It's Tops & Grooves

Like Stow Lake, these two businesses next to each other look super-charming.

Too Beautiful for This World: "The World's Finest Theater" (Part one of a series of rants)

These photos are all of the Fox Theater, designed by Thomas Lamb, located on Market and 9th, built in 1929, the self-proclaimed "World's Finest Theater!" Based on these photos, I'm pretty sure they were right. It's all so baroque! Can you imagine going to see a film in a theater like this? I mean, the Castro is alright and all, but man... (My father remembers seeing some sort of Boris Karloff movie at the Fox with his cubscout troop, probably in the late 50s. "It was really cool," he says). Unfortunately, like many theaters in this town, the Fox was just too beautiful for this world, and in 1963 it was torn down.







I don't even want to write about what it was replaced with. It's called Fox Plaza and it's the ugliest fucking building in San Francisco. Sigh.

Even Boring Stuff at Least Used to Look Cute

Back in ye olden days, even boring stuff like the sign for a parking garage had some style. Like this one, located on the San Francisco Marketplace building, which is on Market and, uh, 9th or something:



Anyway, the point is, it seems like everything that is built nowadays, especially buildings/structures which serve a semi-utilitarian purpose (government buildings, hospitals, parking garages, etc.) are made as boring and ugly as humanly possible. It's like, Slab Of Concrete, Slab of Concrete, window, repeat, ad nauseum. You know? I mean, a parking structure is not an interesting place to be. But do they really need to be so aggressively ugly?

Ex Round Table, Market Street

Above is a building on Market Street, between 7th and 8th. It has faces carved allover it, which you will see if you enlarge the picture. Like lots of gorgeous old buildings, the bottom has been hollowed out (probably the inside too) to make way for something else beautiful and special- a now abandoned Round Table Pizza. In the first photo, you can see the remains of the carved columns peeking out from behind the boarded-up exterior. Who knows what might be next? A store selling Nike Dunks? Or maybe they'll just knock it down.