San Francisco is not known for detached houses with landscaped setbacks, lining picturesque, park-side streets. But between 1905 and 1924, thirty-six such neighborhoods, called residence parks, were proposed or built in the city. Hundreds like them were constructed across the country yet they are not well known or understood today. This book examines the city planning aspects of residence parks in a new way, with tracing how developers went about the business of building them, on different sites and for different markets, and how they kept out black and Asian residents.

San Francisco is not known for detached houses with landscaped setbacks, lining picturesque, park-side streets. But between 1905 and 1924, thirty-six such neighborhoods, called residence parks, were proposed or built in the city. Hundreds like them were constructed across the country yet they are not well known or understood today. This book examines the city planning aspects of residence parks in a new way, with tracing how developers went about the business of building them, on different sites and for different markets, and how they kept out black and Asian residents.

"Cracks in the Asphalt" is a one of a kind guide book to thirty of San Francisco's Community Gardens, but will be of interest to those not in the city! One important aspect of the book is to let readers know that these gardens were born out of the hard work of each group of neighborhood activists whose role was to not only create a garden where there was a dumping ground, but to create a sense of community as well. Because of this the gardens are situated over looking freeways, in downtown areas, in out of the way corners and busy neighborhoods. Beautiful full-color photos by Stacey J. Miller throughout!

When youre in West Portal and the adjacent Forest Hill and St. Francis Wood, its hard to believe youre still in San Francisco. These quiet and picturesque neighborhoods are decidedly non-urban, yet they are connected by a streetcar tunnel that leads under Twin Peaks to the bustling downtown area, two miles through the citys mountainous core. In fact, West Portal is named for the western end of this tunnel, which opened in 1917 to bring residents from the city center to what were new garden suburbs. Originally West Portal was sandy and scruffy, while Forest Hill and St. Francis Wood were heavily forested. The neighborhoods grew rapidly in the 1920s, and today West Portal is a popular shopping and entertainment district, while St. Francis Wood and Forest Hill boast some of the citys finest architecture and landscaping.

The San Francisco Bay Area, with its year-round temperate climate and plenty of rain, is ideal for gardening. Complete and easy-to-use, this handbook covers all the nurseries, equipment and supply stores, accessory outlets, flower and garden shows, special events, clubs, tours, and bookstores with a green thumb around the bay. Line drawings.

Seasoned garden writers Susan Lowry and Nancy Berner, along with leading landscape photographer Marion Brenner, tour more than thirty-five private gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area, illuminating the unrivalled beauty of Northern California—the breadth of the sky, the quality of the light, the sparkle of the Bay, the shapes of the hills—that has beckoned landscape designers and gardeners for generations. Organized geographically—starting with the San Francisco Peninsula, moving north into San Francisco itself, crossing the Bay into Berkeley and Oakland, and finishing in Napa, Sonoma, and Marin—Private Gardens of the Bay Area encompasses an extraordinary range of micro-climates that foster the cultivation of an equally extraordinary range of plants. The kaleidoscope of vigorous plants from five continents bursting out of an Oakland front yard is one kind of garden, the clean-lined contemporary composition of drought-tolerant natives and gravel is another, and the garden tucked into the mountain landscape of oaks, manzanitas, and ceanothus is yet another. This fascinating tour includes gardens such as Green Gables, where the 1911 terraced design by Greene & Greene is meticulously preserved; Big Swing, with a world-renowned collection of salvias; a vertical garden on a vertiginous site in San Francisco by Surfacedesign; and a romantic landscape of lawns, perennial beds, and stately oaks owned by noted collectors and gallerists Gretchen and John Berggruen. Lowry and Berner describe the goals of each garden owner and the principles behind the designs.