Urban art at its worst.

Walk south along that chicest of San Francisco’s streets, Fillmore, and turn west on McAllister and you are suddenly in an area which feels like a concentration camp. Lined with housing estates for the poor, each comes with a healthy ration of locked gates, barbed wire and surveillance cameras.

Then, just when you though things could get no worse as you approach City Hall, something like this confronts you:

Lefty. G1, 35mm, f/5/5, 1/400, ISO 100

An appropriate tribute to one of the greatest government crimes of our times. Public schooling. This mural suggests that this chap finally cracked and set about himself with a heavy object, doing the students justice. Can’t say I blame him. Just imagine turning up to school only to be confronted with this daily ….

Those were the days.

G1, 33mm, f/5.4, 1/800, ISO 100

Back in the days when men were men, and women were men. At the UN building in San Francisco.

Some people never grow up.

I suspect this is the sort of thing you can only see on the West Coast, where you can still occasionally find hippies driving around in VW Microbuses.

G1, 30mm, f/5.3, 1/1600, ISO100

Someone really should tell these folks the Sixties ended a while back, valid as their sentiment may be.

Spotted, where else?, in San Francisco.

At work.

This man is a cable car conductor. San Francisco’s cable cars have been using the turntable at Market and Powell since the late nineteenth century.

G1, 22mm, f/5, 1/250th, ISO100

At this terminus, the conductor has to exit the car after aligning it carefully using a trapdoor in the car’s floor, pulls a lever in the street and then manually turns the car to face uphill once more.

I love this man’s direct, unflinching gaze, and his obvious pride in an occupation over one hundred years old.

Just using mine.

You have to wonder whether this eye research business purposefully chose the building for its two-eyed window or whether it’s just one of those things that happen.

Eye research. G1, 42mm f/5.6, 1/1250, ISO 100

I rarther fancy serendipity is at work here.

Spotted on Fillmore Street in San Francisco.