Spanish Colonial
Well, gentle readers, you can stop holding your collective breath now: my tortured San Francisco apartment search seems to finally be at an end. No longer must I roam the streets of the city, like a lost soul shuffling dejectedly from open house to open house. This past weekend I put a deposit down on a one bedroom in a handsome, 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival building high above the city, in a neighborhood usually referred to as Corona Heights (or, occasionally, among older residents, Mount Olympus).
Though the Spanish Colonial style certainly has its detractors (Steve Jobs, for example, has referred to his historic Woodside mansion as an “abomination”), I kind of like it. Perhaps I’m just a sucker for its sheer “Sunset Boulevard-ness,” but I can’t help but feel a touch of old California romance when I see the place. I think it certainly beats the decrepit Victorians that dominate the San Francisco real estate market, anyway.
The neighborhood isn’t bad either. It’s positioned on top of a lightly traveled hill, so the views are fantastic and the parking is shockingly easy, yet it is still within fairly easy walking distance of three major San Francisco neighborhoods (the Haight, Cole Valley, and the Castro). As it happens, I’ll also be living adjacent to one of my immediate coworkers, which opens up carpool possibilities.
Interestingly, a Google search reveals that the neighborhood even has some cult literary cred, having rated a particularly foreboding description in H.P. Lovecraft disciple Fritz Leiber’s “Our Lady of Darkness”:
The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.
Hmm—I knew there had to be some sort of downside. No matter, though—living near a source of nameless supernatural dread is a small price to pay for easy parking.