Charles

Recent Actions

• Posted Blocker: 1200 Battery to SFist
  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.
• Posted Blocker: 1000 Folsom to SFist
  They don’t come any more rich with Blocker fodder than Folsom between 6th and 7th Sts. You’ve got four lanes of auto traffic zooming in one direction only. You’ve got an infamous ultramega dance club on one corner, and an “urban communal retreat” that certain people just call a big sex cult on another. You’ve got $30 back waxes, the ice cream man, hella lofts. There’s light industry. There’s an enormous, lovely city park. There’s a guy walking down the sidewalk with a black cat slung over his shoulder. Let’s go.
• Posted Blocker: 500 Monterey to SFist
  Monterey Blvd. isn’t quite the time warp we’ve seen elsewhere around town—we’re thinking of Mission in the Excelsior; we’re also thinking of Amethyst in Diamond Heights. But just the same, it’s clear that few things have changed in recent years (decades?) on this Sunnyside thoroughfare between Edna and Foerster.

  Something else is apparent as well: Several businesses here go out of their way to not let us forget what street we’re on. Monterey Cleaners operates its own plant. Monterey Auto Service is an official brake and lamp adjusting station. Immediate neighbors Monterey Pizza and Monterey Salon ought to join forces and offer some sort of meat lovers’ pedicure special. Monterey Blvd. proudly wears its status as Official Business District of Sunnyside like a big blue #1 ribbon at the county fair.

• Posted Blocker: 2700 San Bruno to SFist
  Good grief. You’re really struggling getting your luxury SUV into that space in front of Tena Pro Nails, aren’t you? Do you have an 11 A.M. pedicure appointment? It’s a few minutes after the hour...

  Upon quick glance, Portola’s main business drag, San Bruno Avenue, seems acutely workaday compared to a few of its neighborhood-cousins around town. If Russian Hill is a cute little summer dress and the Mission is an old Air Supply T-shirt worn tightly and ironically, Portola is a pair of blue Levi’s—straight-leg ones. And the hair looks terrific.

• Posted Blocker: 200 Steiner to SFist
  Within a minute of Team Blocker’s arrival on Steiner between Haight and Waller, a mammoth tour bus rolls south down Steiner. Hunh? Clearly, it’s coming from Alamo Square up the hill a few blocks...but where it’s headed, we’re unsure. Duboce Park for a game or two of slobberball? Perhaps a little exercise up and down the Sanchez steps? Seems an odd route for a tour coach, seeing as how the Lower Haight has always been one of San Francisco’s most locally geared neighborhoods — as homegrown as its natty sibling, the Upper Haight, sometimes isn’t.