 Welcome back to the Agora Cafe. I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey, namely a little video tour of my old childhood neighborhood, San Diego. I'm going to do it via the Street View function in Google Maps. Now the images in Google Maps are all copyrighted, but I look through their terms of service and as I read them, they are. I'm allowed to use them so long as A, the use is non-commercial, which this is, and B, so long as I give appropriate credit for each image, and they say in the terms of use that that text at the bottom right of the image that you hopefully can see there is sufficient credit. I don't need anything further than that. So assuming that I have interpreted these requirements correctly, then YouTube should not take this down. So I was going to start with my elementary school from the early 70s, Silvergate Elementary, I don't remember this sign, though that doesn't mean it wasn't there. The sign I remember is this one. The name Silvergate comes from the days when, a long time ago, San Diego was contemplating adopting the nickname Silvergate as a rival to San Francisco's Golden Gate, since they have two of the major harbors on the California coast. In fact, maybe one point that you were going to call Balboa Park, Silvergate Park, which I guess makes at least as much sense as Balboa Park, since Balboa never had any connection with it, but Balboa because he was the one who discovered the Pacific as supposed to be sort of a symbol for the Pacific in general. Anyway, I also thought it was odd to pick Silvergate to rival with San Francisco's Golden Gate. It's like deliberately picking the number two metal. This fence right here used to have, when I was a kid, it had a street sign, an intersection of a Venice street as a voice circle, even though the actual intersection is not there, it's a little bit farther back, and I see they no longer have that street sign there. We used to be there right next to the fence, and I used to wait by that fence from my mother to come in the car and pick me up, and I would fantasize that the fence was a horse, and that the pole with the street sign was the horse's neck, and that the street sign, saying Venice and Savoy, crossed where they was the horse's head, and that Venice Savoy was the name of the horse. I must have been pretty desperate. Anyway, next I'm going to take you to my old address. I can't show you my old house because it's been torn down. They put a much larger and fancier house in it instead. There we're getting some nice blue skies. Sweet home San Diego, where the skies are so blue. Sweet home San Diego, Lord I'm coming home to you. What happened to the arrow? Why can't I move this further? I'll just cheat and jump. There we go. So you can see this is a very pretty neighborhood with a nice view of the ocean, and I wonder, well, this is most of a pretty expensive area. How could we afford it? Well, we couldn't, but my grandmother could, since she's still one of my mother's inheritance. I think I've talked about that in another video. And then she would dull it out to us to basically to control my mother. And my mother initially didn't want to take any money from her. But once she had me as a child and my father had died, then she felt she couldn't afford to turn down financial help. And grandma wanted to keep her near where she lived in San Diego. And so she helped out financially with this house, which was, the house she stayed in was, and I didn't realize it at the time, but years later, before they turned it torn down, I came back and saw it and thought it was the smallest house on the street. It was really tiny compared to every other house on the street. And it's since been replaced by, as you'll see, a much larger house. Anyway, this was a beloved neighborhood for me. Everything was so pretty. And that view, every time you, every time you pass the view, there are actually some houses in this area up on that hill that have view of both the ocean and the bay, looking one direction or the other. I imagine those cost a pretty penny. Okay. We're coming up on Miles Street pretty soon. There is Granger. And then that building on the right that large squares building is where my house used to be. We had, ours was only one story not two, and it had a big front lawn, which has been replaced by this car park. But there it is. I imagine they get pretty good views from up there. This house next door looks new to me, too. I don't recall the house next door looking quite like that. Used to take care of their cats when they were away. And they were trick-or-treating with my friends, Brian and Jamie, on this street. It's a little hard to tell from the, on the street view here, though from the fact that you could see the ocean before and you can't now, you can sort of tell that this is a hill, but it doesn't look, hill doesn't look as steep as it actually was. It wasn't super steep, but it was, you know, is more of a hill than this. So come here, and then we want to get coast right here, and there's this little alley going up there. And I actually want to show you the alley. So I'm going to backtrack back up here. This is the alley that runs behind all the houses on Granger. So let's see, did I miss it? I'm going to show right there. That's the place where our old house was. And there was, I don't know, you can't really tell what the yard is like now, but when I was there, it was this massive jungle, all these cactus plants that our dogs couldn't go near without getting stuck full of needles, but our cats could easily go around them and under them and so forth and never, never got any needles. So I used to practice riding