Build the T-Tourist

OK, quick story: about 200 million years ago, the supercontinent Pangea began to break apart and the land mass that would become North America detached from the land that would go on to be Africa and eventually California formed BUT had the misfortune to be right on several major fault lines where the North American Plate meets the Pacific Plate. This meeting is not always a pleasant one, and occasionally the plates will shimmy against one another, causing death and dsestruction of property. One such event happened in 1989.

Meanwhile, the hapless car-drunk citizens of San Francisco constructed the Embarcadero Freeway, a hideous hulking concrete structure that connected the Bay Bridge to Broadway and Chinatown. In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the EF was damaged beyond repair and eventually torn down, opening the waterfront and greatly improving the lives of everyone. BUT not everyone was pleased. Many Chinatown merchants believed that the EF ferried customers into their Sales Zone and Chinatown power broker Rose Pak worked tirelessly behind the scenes to build a new way to get people there.

AND SO IT CAME TO PASS that in 2012 The City began construction on the Central Subway, a transit line so powerful it has THREE WHOLE STATIONS and cost, idk, 30 quadrillion dollars or something. You can get on at 4th and Brannon and be whisked (to the extent anything on Muni does whisking) to the Rose Pak Chinatown Station on Washington. Did this save Chinatown? No, Chinatown was fine the whole time. Was this a massive boondoggle that made a lot of money for contractors? What do you think.

So it turns out tunnel boring machines (which are not machines designed to wear tunnels out with endless stories about their high school baseball career but the other kind of boring [also, why does bore mean those two completely different concepts? I should look into that]) are big and unwieldy and you can’t just pop them out of the ground wherever so the TBMs kept on tunneling past Chinatown and finally got tired and stopped in, of all places, North Beach, a neighborhood I have lived in twice and still love, directly under the former Pagoda Palace theater. There the two TBMs were disassembled and extracted.

HERE’S WHERE IT GETS WEIRD. “So,” you might think to yourself, “I guess the North Beach Station was constructed right there, on the site of the Pagoda Palace theater.” That makes perfect sense! Also, YOU’D BE WRONG. There is no North Beach Station. There is a giant tunnel from Chinatown to North Beach but no subway and no station. It’s fucking INSANE that there’s no station.

The First Rule of Tunnel Boring Machines, according to local knowledge haver Burrito Justice, is IF YOU HAVE A TUNNEL BORING MACHINE NEVER STOP TUNNELING. He’s right! The T-Third line could go to Alcatraz and Angel Island and Marin and, fuck it, Portland Oregon for all I care.

BUT now we may see some progress! Supervisor Danny Sauter, whose district includes North Beach, Chinatown, the twisty part of Lombard, and the retro-future Hyatt on Market, wants to GET SOME SHIT GOING!

Hell yeah Danny! If I was at Moscone Center I would be so down for a bowl of cioppino or, let’s just be honest, a drink at Gino and Carlo at 8 a.m. So what’s the problem?

Small minds! Let Danny cook. Let’s go to Fishermans Wharf and build the underground Geary line Mom keeps talking about and so forth. Democrats are taking over soon and the money tap will be flowing. Let’s build some shit! Look at this:

Fucking SWOON. Anyway, the point of this whole thing is that it’s stupid to not use a tunnel you already have to get oncologists from a convention to Garden of Eden on Broadway ASAP.

POSTSCRIPT NUMBER ONE IF YOU’RE STILL HERE:

Ohhhhhh OK I can see that.

POSTSCRIPT NUMBER TWO IF YOU’RE STILL HERE:

I moved to San Francisco in 1990 and my landlady, who had not left North Beach in several years, gave me directions to my new pad that included the Embarcadero Freeway which had been closed for about a year. I remember standing in an empty parking lot downtown (it was a Sunday) and frantically calling her for ground level directions (I was on a pay phone and there was no Google Maps, also picture this scene in washed out 70’s color). She was as surprised as me to learn the EF was gone. But she gave me a FREE parking space in North Beach so for that I am eternally in her debt. Bless you, Sunny, wherever you are.