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View From the Seventh Floor
27 August 2024
We'd taken a walk around the ward on the seventh floor in the morning, just to keep active. We noticed a few color pinhole prints and a couple of black-and-white "digital prints" of blooming flowers on the walls.
4) Downtown. Salesforce Tower.
We brought our iPhone but we didn't take any photos even when we wandered over to the elevators and lobby/family waiting area where a nurse had told us there were some great views of the city.
On our morning walk those great views were dampened by rain. So we resolved to return when the sun came out.
By 2 p.m., the sun had broken through and the streets had dried. So we took another walk around the ward and snapped a few shots with our phone.
1) Divisadero. Looking north.
They were compromised a bit by the fluorescent fixtures in the lobby reflecting off the big windows. Not as bad as during our morning walk but still a problem.
The solution, we knew, is to step up to the window. But with double vision that we dealt with by closing one eye, we didn't trust ourselves to know where to stop. So we moved closer, watching the floor, until most of the reflections were out of the frame.
2) Alamo Square. The northeast view.
Then we took a few shots from a vantage point we don't hope to revisit.
We looked (1) north up Divisadero, (2) northeast to Alamo Square, (3) east to Civic Center and (4) down Geary Blvd. to downtown.
What we like about these images is that, unlike postcards which fein landscape views, these shots show what's right under our nose and what's beyond our reach. We've cropped a bit of that out but you can still see the depth of focus the camera achieved.
3) Civic Center. City Hall.
There are the usual landmarks, of course. City Hall, with its splendid dome. The Salesforce Tower at 1,070 feet flanked by the Bank of America building (as we continue to refer to it) at 779 feet tall (but sitting at a higher elevation than the Salesforce Tower).
Otherwise we might have thought we'd died and gone to heaven.