After a man shot a neighbor in his apartment building over in the 2400 block of Bryant Street a little before 4:30 am this morning, police had a standoff with the suspect. Luckily, no further gunplay ensued.

SF Appeal reports:

At about 4:35 AM the victim, who was suffering from at least one gunshot wound, called 911 and reported that he had been shot and needed assistance, SFPD spokesperson Officer Dennis Toomer said.

“The victim stated the suspect lives in the same building from where he was calling,” Toomer said, in the 2400 block of Bryant Street, near 22nd Street.

The victim was taken to SF General where he is in stable condition. The shooting suspect, however, was apprehended and taken to the clink. No word yet as to what sparked the shooting.

[SF Appeal]
[SF Examiner]

The second shooting occurred at Fifth and Market streets, "where at least one victim was removed from a Muni bus." (So...a shooting happened on a Muni bus, then? Great.) And the third bout of gunfire happened at Fourth and Bryant streets. No one (allegedly) received life-threatening wounds in either of the last two shootings. And, of course, no arrests have been made.

More info as it comes in.

The sudden appearance of a Smart in our neighborhood got us thinking: perhaps this parking solution will bring an end to our car-free lifestyle. We conducted a quick feasibility study in our neighborhood, with the following discouraging results:

Number of Smart-friendly sub-9' parking spaces: 5

Number of these not already occupied by a 13' car: 0

Undaunted, we stopped by SmartCenterSanFrancisco, in the Mercedes dealership at 8th and Bryant (running words together seems to be part of the SmartCarMarketingPlan). During our brief stay, a steady stream of people best described as "Americans" arrived in small boisterous groups with the apparent intention of mocking the innocuous FourTwos (that's the model name) on the showroom floor -- their incisive commentary included such gems as "it's a glorified golf cart!" and "that's retarded!" The long-suffering and apparently very, very patient sales staff offered to make appointments for test drives.

Someone reports, asks the following about city-enforced personal hygiene of the homeless population:

I saw a city water truck soak a homeless guy and all his stuff this morning. The guy was camped out on Bryant about a block from the courthouse when the truck drove up and sprayed him with a firehose type spout. The guy freaked and ran to get away. Does the city routinely route out the homeless with these tactics? I've never seen anything like it. It was really shitty.

What say you, readers? We can't recall seeing any water-related anti-riot tactics used against the homeless population. Can you?

A PG&E plant in the process of being torn down collapsed and killed a worker and injured two others today. Earlier this afternoon in an abandoned Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power plant in Bayview-Hunter's Point, workers who had been hired by the utility leviathan to remove the large boiler "had tied cables to the boiler, but it collapsed prematurely, raining debris down upon the workers." The five-story-tall walls of the power plant caved in, killing one and trapping two for over an hour. According to the Gate:

The two surviving victims were pulled from the wreckage before 1 p.m. and taken to San Francisco General Hospital with potentially life-threatening injuries to their legs, Talmadge said. One of the men had been trapped in a "cage of steel," said Fire Department Lt. Ken Smith.

James Bryant, president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, who has been monitoring the demolition project, goes on to say about the 20-plus work crew, "[t]hey've had an exemplary safety record so far...doing a controlled take-down, and this is a surprise." Well, yes.

The two survivors were rushed to San Francisco General Hospital's trauma unit.

Image: KTVU2

On Saturday night, just outside the gymnasium at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory, anti-violence activist Terrell "Terray" Rogers was shot and killed at halftime during his daughter's basketball game. According to the Gate:

At 8:20 p.m., during halftime of the game, Terrell Rogers and another man left the gymnasium and walked across Ellis Street, between Gough and Franklin streets, police said. Two men approached Rogers near a small church parking lot. Both opened fire, striking him multiple times before they fled on foot, said Sgt. Steve Mannina, a department spokesman.

Rogers' daughter, Tierra, a junior guard for Sacred Heart's women's basketball team, was pulled from the game and told by officers that her father had been shot.

