I went to see a man about a sandwich, but I ended up at the library.
I’d never been to Ocean View before, but I live by the maxim: “if you really want to know a city, take its public transit to the end of the line and get off.”
So, I did. And yes, the M technically ends at Balboa Park, but I’ve been there, and I hadn’t been to Ocean View so I got off a few stops early. (Plus, like I said, there was the matter of a sandwich.)
Technically, I cheated a little bit. Normally when I write one of these library posts, I’m returning a book to its home location after getting it through the San Francisco Public Library hold system. But I hadn’t gotten a book from the Ocean View branch, I just wanted to visit. And technically, I did borrow 3 books from there today when I went, so we can just pretend I’m writing this post a couple weeks from now.
As soon as I walked in and tried to orient myself, the librarian immediately asked if I needed help. And I do mean, the librarian: the Ocean View branch is so tiny, there is only room for one person at the checkout desk on the ground floor. I beelined for the Lucky Day shelf, which was very well stocked with exactly the kind of books I like: dense depressing fiction about shitty things happening to perfectly lovely people.
The vast majority of the visible collection on the first floor is devoted to Chinese-language materials, and children’s books: as it should be, judging by the patrons I saw occupying every available chair in this reading room.
The second floor is committed to a computer lab, bathrooms, and what look like staff offices (but I didn’t snoop around). There’s a charming linoleum staircase mosaic (no, those words had never been combined in this way before) of letters emerging from a fountain pen and ending up inside a computer mouse circa Macintosh Performa days. The mouse can probably be explained by the fact that this branch was opened on June 7, 2000: the first new branch building to be built in San Francisco since 1969.
The outside of the library is decorated with a sculptural tile installation of clay hands releasing a dove, surrounded by plaques of letters from different alphabets against a background of laurel leaves. It includes the letter “Ж” from the Cyrillic: my first initial in Belarusian.
It doesn’t escape me that both of the posts I’ve written as part of this series have been about San Francisco neighborhoods with working class roots, where homes are owned by people of color who were prohibited from buying elsewhere, and whose communities were deeply damaged by civic neglect in the 1980s and 1990s.
It’s also fitting that my own journey there was by train since Ocean View began “as a community built … around a railway station.” But the disuse of that station would also spell its doom:
In 1904, the Bayshore cut-off was completed and the regular passenger service was discontinued through the Ocean View Station. About this time, the electric Interurban Line was started on Mission, causing a shift of business development to the Mission. The Ocean View never recovered from this abandonment.
But still, this is San Francisco, and the skyrocketing real estate prices over the last two decades left no neighborhood un-gentrified: many homes gleam with a fresh paint reflecting off the Teslas parked in their driveways.
I met several dogs, as I always do on my urban adventures. An adolescent pit/lab mix barked at me from a gated entryway, and when I didn’t jump away, quieted down and cocked his head to the side, surprised.
The man who made my sandwich called me “friend”, and while waiting, I browsed an impressive selection of bagged cocktails and tempting Michelada-dipped gummies.
I didn’t catch a glimpse of the ocean, though. Not even once.
