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Friday Slide Show: Tunnel Tops
5 August 2022
As fate would have it, the suction hose on our six-year-old Miele C1 Classic vacuum snapped in two just as we were going over the big living room rug. Fortunately we have a wealth of medical supplies here, so we patched it with some Tegaderm (which is a marvelous cure for this sort of thing) and finished the job.
But it's a Miele, for crying out load. We can't have it looking like our even older Hoover (on which we first performed this miraculous surgery) in the garage. The Hoover has a license plate that says, "My Other Vacuum Is a Miele."
We found the part right away online. But we remembered the vacuum guy who sold us this thing when the Hoover's hose couldn't be repaired (you know, before medical miracles). He was a champ so we wanted to do business with him not Bezos.
Except he closed up during the pandemic.
Still, the urge to shop locally persisted and we found a little shop that's been around a long time that had the part in stock. Phil's Electric responded to our email right away with the price and availability.
We popped over there to pick it up earlier this week but it happens to be a block from the Presidio. So we thought we'd bring a camera and see what we could see there before we picked up our new Miele hose.
We had not yet seen the new Tunnel Tops, a 14 acre development over the Presidio Parkway, the freeway between the Marina District and the Golden Gate Bridge. The Parkway replaced the infamous Doyle Drive elevated freeway, which was frighteningly too narrow to begin with.
There are two tunnels on the Parkway and two open spaces on top of them. To the west, by the cemetery, there's Battery Bluff Park. That was too far a walk for us. But we made it to the eastern tunnel park, Tunnel Tops.
We've always thought of the Main Parade Grounds as the heart of the park, but we're entertaining the idea that Tunnel Tops is the new public heart of the park.
It consists of a welcoming Presidio Plaza area with a Parklands Overlook nearby, a Western Lawn with adjacent Campfire Circle, the Golden Gate Meadow in the middle with a Veterans Overlook, a wide Presidio Steps that would make the Spanish Steps in Rome blush at the top of which is the Crossroads Overlook which leads on to East Meadow and the Bay Overlook.
Tunnel Tops. Click for an enlarged map.
You'll see all that in the slide show plus the imaginative Outpost playground down those Presidio Steps.
It just happened to be a gorgeous sunny day when we were there so the images are intense.
We didn't escape without being asked to take a group photo with a smartphone. We obliged and the visitors were delighted with the photo. All eyes open, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. We wished each other well and continued along our different paths.
Just like the old (pre-pandemic) days, we thought.
