This is not one of the Mission streets most likely to be photographed by San Francisco visitors. This is Landers – which is, in fact, only one short block from Dolores with all the palm trees, much photographed. Most of Landers is occupied by the back of this apartment complex.
Still, for all its ugliness (and this building is automatically entered in the San Francisco Architectural Ugliness Competition, domestic category) Landers preserves sentimental associations for me.
Years ago, I had a boyfriend in this building. I met him just a few months after he arrived from New Mexico. This building was his first San Francisco home, and I show it now from the front.
My boyfriend came here to be the roommate of a long-ago work-friend who had earlier moved to San Francisco. The apartment was incredibly tiny and incredibly crowded.
When the roommate learned that my boyfriend was going to move in with me, the roommate became possessive and began to express many negative emotions.
So when we moved my boyfriend's stuff out of the Casa Dolores apartment, we felt rushed and intimidated by the roommate's fury. We had a U-Haul pickup double parked on Landers, behind the building. Well, for some reason my boyfriend treasured a cast-iron model of a cannon that weighed about 50 pounds. And in transporting that cast-iron cannon from the tiny emotion-fraught apartment out to the truck I managed to scrape most of the skin off the knuckles of my right hand. Blood memories, those are the strongest.