The Sunday Streets events are being threatened - if you’d like to read my rant about it, please visit the Rincon Hill Examiner.

Happy Friday! - jamie

According to an article that appeared on the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco is the most “walkable” city in the nation. The most walkable sections of the City today are Chinatown, the Financial District, and “Downtown” according to Walk Score. I guess I would lump Rincon Hill into a portion of the latter two areas. SOMA came in 8th on the list. Rincon Hill will become even more walkable over the years as Folsom Street becomes a 2-way Folsom Boulevard, the new Transbay Transit Center gets built and opens up, and many more people move into the neighborhood to help support the types of services we must get from other neighborhoods at present. I couldn’t be happier that I have to remind myself to take my car out for a drive once in awhile to keep the battery in decent shape and can walk, bicycle or take public transit to most of my destinations in the City.

While I’m discussing walking, I just posted a new entry on my Rincon Hill Examiner page about this weekend’s AIDS Walk and the Choose Good Block Party. I hope to see you at one or both of those events on Sunday!

I noticed that the parking lot beside the Ferry Building was closed yesterday while walking over to Pancho Villa for lunch. According to an article in today’s Examiner, the parking lot (a.k.a. Pier 1/2) has been closed since July 3rd when it was decided the structure was in worse shape than what the Port of San Francisco initially thought.

Businesses at the Ferry Building are already noticing an impact from customers left to search for parking nearby since their standby parking lot is now closed. I would suggest to my neighbors that if they must drive to the Ferry Building, the most plentiful parking lots (at least on Saturdays when the Farmer’s Market happens) are located at the Embarcadero Center buildings just a short walk away.

Credit: Jamie Whitaker

Sorry for the lack of posts … busy as can be at my full-time job with a fresh quarter-end and, in most cases, fiscal year-end for my clients. I’ll probably write more about this on my Examiner.com page (for which I’ve set up a forwarding domain, www.SFRinconHill.com) later this week, but I wanted to share an image with you now. The expanded, 30′ sidewalks planned for Spear, Main, and Beale Streets can be previewed on the NE side of The Infinity where I photographed the benches pictured with this post (Spear and Folsom Streets). As sidewalk and roadwork is performed on these three streets, we should see more 30′ sidewalks and other public amenities like the benches.

I’ve recently been invited to contribute articles about the Rincon Hill neighborhood and the surrounding area to the examiner.com web site. I’ll likely post news-oriented articles to the Rincon Hill Examiner page while keeping this Rincon Hill neighborhood blog a little more casual and opinionated (but that may change). While the RinconHillSF.org web site remains non-commercial, I will get compensated by examiner.com based on the number of page views for my posts at Rincon Hill Examiner.

As always, please let me know of community events and news that I can share with our neighbors. Email me at rinconhill@gmail.com.