my bike down this alley, and here the alley gets a little bit less finished. Now you really, you know, look at this, you don't really think that you're in, you think you're out, you think you're farther away from the center of things than you really are when you see this, this area here, this, it looks like you're doing some tropical isle. Anyway, this is on Point Loma, which is the big peninsula that separates the San Diego Bay from the Pacific Ocean, which makes it possible to have a silver gate, so to speak. The very tip of Point Loma is the Cabrillo National Monument, which has some of the best views, but we're not going there today. It's hanging around the old neighborhood. All right, so this is now where you've come out of the place that I showed you before. Now, when I get to where the action is, namely you want to get to the coast, so if you go right, it'll take you to Orange Beach, sorry, Wrong State, to Ocean Beach. If you go left, it'll take you to Sunset Cliffs. I'm going to go left just a little bit to give you an idea, and then we'll head over to Ocean Beach, which is quite a bit of my neighborhood. The farther you go in this direction, the more expensive the houses get. There's a nice little park here. You can see this sort of thing, and this sort of thing, and this sort of thing. It's jumping around a bit randomly, but it's all very familiar. All right, so you get an idea of what this area looks like. It's called Sunset Cliffs because there are cliffs, and it's a great place to watch the sunset. All right, now I'm going to take us to Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, and heading toward Ocean Beach, which is the commercial district. Yeah, and this is sort of my favorite places to be back then. It was near my home. That was the only commercial district near my home. The only place you could really walk or bike to. I don't think I ever biked there. I would have thought it was too exciting for me to bike all the way out here, because I never got that expert at biking and traffic. I usually went to a park somewhere to practice my bike. I realized this is not quite as engaging as an actual video tour, but you know, we make do with what we can, and it will give you an idea of why this is a kind of a cool neighborhood coming up. You can't tell from here, but Narragansett has good views at the end. But we're not going to Narragansett now. We're headed toward Newport Avenue. This is Newport Avenue. This is the main drag in Ocean Beach. It's kind of a funky little beach town. It's the Breakfast Republic, where I had breakfast with my friends Gary and Alicia the last time that I was here. Down in this area is where I, as a kid in the 70s, first discovered comic books. I think it's a Harrington font over there, isn't it? No, not quite, but almost. If I remember correctly, which there's no guarantee of. Anyway, the particular stores where I used to get comics are not here anymore, but this is where I first got into superhero comics and horror comics and all that good stuff. The other main street, although we're not going there now, because they take too much time. The other main street in Ocean Beach is a number of blocks to the right. We'll be going in that direction in a bit, but we won't really go to that street. It's Voltaire Street, which has a vegan co-op that, remember, was, when we took Jeff Tucker there, he was horrified, traumatized. I don't think he's ever quite recovered from it. He kept saying, isn't there a McDonald's? All right, this Wings Swingware place, as you can guess from the marquee there, used to be a movie theater. We used to have these kids matinees where parents would drop their kids off. I don't think they were supposed to drop them off. They were supposed to stay with them, but they would drop them off. My mother would stay with me, but most of the parents would drop the kids off to get rid of them in the kids matinees. It was like Lord of the Flies in there. Well, not quite, but it was pretty chaotic. They were yelling and running around and throwing food. Not really there for the cinematic experience. This is a famous hostel, galactic comics that wasn't there when I was there. There are a lot of excellent murals in Ocean Beach, and then there's that one. It's an odd mural for this location. This location is a place with a very hippie lefty vibe. I'm sure not everyone is happy with that super patriotic mural. This place is famous for absolutely gigantic hamburgers. It's a real challenge to try and deal with. A hodad is someone who hangs out with surfers and is on the surf for lifestyle, but doesn't actually do that much surfing. I've never been up there, but that would be on that rooftop bar there, but that would be a cool thing to do sometime. I've eaten that. I think that Japanese restaurant was pretty good. There's Ocean Beach Hotel. I've stayed there. It's a very nice view. Although the air conditioner in my room was so loud, I felt like I was in the middle of some kind of industrial factory. Okay, I want to take you to the right, but first I want to take you to the left. I want to show you the pier. This is the way to the pier. You can see an arrow here, but you actually can. I guess there's a little leap. You have to leap past and then there you are. Famous gate. It's not really cooperating. If you look over here to the right, oh, we're already a long way past the beach now, but the nearest part of the beach is for surfers. The middle part of the beach is for swimmers. And then the farthest part of the beach is for dogs or humans with dogs. I've eaten to this place too. It's nothing special, but it's a cool location. That's