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Friday Slide Show: A Peek in the Park
4 November 2022
We took a seven mile walk yesterday, part of which crossed Golden Gate Park. We haven't been to the park in quite some time, so we brought along a camera. And we were glad we did.
What had once been some major thoroughfares through the greenery had been closed to traffic during the pandemic. There are a couple of measures on next week's ballot that address that situation, which impacts access to the museums, and another that deals with parking facilities in the park.
But the streets, we found, weren't just closed. They had been repurposed for pedestrians, joggers, dog walkers, scooters, skaters, strollers and bikes, among others.
And they were busy, too. Especially considering it was a weekday.
Apart from the yellow Adirondack chairs sprinkled here and there and new benches and tables in the middle of the road, what caught our eye was hard to miss: three huge Doggie Diner heads in the middle of the road.
When people ask us where we went to high school, we say Doggie Diner.
Al Ross owned the hamburger and hot dog chain that, at its height, boasted 30 locations in the Bay area. It operated from 1948 to 1986, featuring quality ingredients and luxurious shakes. In 1969 Ross sold it to Ogden Corp.
Doggie Diners featured a taller-than-human rotating fiberglass Dachshund head designed in the mid-1960s by Harold Bachman. But with the demise of the chain, the heads disappeared from the urban landscape.
In 2001, the city of San Francisco itself paid to restore one of the heads and installed it on the Sloat Blvd. median strip at 45th Ave., near the home Doggie Diner of your editor.
In September of last year, the non-profit Illuminate.org installed the three heads we ran across on the JFK Promenade in the park. They've been there ever since.
The one installed on Sloat Ave. has actually been named a historical monument. Which, you know, makes us feel something like a relic ourselves.
That wasn't all we noticed, though.
There's a little roadway off JFK to Sixth Ave. that has been closed to traffic for years now. It's a skate park for roller skates. And it just recently got a nice paint job that formalizes the track area, separating it from the stunts area in the infield, which even has a skate logo.
We caught a glimpse of the SkyStar Wheel, too. That's even harder to miss than the Doggie Diner heads.
Things change. And they change constantly in a city. We were glad to catch up on a few of them. Even if one made us feel something like a historical artifact.
