I took this photo over a year ago, and I’m still enchanted by how much is happening here on this bit of sidewalk at the curb at the corner of Taraval and 41st Avenue.
I had just biked over to pick up dinner from Vanida Thai on that block. I had occasion to look closely at the sidewalk because I was waiting at the corner with my bike. I mention this because when you’re waiting with a bike your gaze falls in different ways from when you’re walking, never mind driving, and so just that thought–that we see different things depending on how we’re getting around–feels consequential to me, and like a tiny gift that I “got to” see this because I happened to go over on my bike.
What I first noticed was the way the cigarette butts had accumulated in the numbers, especially the precision in the top corner of the 4. Is this one smoker or many, I wondered immediately–do they work at the pizza place on this corner, and is this a journal, of sorts, of their breaks? The cigarettes seem mostly to be the same kind, and smoked down to an almost identical length.
I was so lost in speculating about whether someone was actually doing this fine inlay work on purpose, or whether maybe it's the work of some combination of chance, gravity, & pedestrian patterns, that it took me a while to notice the most astounding thing of all: the -th.
41th!
The whole thing about street numbers is that you sort of look through them, not at them. They’re a thing you check, and then keep moving. They’re not the subject, they’re a pointer. But this little gaffe in the ordinal indicator suffix suddenly became an invitation to imagine the circumstances its making. A bit of evidence of a human hand, a blip in the grid, a benign and delightful error, in a city where driverless cars plow into firetrucks.
SF has over 18,000 intersections most of which are marked with their street names in concrete, dating back to a 1905 ordinance requiring that street stamps be used when new streets were built (to help people find their way after an earthquake apparently).
What happened with this one? Had the sidewalk crew just finished 40th and forgotten to change the stamp? The sweep all the way from 34th to 40th are all -th ordinals, so it’s easy to imagine they could just forget to swap in the -st for this street. (By the way, I learned that the -st of first originates in fore-st, i.e. the most fore, the first.)
After the run of -th from 34th - 40th, things get wild— 41st, 42nd, 43rd. Three different suffixes! Then it settles back into -th all the way to the ocean, at 48th.
How would you even say 41th?
When I posted this photo on Instagram, my cousin commented, “my tongue doesn’t know what to do!”
If you try to approach it coming through “first” forty-first-th, it feels like, well, plowing into a firetruck.
Forty-oneth, my partner said matter-of-factly. Yes! of course! I’d been thinking about this for several days by that point and that still hadn’t occurred to me.
In sharing this photo, I learned from my friend Lisa Ruth Elliott that there’s a Flickr group called Street Tpyo [sic!], San Francisco Style. I also found another site for collecting these, and an article about the phenomenon in SFist. Some are oversights, some improvisations — a backwards 3 where an E was needed, a W standing in, upside down, for an M. Some are mirrored inversions. Many have missing letters. Hard to correct a typo in concrete once it’s dry.
I lo///ve this one I found on Quintara and 42nd.
