Ad Hoc Construction by Buena Vista Park

I'm writing this from my sister Kate's basement level apartment by Buena Vista Park in San Francisco. It's a cozy yet bizarre little space on the ground floor of an old Victorian from the 1880s. The apartment is kind of a studio, since there is only one main room, but the main room is large, and broken in half by a big archway that, judging from the hinges mounted on it, contained double doors at some point. The door to her bathroom has about eight inches of space between its bottom and the floor, and, strangest of all, contains only the sink and claw-foot bathtub. To reach the toilet, you leave the bathroom by another door, and walk down a crooked, red-carpeted hallway, that is also the back entrance to her neighbor's apartment. The toilet is in a small closet across this hall. It is not shared - it is Kate's toilet - it is just located across communal hallway.

This place has been around for 120 years or so, and in that time, I'm sure that the usage and layout of the space that is now Kate's apartment has changed many times. Remodels, renovations, reallocations of space - each time one of these is done, you have to deal with the space as it is, and many decisions are made ad hoc. And then, suddenly, a century later, you find that the toilet has to be down the hall and the door doesn't reach the floor. Much as we Californians would like to believe that we can rebuild ourselves as whatever we want, wherever we choose, our choices are necessarily a product of the choices of those who came before.

And in a weird, those-who-came-before-you coincidence, Kate's new San Francisco apartment is five or six doors down from the house my grandmother grew up in. It was the house she lived in when she rode the ferry across the bay to Berkeley, as the Bay Bridge was being built, and the house my dad remembers visiting to see his grandmother after the Keller family moved down to San Diego. But now my sister Kate has graduated from Berkeley, and has decided that she likes the Bay Area better than San Diego, and has made this apartment her little corner of the City. It has taken a hundred years and three generations, but a Keller has come full circle.

I'm still undecided as to whether full circle represents a lack of progress, or an all-is-one sort of transcendence. All I know is that Kate and I are made of the same stuff as our ancestors, but we've also undergone a lot of ad hoc construction.