Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Handy Guides to San Francisco

The other day, I was standing at the bus stop reading Oh the Glory Of It All (which I am loving, by the way) and came upon this dazzling paragraph about the city I now call home:
San Francisco looks like a hand. A right one, palm side up, forearm the peninsula leading down south. And this is true down to the details: the correspondences of palm lines to major streets, whorls to neighborhoods, fingers to bridges, calluses to hills: the crease of the "lifeline" the smooth arc of highway 80 curving off the Bay Bridge of the pointer; the lower and more diagonal of the two other main hand lines ("headline" and "heartline" in palmistry) replicates the diagonal of Market Street, while its companion is the kink of the Geary Expressway arcing into and becoming Van Ness. There's a nameless groove that doubles for Lombard Street, a perfect crosshatchy area for the alleys of Chinatown, the fat lump anchoring the thumb is Potrero Hill and Hunter's Point, right where they should be. The Bay Bridge is the pointer, the Golden Gate the ring finger, the rest of the fingers are gone--unless you count the finger piers.
And then later that night when I got home and was reading some of my favorite blogs, guess what I found posted on Strange Maps?

A different hand-related visual representation of the San Francisco area! (Click here for the original Strange Maps post, including a much larger image.)

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