Visiting Old Neighborhoods

My wife, son, and #3 daughter, are at my father-in-law's place over on Main. I'm 'holding down the fort,' here on Ash: as usual on Wednesday mornings. So far, that's pretty much routine at the Gill household.

What's not so routine is that I'm borrowing my wife's laptop, doing a little online nosing around while letting cable programs wash over me. At the moment, that's a Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen nightmares rerun. The show's an occasionally-fascinating look at how smallish medium-to-high-end restaurants work. Also a reminder that I haven't plumbed the depths, when it comes to workplace conditions.

I decided to take a trip to the west coast: San Francisco downtown, to check out the places I lived there. I've just been on the 700 block of Bush Street, just off Powell, where I had a good-enough-for-a-bachelor set of rooms at the back of a building, a few floors above a French restaurant.

The restaurant is still there, although the swank place across the street is now another sort of business. Change is no surprise: I left that part of the world in the '70s.

The "Y" is still there, over the top of the hill north on Market, wrapped around the corner of Market and Sacramento. I had a room there, one floor over the lobby, overlooking an airwell/entry-level court. It's still called the YWCA. That neighborhood hasn't changed quite as much, although there's an acupuncture health center on one corner, and the British (style) pub is gone.

There's also a sign telling about a summer children's program in front of the Y, in English and Chinese. No surprises there. Although the 'tourist' Chinatown district is a couple blocks east, that part of San Francisco was part of the 'real' Chinatown when I lived there. My quarters weren't as nice as the Bush Street address, but I liked the neighborhood. I also noticed that folks there weren't as diffident as Euro-Americans tend to be, about using color on buildings. Especially red. And yellow.

I 'really ought to' get back to work now.