Co-founder of Peacekeepers--"a nonprofit crisis intervention group looking to curb violence in San Francisco, particularly in the Alice Griffith public housing development in Bayview-Hunters Point"--officers think that Rogers was the intended target, although the motive for his murder is not yet known.

Photo credit: the Hunters Point Family website (via the Gate.)

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. 27: South Park St. in South of Market

It’s early on a Saturday afternoon, and we’ve somehow found our way to Paris.

OK, this isn’t Parisist. We’re not in Paris. Rather, we’re poking around South Park between 2nd, 3rd, Brannan, and Bryant Sts., where arrondissement 94107’s narrow ellipse of green space merely feels a bit Parisian.

The scene in the park is, for the most part, typical and ephemeral: young parents with their kids at the playground, couples chatting on benches or picnicking at tables, dogs and their attendant humans. Falling leaves pepper the ground with muted autumn color. South Park’s twist on the familiar neighborhood park theme, however, is the regular presence of down-and-out’ers at its west end. Nobody seems to demonize the two or three unshowered men hanging about, and while we’re not interested in joining them for a game of checkers or anything, it seems to be a case of no harm, no foul – at least on this afternoon.

Within a 10-minute span, some poor sap ruined his life.

According to San Francisco Crime (via Bay City News), at 9:05 a.m. this morning, Sacto resident David Bryant, 51, jumped over the counter at Wachovia Bank (at 200 Pine Street) and snatched some cash. He then fled the scene, all while cartoonishly leaving behind a trail of escaped dollar bills, and then tried carjacking two people with a knife. (Chortle.) He succeeded on the third attempt, kidnapping a cabbie at Bush and Sansome Streets, who drove him a few blocks away. Then, "police were able to stop and arrest Bryant on Leavenworth Street at 9:15 a.m."

Bryant was charged with five counts of robbery, two counts of attempted car jacking, one count carjacking, and finally, one count of kidnapping.

-- King Corn (2007): Sounds like a tasty breakfast cereal, doesn't it? But in fact, it's a documentary about two college buddies who "plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain [corn] on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat--and how we farm." Screens tonight at 7:15 p.m. and 9:15 at the Red Vic; $5-8.50.

-- Day of the Dead March: Honor loved ones from the other side of the grave. The procession starts at 24th & Bryant, ending up at Garfield Park at the Festival of Altars 8:30 p.m. at 26th & Harrison; free.

-- Masonic / Mason Bates: Juilliard trained composer, whose work has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, and local electronica DJ spins tonight starting at 7 p.m. at Varnish Gallery; free.

-- Dilated Peoples: This hip hop outfit's "hard, intellectual grooves" get the floor boards, and your ass, shaking tonight. Show starts at 9 p.m. at the Independent; $20.

After living in Shanghai for several years, 27-year-old Bay Area artist Aliza Cohen returns home to boast her new series, Bundles & Passages, featuring work that reflects her feelings of time-honored culture shock while living abroad.

She describes her paintings and drawings as a "deep exploration of my experiences traveling throughout China and Southeast Asia, as well as my recent return to San Francisco...this collection of artwork is an attempt to amplify or diffuse the relationships between objects to create poignant moments in paint that illuminate the tension or delight of my personal journey." Groovy. What's more, there will be free booze for all! Don't miss it.

Cohen's homecoming begins tonight at 6 p.m. at 1890 Bryant Street Open Studios; free.

The reason? The post office was so bad at getting packages and letters back to stations like the one at 23rd and Van Ness after an atttempted delivery and leaving a notice that it just decided to stop even trying. Now all of the Mission's packages go back to the Postal Annex. What fun that is for folks without cars in the Mission.

Our reader says there's a sign up to that effect in the post office itself, but, as always, by the time we got to the post office to take a picture of it, the post office was, of course, closed. Maybe we should've stopped by the 16th and Bryant Postal Annex instead.