Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Row Houses


Cold winter light on a row of tiny Victorians that I pass on my way to and from campus every day. This is the corner of McAllister at Parker in San Francisco, a stone's throw from Golden Gate Park.

An elderly priest-librarian (now gone to his reward) told me stories about these little houses when I first went to work at the library twenty years ago. His Irish working-class grandparents had lived in one of them when he was a child, and when much of the surrounding landscape was still sand and scrub.

These days, they are inhabited by double-income professional couples. And even in a depressed market are easily worth more than a million dollars each.