Potrero Hill has one structural advantage over most of San Francisco and one structural problem, and both come from the same fact: it is a hill, east-facing, sitting outside the fog belt. The advantage is the weather — this is consistently one of the sunniest neighbourhoods in the city while the Sunset is grey. The problem is the gradient, which means an afternoon here is either well planned or a series of unnecessary climbs.
The whole neighbourhood is arranged around a slope, so the order you do things in is the difference between a pleasant afternoon and four climbs. Tell Karpo where you are starting and it will run it downhill.
The crooked street nobody queues for
Everyone knows Lombard Street. Almost nobody knows that the block of Vermont Street between 20th and 22nd, on the western slope of Potrero Hill, is by several measures more crooked than it. There is no queue, no tour bus, no line of people photographing from below. It is a genuinely strange piece of street engineering wedged in beside a freeway interchange, and you can stand in the middle of it.
Walk it downhill. The view on the way down includes the freeway structure and the industrial flats beyond, which is a more honest San Francisco image than the postcard version on the other hill.
The parks, in the right order
McKinley Square, at 20th and Vermont, has a playground, a slope of grass and a view straight at the downtown skyline. Potrero Hill Recreation Center at 22nd and Arkansas has playing fields and one of the widest views in the city — the bay, the bridge, the whole eastern shoreline. Between them, Jackson Playground on Arkansas covers the flat, active end of the neighbourhood with courts and a field.
The sequence that works: start high on the hill, take in the recreation centre view, walk down through the residential streets to McKinley Square, then finish flat at the 18th Street shops. Doing it in reverse means climbing twice and arriving hot.
Eighteenth Street
The neighbourhood's commercial run is a couple of blocks of 18th Street around Connecticut and Missouri, and it is a proper small high street: bakeries, cafés, a pub, restaurants and a corner shop, at a scale where the same people are in there on a Tuesday and a Saturday. It is where the afternoon should end, because it is at the bottom of most of the walking and it has somewhere to sit.
The sport part
The recreation centre and Jackson Playground both run public courts and fields, and the neighbourhood's leagues use them heavily on weekends — turning up to watch is a perfectly good use of an hour. The other sporting fact about Potrero Hill is proximity: the ballpark and the Mission Bay arena are both close enough that on a game day the neighbourhood serves as parking-and-eating for people walking down the hill, which is worth knowing about in both directions.
Practical notes
The crooked block of Vermont Street runs between 20th and 22nd Streets on the west slope. McKinley Square is at 20th and Vermont; Potrero Hill Recreation Center is at 22nd and Arkansas; Jackson Playground is on Arkansas Street. The commercial strip is 18th Street around Connecticut and Missouri. Potrero Hill sits outside the fog belt and is regularly sunny when western neighbourhoods are not. Gradients are steep — plan routes downhill. The 22 and 19 buses serve the hill; the ballpark and Mission Bay are within walking distance downhill on the north side, which makes game days busy.
Tags: #ThingsToDoNearMe #PotreroHill #SanFrancisco #VermontStreet #McKinleySquare #SportsSocial #SFViews #EighteenthStreet #SFParks #CrookedStreet #SFNeighborhoods #JacksonPlayground #SFWalks #SunnySF
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Ask Karpo first
Potrero Hill is all about doing things in the right order on a slope. Ask Karpo where to start from, whether the courts are in use today, and which way to walk so you finish on 18th Street instead of climbing back up to it.
