San Francisco on Sketchcrawl Day

By Pete Scully in San Francisco, California

A few weekends ago it was another Worldwide Sketchcrawl Day. I was in San Francisco, though I didn’t manage to meet the other SF sketchers this time. While the sketchcrawl was starting up at Duboce Park, I wanted to have a look around Market Street first. This section of it is a little sketchy, but there’s stuff to sketch.  So I stood on the corner of Market and 6th and sketched a panorama. While I sketched, a religious group across the street started bursting into songs of praise. After a while, a homeless man with a dog decided to stand not far away from me and take that as the appropriate opportunity to perform an open inspection of the content of his underpants. Giving it a good old inspection. I moved away for a bit until the boys were back in the barracks and he’d shuffled off (though public nudity is not uncommon in San Francisco – once I saw a man wearing nothing but a very tiny little leather jacket), and I got back to work. Oh, the Tenderloin. When I was done with this sketch I had lunch at the vastly more upscale environment of the Westfield shopping center food court, and then took the Muni Metro up to Duboce Park.

Duboce Park is quite nice. It has a very Local Neighbourhood feel about it, though this being San Francisco I’m sure you have to be doing pretty well to join the local neighbourhood these days. I’ve never really been here before, except for when travelling through on the Muni, or that time last March when I wandered about nearby with a couple of friends from England on the way from Castro to the Haight. The park is filled with dog walkers, families, young people laying on the grass reading books.And e-books. While I was sketching the park, there was a kids birthday party going on nearby (with a pinata), in the canine section dogs were running around and barking and texting, or whatever it is dogs do, and construction vehicles lined the street beside the Muni lines. I sketched the second one from the steps of the Harvey Milk Center for the Arts.

My final sketch of the day was another big panorama, this time in nearby Lower Haight Street. This is a very colourful neighbourhood, edgier, more ‘hipster’ than ‘hippy’, and there was some sort of small daytime dance party (or maybe it was a record store with DJs and cool people) a few steps away. I overheard two guys talking, there was talk of this party and that band, all many levels of cool above my coolscale (or below it, depending on your point of view). I was aching standing here, and the wind was picking up (sky was blue for periods, but a lot of clouds and fog rolled in and it got very chilly. A welcome change from the Davis heat I was escaping, but I needed to sit down and relax for a bit, so I walked down to the Toronado pub nearby and got a beer. Another busy sketching day in the city.