Wistaria & 49th

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More photos from the (Not Very) Great Alameda Photo Freakout of '09. Said event being the morning I tracked down the Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial and the nano-parklet at Alameda & 38th, and assorted other spots nobody but me cares about. Well, me and a few loyal Gentle Readers, plus the occasional Google hit that's often the result of someone searching on an unrelated topic -- and typically they don't stay long. I kind of enjoy tracking down really obscure places and things around town, but the downside is that pretty much by definition I don't get a flood of visitors searching for the things I cover. Which is fine, I mean, if it really bothered me I'd stop and do something else.

Still, this is one of those times when I stop and wring my hands and wonder aloud just how far down this particular rabbit hole I intend to go. The "park" at Wistaria & 49th shows up alongside the aforementioned two places in an obscure city document I keep linking to. But it's not really much of a park, is it? It's a steep, narrow, unbuildable strip of land, the result of the city street grid bonking up against the side of the Alameda Ridge. There isn't even a decaying statue of a forgotten politician to hold our interest here. So I'm starting to wonder if I've wandered off the far side of esoteric into... whatever's over there, I'm not sure what that would be. One of these days, I'll be taking third rate photos of some nondescript weedy highway median somewhere, and a white van full of anorak-clad British trainspotters will drive by, and they'll laugh at me and call me a nerd. And it's not like I'll be in a position to argue with them.

There is one point of interest here, which you can see in the top photo. The Alameda area is home to a fair number of public stairs, and one of these staircases forms the short side of the park here. I was doing a public stairs project a while back, until I ran out of examples that I knew the location of. Not knowing Alameda very well, I never covered anything in this part of town. I really ought to have stopped and taken a few shots of just the stairs while I was here, but I'd forgotten all about the old stairs project. I suppose I could go back and take care of that at some point. Which sounds kind of silly, but I'm not going to absolutely rule it out.

The stairs appear on a couple of walking maps, and they point out a number of the other staircases in the area. So I could probably ramp the stairs project back up again if I was so inclined. I can't absolutely rule that out either.

So to address the rabbit hole question: The answer is this far, and a little further. There are two more stops left on the Great Photo Freakout after this one, and they don't even have stairs to make them, uh, interesting.

In my defense, I do have a few posts about actual interesting places and things lying around in my drafts folder. But the boring places are low hanging fruit. The fact that there's nothing much here makes the research part really easy. So I guess it's got that going for it, at least.