November 2020 in San Francisco started with great anxiety. Just a few days from the election, no one knew what would happen. Turns out people voted and life continued.
Here are a few photos from San Francisco from the first two weeks of November.
This is my hand dropping off my ballot two days early at the voting center in front of Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. The department of elections had closed off Grove Street and erected huge tents to bring the voting facility outdoors. I like how the color of my ballot kind of matched the ballot attendant’s glasses.
The day before election day, businesses all over town started boarding up in case there was civil unrest. 2020 has been a year of boarded up businesses. After the initial lockdown in March, many businesses boarded up their doors and windows to protect them from theft and vandalism. One night in June during the the Black Lives Matter protests, wide spread looting broke out in San Francisco’s business districts and many stores boarded up to prevent further losses. This third round of preemptive boarding up measures were particularly unnerving. Knowing that the election results would be close and likely unknown for days afterword was unnerving enough. Fortunately there was no civil unrest and the election went the way 86% of San Francisco voters had hoped. The clear winner for 2020 is the plywood industry.
Autumn in San Francisco can be somewhat subdued compared to many places in the U.S. The temperatures don’t get too cold, and there are not a lot of trees changing colors and losing their leaves. The evenings can can take on a really beautiful, soft and etherial feeling. The company I work for gave us Election Day off, so I took an opportunity to hike down to The Embarcadero. I as walked between the piers I saw sea lions swimming in the bay and long rows of pelicans skimming over the water. I walked out the end of Pier 7 to enjoy the view, and just as I was returning to the shoreline, the lights on the pier lit up creating nice contrast with the sunset kissed clouds.
Several piers long the waterfront have been converted to office space. These reflections are in windows of Prologis, an industrial real estate company located in Pier 1.
With Halloween over, Christmas can take center stage in store windows. I love taking photographs of the many creative window displays around town. Out of the Closet Thrift Stores is a non-profit dedicated to helping people living with HIV and AIDS. Artist eiotown has been contributing to their window displays for years. His work is amazing. You can see more at his website here:
http://www.eiotown.com/store-window-displays.html.
On November 6, protesters painted a 240 feet long and 22 feet wide street mural on Montgomery Street that read COUNT EVERY VOTE. The mural also depicted a hand depositing a ballot into a ballot box and the words: "Jones Day, Hands Off Our Ballots." This was in front of the offices of the law firm Jones Day. The firm served as outside counsel to President Donald Trump's reelection campaign.
101 California Street is a 48-story office skyscraper bound by California, Davis, Front, and Pine Streets. Completed in 1982, its distinctive features include a cylindrical tower and a seven-story, glass-enclosed lobby atrium. It also offers some really cool window reflections of nearby office towers.
One of the strongest impressions I remember when I visited San Francisco as a kid was the hotel with my name on it: The Hyatt Embarcadero. Built in 1973, it was designed by the Atlanta-based architect and developer John Portman as part of the Embarcadero Center project. It has some of the most unique architectural features of any building in the city. Situated adjacent to Embarcadero plaza, its wedge-shaped design has angled balconies open to the plaza to the bay. Its most notable feature is the visually dazzling and futuristic 17-story atrium, with tiers of balconies to create an inverted pyramid. The hotel is crowned with The Equinox, a revolving rooftop restaurant with 360 degree views that looks like an alien spacecraft ready to detach and fly into space. In this photograph, the hotel’s exterior is framed by the The Tulip, a 1981 Portman-designed sculpture with a walkway that connects the hotel to the Embarcadero Center. The dappled light comes from reflections off the Embarcadero Four tower.
This 22-foot tall, 4,500 pound stainless steel sculpture by French artist Jean Dubuffet named La Chiffonnière ("Rag Woman") stands in Embarcadero Plaza. On November 7th there was a Count Every Vote protest there and someone had propped up this sign next to her.
This is the Salesforce East tower at 350 Mission street. If you look up the facade of the building at an angle it creates quite the optical illusion.
This 40 foot stainless steel sculpture called “Time Signature,” by Richard Deutsch stands in Foundry Square in front of the BlackRock building at 400 Howard Street.
Around 8:30am on Saturday, November 7th, our neighbors started yelling out the windows and banging on pots and pans. Fox News had called the presidential election for Joe Biden. It turned out to be a noisy day in downtown San Francisco. People spilled out into streets hooting and hollering and drove around honking their horns. Spontaneous celebrations erupted in the Castro district and in the Civic Center. Here, happy people held signs up to passers-by in front of San Francisco City Hall.
Some people driving by reciprocated holding up signs of their own.
This hitching post in front of the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill is a relic of days gone by when horses were the one of best modes of transportation available. I like how the person on the motorcycle contrasted with this small piece of history.
"I Left My Heart in San Francisco" sang by Tony Bennett has become an anthem for the city. This statue of Tony Bennett is outside the Fairmont Hotel. Appropriately for 2020, he wears a face mask.
Since 2015 OpenSFHistory has been curating historical photographs of San Francisco and putting them online in an interactive map. To date, they have posted over 50 thousand Historical Images. In 2020 they started OpenSFHistory in the Streets - encouraging people to become guerrilla historians posting images on streets where the photographs were taken. This one at Green and Jones Streets showed what this corner looked like after being excavated just over 100 years ago.
Sunlight kissing the corner of the New Federal Building at 7th and Stevenson Streets.
Light reflecting off windows onto a building on Dore Street in the South of Market district.
These shadows are cast by the lights that illuminate a billboard outside the Oasis night club.
A bench dedicated to Modesto Fegurdo outside Butter, I dive bar South of Market.
Colorful geometric street art on a boarded up building.
This time of year, the afternoon sun shines brightly down Market Street. City crews spray reclaimed water on the street enhancing the sun’s reflections.
The Andrews Hotel on lower Nob Hill has been under renovations since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Late afternoon sun plays off the scaffolding and creates dramatic shadows.
I found the “Forever” in the Forever 21 store sign ironic, now that it has permanently closed.
Although this is an inanimate object, I felt sorry for this poor, abandoned “love” cow pillow on Washington Street.
I spotted this guy playing a guitar on a fire escape on Powell Street.