of SUV, you’re likely out of luck.
Action late on a Wednesday afternoon here is predictably light. A couple of landscaping crews are wrapping up their day’s work, and a few residents look to be pulling their cars into their garages a little earlier than usual, perhaps. Other than that, and that one elderly fellow in the sweater vest obsessively watering every inch of his front lawn with a handheld sprinkler, all’s quiet here on the southwestern San Francisco front.
A walk down Country Club’s sidewalks reveals a few items that exist outside the street’s super-tidy visual template. In 254’s driveway, a basketball hoop that looks short enough for Billy Barty to throw down on beckons our inner 14-year-old, while the flier on the lightpost at Lancaster Alley (which leads away from this secret world and out to Sloat Blvd.) announces that Duke, a “friendly” Doberman, has gone missing. One of the few architectural oddities we spot is the Tudor-ish, slate blue home at 245 Country Club. Among all the post-WWII, west San Francisco places along this block, it’s impossible to miss.
Around the street’s bend to where it intersects with the western terminus of Ocean Ave., high-maintenance front lawns give way to zero-maintenance rock gardens. But our favorite landscaping trend around these parts is that of the sculptured juniper bushes – clearly an art form in this part of town. Years ago, we saw an SFSU student’s documentary on certain Parkside/Sunset/Richmond residents (invariably, male retirees) who delighted in trimming their front yard juniper bushes just so; one even attempted to create juniper versions of Mt. Rushmore, and was dead serious in his pursuit. Sadly, on this visit, we make no Abe Lincoln-as-shrubbery sightings.
There’s hardly a bad-looking yard on this block, and the one resident we chat with seems genuinely flattered that Country Club Drive is finally getting the Blocker exposure he’s confident it deserves. But one question lingers: Where the hell’s the country club around here?
