Corona Heights

San Francisco has more than one hundred different neighborhoods, as well as old subdivisions of neighborhoods that only a handful of people still acknowledge. I don't know if this many neighborhoods in a city of around 750,000 inhabitants constitutes more of a focus on place and local-ness than that exhibited by other cities; but it interests me. The various microcosms of the city interest me, for a variety of reasons.

Today the baby and I explored the Randall Museum and Corona Heights Park for about an hour. I wasn't really touring the entire district known as Corona Heights; but somehow, the neighborhood still made its presence felt. It's tucked away behind the Haight and Buena Vista Park; behind, also, the Duboce Triangle area and the Castro. It feels like it's tucked "behind" everything, in fact--when maybe it's also at the center of things.

One does feel at the center of something, climbing the steep stairs to the top of the hill at Corona Heights Park. The views are spectacular. My son was a little disturbed by the sweeping panorama; he kept making little distressed noises as we climbed up. I tried to talk soothingly to him as I huffed and puffed to the top--"We're almost there; a few more steps and we're there." Once we arrived at the top, he was fine. Something about climbing up rapidly, with the wind gusting all around us and the sense of infinity (or void) rushing in as we looked out across the Bay, must have thrown him off balance, momentarily.

The Randall Museum itself is a place with great promise, but I always feel a little disappointed walking through its exhibits. There's just not much "there" there, as ambitious as they seem at times with all the activities they offer. The whole set-up of the animal exhibits could use a bit of re-thinking, in my opinion. They have some wonderful animals; but the aquariums at the entrance to the room, with their handfuls of sea anemones and jellyfish, are unlovely to say the least, and not all that interesting; and the huge, noisy ravens in the middle of the room should be moved somewhere else, or left out of the exhibit altogether.

But I won't continue to rant about that. My little guy enjoyed the turtles, and the rabbits, and enough other creatures to make the trip completely worthwhile; and the tot room, which also lacks "oomph" in terms of the toys it contains, has an interesting design; my son enjoyed playing both in the loft area, and down under the loft, in a little plastic "house" with a door he could easily open and shut. It's obvious that his own sense of place (very, very localized) is rapidly developing.