the end of the pier. According to this little map, I'm in the middle of the water. Trust everything you see. Okay, heading back to the mainland. Right there you get a bitter view of the beach, of the near part for surfers, the farthest part for swimmers. You'll see a short jetty, a rock jetty that I think is what the divide is between the swimmer's beach and the dog beach. I believe that's right. Remember my mother and I and our dogs used to walk out on that jetty. One of our dogs did it easily. Everyone had lots of trouble. The first dog would show off and go back and forth to show the second one. Then farther away, you can see a much longer jetty and that marks the entrance to the San Diego River and beyond that is Mission Bay. Okay, so back down to Newport Avenue. Oops, I ended up in the parking lot at the Ocean Beach Hotel. Back in the 19th and maybe the early 20th century, there was a big amusement park here, but it's long since been torn down. Though there's another one up in Mission Beach that is still going strong. So this is Abbott Street, which runs along the coast here. Now we're back in a more residential area, as you can see. If we went farther, we'd eventually come up to Voltaire Street, which is the more, well, actually, maybe I'll take you up there. Why not? I'm going to come back. Voltaire Street is one of the number of streets that come off of Rose Crans over at the other side of Point Loma. There's a whole bunch of streets that are named after famous authors running A through Z and then they run out and they start over again, though they don't get all the way through the alphabet the second time. And a few of the streets have changed their names. They actually have a Xenophon Street, which is cool. I'm a fan of Xenophon, I think he is underrated. Anyway, so this is Voltaire Street, which is the other major commercial street. So it's that way, but misdirected. It's still fairly residential right along here, but now the commercial part starts. Of course, these photos are all pre-pandemic. Probably some of these places are going out of business and roads that aren't at least hunkered down a bit. Where is that Regan Place that we dragged? Really, as Angela Keaton dragged, Jeff Tucker too. I was just along for the ride. To large building on the right side. Not there yet, I don't think. I might have passed it, missed it here. I suspect this is it. People's organic food market. Yeah, I think that's it. I'm not absolutely sure. I saw it. When we went there, it was nighttime. I think that's what it is. All right, so we've seen a little bit of Voltaire Street. It's not quite as cool and funky as Newport Avenue, but it's all right. It has a cool name. Cooler than Newport, really. And I want to find a way back to get back, get back, get back to where I once belonged. I don't want to say those are the only two commercial streets in here. Here we are. This is the intersection of Brighton and Abbott and the head toward the beach. Abbott ran along the beach, but then, since it wasn't exactly parallel to the beach, it got farther and farther away from it. I'm going to go in where it says no exit. I mean, no entrance, because wrong way, because I can. You can see the the pier there in the distance. So this is a place to park if you can't find any place to park closer in. This is a place to park. I'm like those realtors saying this is the bathroom. Like you can't recognize a bathroom when you see one. Not doing what I want. Oh, I know. You did. You did. All right. This is the bike path. This bike path runs along the San Diego River, which is a slimy God forsaken river in some ways, but that's not so bad here where we see the ocean, but farther in, like when you get to Fashion Valley, it's sort of a slimy thing. Anyway, this bike path goes a good long way, very long way. It's a great place to ride a bike. The bike path is up there is the sky. Down there is the ground. That's called a person. This is a very informative and educational video. Okay, the part of the bike path that's been recorded for Street View doesn't seem to want to let me go here, but this implies I can go. Boom. There we go. Every once in a while, reach a point on Street View where it won't let you go any further. You just, you cheat and hop past it and then you can go again. I don't know if I'm cheating. It's not really cheating. This takes the fun out of it. I say it's not really cheating, so let's say it's cheating. It's not that scenic on the right side. It's scenic on the left side. Yeah, this is the part of the San Diego River that isn't all creepy. You could follow this bike path a very long way, although as you'll see, Street View doesn't. But I think this bike path goes quite a long way inland. See, now it becomes more scenic on both sides. This is probably the best part of the bike path. I think that is, is that the skate park? There's a skateboard park. I think that's it. I can't see from here, but I believe that's it. Yeah, that's a skateboard park. This is the bridge that goes over to Mission Bay and all that stuff. And now we're actually back in Sensor Cliffs Boulevard, and somewhere near here is a way, please, you can catch the freeway. And if you're taking the freeway in, it'll shoot you right into Sensor Cliffs. Anyway, so I think that's all I'm going to burden you with. So that's my childhood neighborhood in San Diego between Sensor Cliffs and Ocean Beach out on Point Loma. And I thought you might enjoy it. And if you didn't enjoy it, we have to watch it anyway, because that's the rule. And if you break the rule, then you're cheating. And we know how much fun that is. All right, so see you next time.