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

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Blocker, No. 31: Channel St. in Mission Bay

Channel St. is the only street in San Francisco where none of the residents live on land. Where a pair of waterfront parks line the entire length of the street (and one of the few remaining creeks in town). Where a long-defunct tugboat and heady pile of fragrant tree bark don’t seem out of place alongside the road.

This being Mission Bay, development is having its considerable say. At the east end of Channel, where the new T-Third streetcar line snakes its way by on 4th St., a few major projects dominate the view. Some are complete, such as the Giants’ brick ballyard and the high-density residences across Mission Creek. Others are getting there, like UCSF’s manifest destiny campus to the south. And elsewhere, certain plans appear to be just getting underway - as is the case with the proposed mixed residential/retail along the south side of Channel, where until recently, a big parking lot hosted suburban sports fans’ vehicles a few hours at a time. No other San Francisco district approaches Mission Bay’s current state of flux.

But where men in hardhats, orange vests, and mustaches ply their trade at the construction site on one site of the street, it’s a different scene across the way at sparkling new Mission Creek Park. The narrow open space of sod, native grasses, and winding pedestrian paths is a popular spot with mothers, nannies, dog owners, and their charges late on this winter afternoon, and its appeal is abundantly clear. A couple snogs on the terraced grass near the plaza outside the park office, while seagulls bob upon Mission Creek, a Bay inlet preservationists are making strong efforts to maintain as a rest area for shorebirds along the Pacific Flyway.

It’s around the other side of the park office, right alongside undertrafficked Channel St. itself, where we’re met with the most stupefying sight of our walking tour. It’s a young man – he can’t be out of teens by a year or two, if at all – and he’s shirtless and sunbathing in a reclining lounge chair on the sidewalk, a few feet from a red standpipe. Today’s not a real warm one to begin with, the sun’s on its way down, and it’s pushing 5 P.M. He’s got a tremendous view of a chain link fence and the 280 freeway’s final approach to South of Market. All in all, it’s OK with us - just a peculiar spot to set up a beachhead, that’s all. Isn’t there a creekfront park over there?

The western half of the lengthy block ups the funk meter exponentially, but two dozen houseboats will do that to a place.

Mission Creek Park abuts Huffaker Park at Mission Creek Harbor’s eastern end. This area has been home to a cavalcade of houseboats since the mid 1960s, and while it would make for some terrific yellow journalism if the residents were renegade water-squatters complete with motley skull-and-crossbones flags tied to the masts of their floating homes and middle fingers extended toward all the poncey landlubbers, the drab fact is they’re friendly folks with an above-board deal with the Port Commission that allows them to live here. Why should Sausalitans have all the houseboating fun?

Granted, this setting isn’t exactly a Scandinavian fjord in its quietude, what with Highway 280 jutting overhead, the nearby Caltrain depot, and all the adjacent construction. But it’s a wholly unique urban setting, and given that there are only a few hundred houseboats in the entire Bay Area, the monthly Dramamine tab is probably a small price for these people to pay. Plus docking fees and marina permits, of course.

We’ve been spending most of our time in the waterfront parks along Channel because the street itself doesn’t much hold our interest, other than the displaced sun-worshiper profiled a few paragraphs up. Across the bumpy road from Huffaker Park, a large warehouse appears to be mostly vacant, while to its immediate east sits what appears to be the development company’s on-site office. There’s no two ways around it: This sure is the unsightly side of the street.

The rotting tug across the street from where we stand in even worse shape than the warehouse, but most would agree that a boat well past its prime has a lot more romance going for it than an over-the-hill warehouse does. And as for that giant, fresh pile of tree bark we follow our nose to down at the west end of the street, you can’t put a price on that intoxicating scent anywhere. Channel St. and its parks have one or two surprises up its watery sleeve.

(Photos by the author.)