Frisco Vista

By David Enos

For a handy map of canoe and kayak put-in locations around the Bay Area, check out gotoes.org. Happy paddling!

.

map by Chronicle Graphics
I missed this article when it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle back in December. It presents several of the city’s neighborhoods from the perspective of the homeless.
I work in neighborhood no. 2, the “service/crack sector.” Chronicle staff writer Kevin Fagan describes it pretty accurately:
During the day, soup kitchens such as St. [...]

SF Gate provides this cheery map, on which each pin represents a homicide. What a lot of them!

Could violent criminals be going into upscale neighborhoods and mowing down the ruling class? Let’s compare that map to this one, which I posted last week, showing San Francisco housing prices. Hmmm.

Thinking of buying a house or two in San Francisco? The Trulia real estate prices heat map might be just the thing to help you narrow your search.
Shown are price averages as of January 23, 2008. As you can see, if you refuse to pay less than a million dollars you will have to scratch [...]

By 1938 the essential outlines of the city were filled in and established. Some names have changed — I didn’t know that Fort Point was called Fort Winfield Scott. The location of Funston Park was called Lobos Square. USF was the San Francisco College of Women. There were “bear cages” in the park, as well [...]

This cool San Francisco neighborhood map is currently sold out from ORK posters, but I assume it will be back in print at some point. It’s much more sophisticated from a graphic design point of view than this version.
The typeface appears to be FF DIN Condensed.
(Note that the map is copyrighted by ORK design and [...]

Dreamworld.org has a good overview of San Francisco neighborhoods, with some comment under the heading “a local’s guide.” Nice identification of SF neighborhoods, although the typography and color scheme would induce migraines. For the screenshot above I mellowed out the colors a bit.

This great map from the 1890s shows creeks in blue and marshes in green, with modern landfill in magenta. A larger version is at the Oakland Museum of California site.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a series of excellent bay maps on the web. Although the NOAA cautions that the maps are not to be used for nautical navigation, they do show depth contours in considerable detail. This section shows the Bay Bridge where a South Korean vessel collided with the bridge, releasing [...]

This 1907 street map from the San Francisco History website has great detail. Clicking on the sections of the map at that site enlarges them.

Bay City Guide has posted a selection of useful Bay Area maps in pdf format.
Included are:

San Francisco street map
San Francisco MUNI map
Bay Area / Northern California map
Golden Gate Park / Union Square map (interesting concept)
Fisherman’s Wharf map
BART map
Ferry map