There's a roaring battle afoot between the Noe Valley Merchants and Professionals Association — who came out in support of the Pavements to Parks initiative to create a trial parklet at 24th and Noe — and the various Noe-dwelling commenters on the Noe Valley SF blog who are enraged at the idea of potential traffic clogs from delivery trucks, etc. if Noe is no longer a through street. It's obvious why the merchants might like the idea: possibly more foot traffic to their stores, relatively few parking spaces lost. But as one somewhat reasonable commenter puts it: "Maybe what we'll find out [from the trial plaza] is that people LOVE the plaza, but people HATE the traffic. Then we'll know that we need more public space but this isn't the right space." [Noe Valley SF via NBC Bay Area]

And today the NYT revisits the Ike's Place saga, and discovers that the upstairs neighbors there might not have the purest of intentions when it comes to this noisy but wildly successful sandwich shop downstairs. Via the neighbors' lawyers, Ike has been told that he can either vacate the premises and pay damages to the neighbors for "ruining" their lives, or he can stay and pay them off to the tune of $1 million so that they can move. One can see here that they might be looking to share a little in Ike's fortunes. [NYT]
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