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Friday Slide Show: Hidden Gems Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

14 October 2022

Glen Park sits at the lower end of Glen Canyon, San Francisco's prehistoric gouge south of Twin Peaks. It seems every house on the winding streets is different as it clings to the hillside it is built on.

It also has a small but interesting business district with a lot more going on than your typical shopping mall. There's an excellent market with a real butcher and fresh seafood, a handful of privately-owned coffee shops, a bustling taqueria, a quaint French bistro, an elegant Italian restaurant, a handy Chinese restaurant, an unforgettable pizzeria, an aromatic (let's just say) cheese shop, a wonderful bookstore with weekly musical performances and, well, a little more if you look for it.

It's no wonder it refers to itself as San Francisco's Hidden Gem.

Of course since Glen Park is in a city, it's not all Disneyland. The current complaint in Glen Park is the Bird Seed Lady. She has filled a garage with bird seed which she regularly scatters in public to feed the pigeons.

But this "scattering" is more a dumping of large quantities of seed that has led to rat infestations that have recently forced a closure of the market. Residents are furious with public officials for addressing the symptoms (rodents invading the market) and not the cause of the problem (the Bird Seed Lady feeding the rodents).

There seems to be little the market can do to protect itself except keep after the problem, which doesn't prevent the health department from closing it down. It's certainly a frustrating situation in that otherwise charming corner of the city.

Sign of the Times. A hidden gem but not Disneyland.

But despite that problem, we were still able to find plenty of hidden gems the other day when we visited.

A flower arrangement in an alley window, an elaborately painted facade, an I-beam buttressing a tree, a home built within a narrow street corner, a stained glass star seen through a darkened room, Little Free Libraries, a memorial stone to a gardener, a wall of a building painted with a map of the town in 1942, another narrow lot with a house so small it barely accommodates a window.

It's these little clues to intelligent life that we found to be the real hidden gems of Glen Park. And on an overcast day that diffused the light, we photographed a few of them for your amusement.


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