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.
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Blocker, No. 15: Baltimore Way in Crocker-Amazon
Just as Four Corners National Monument exploits the fun one can have straddling multiple political boundaries at once, the 100 block of Baltimore Way between Naylor and Cordova holds a certain appeal for anyone looking to “experience” the “magic” of San Francisco’s southern border - the only city limit in town not inconveniently drenched in salt water.
Baltimore Way, on the lower tier of San Bruno Mountain’s northern flank, is fairly quiet on a weekend afternoon, and the air is surprisingly sweet with the scent of honeysuckle. One resident is in the throes of some kind of home improvement in his front yard, a Giants broadcast spilling out of his portable radio. An elderly woman shuffles down her home’s front steps to water a couple potted plants. A fellow sporting the decades-spanning white tank top look smokes a cigarette in his driveway as he asks us why we were looking at his house a minute before. He seems placated by our response that we’re working on a cover story for Life about his block – which, incidentally, crosses into Daly City, Gateway to the Peninsula, just west of his home at the corner of Baltimore and Cordova, before returning to San Francisco a bit further west.