Blocker: 1200 Battery

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. It’s appeared regularly on SFist since May 2007, but will be going on indefinite hiatus due to a slew of upcoming travel and other projects.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 42: Battery St. in Northeast Waterfront

Blocker’s scope may confine us to the sidewalks 98 percent of the time, but on occasion we’ll find ourselves on certain blocks that demand a few steps outside the confines of our usual corridor. Nowhere is this more evident than along Battery between Greenwich and Filbert, a tree-lined street hemmed in by Levi’s Plaza on both sides. Granted, there’s not much to do up here unless you’re either an employee on break from one of the area offices, or merely someone always on the lookout for yet another place in the city to laze it up. But it’s a pleasant enough hideaway that’s a leafy antidote to the clatter and clang of nearby Fisherman’s Wharf or the Financial District. And you never know when you may be overrun by a just-passing-through posse of early teens in matching tees.

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A number of scattered workers have their priorities in order as they look to extend their Friday lunch breaks. One woman sits cross-legged and reads on a raised stone bench where Battery meets the main entrance to Levi’s Plaza; a handful of others lounge on the benches adjacent to the lovely (if overly chlorinated) fountain toward the plaza’s center, sipping coffee, talking on phones, talking with each other. The fountain’s a nice touch here, drowning out the ambient traffic noise as it does; also, its stepping stones make for a clever strolling diversion. But what’s really going on with that bright orange traffic cone in its midst?

The gently curving faux-brickwork and draping foliage of the surrounding offices suggest a more relaxed workplace that what you’ll see down at, for instance, California and Sansome. At the eminently inviting park across Battery, it appears as if a small group of co-workers are conducting a meeting of sorts alfresco. Detractors of circa-1982 Levi’s Plaza may lob claims of “corporate office park” its way, and it’s certainly not off the mark; we too see that frumpy security guard ambling around the plaza, all decked out in brown. But as such places go, it beats the daylights out of south Novato or Newark – look no further than through the sound-buffeting trees separating the beautifully landscaped greenspace east of Battery from the traffic-rich Embarcadero, otherwise a rumor but for the fact that San Francisco Bay looms across the way.

Battery Street itself here is short on action. Two lanes of one-way traffic head south, away from Fog City Diner and the Embarcadero a block north. There’s Il Fornaio on the west side of the street at 1265, where a few white-shirted and necktied servers of both sexes scurry around the dining atrium, tending to late-lunchers. The occasional game-face’d bike messenger jams by every few minutes, but not as often as the open-topped tour buses that trundle slowly, enabling passengers to snap photos of Coit Tower up the steep eastern flank of nearby Telegraph Hill. All in all, it’s a harmless scene, and not necessarily a real exciting one, either.

And that’s about when the uniformly apparel’d teen team arrives. You’ve seen them at various events around town. You’ve seen them in the upper deck down the left-field line at the Giants’ ballpark. Today they’re straggling through Levi’s Plaza and across Battery, en route to the Embarcadero after a quick stop at Starbucks over on Sansome. They’re the Matching T-shirt Brigade, with “PART NERS 2008” slapped across the front of their black shirts in purple block lettering, and what appears to be hundreds of sponsors in tiny, tiny lettering squished onto the back. Their shirts’ message may be indeterminate, but their cause is clear: It’s a good day for a field trip.

Agreed. In San Francisco, it often is.