A fter retiring as a high school English teacher, Eleanor Burke decided she needed a project to keep busy — and an excuse to explore the city she’d called home all her life.
A few years earlier she had sketched architectural highlights of Russian Hill and published a small guide to the neighborhood. So she decided to expand her horizons and take on the rest of the city. After all, she’d lived in seven of its neighborhoods and knew most of the rest.
Or so she thought.
“I learned how much I didn’t know,” she says now, awaiting the arrival from the printer of Sketching San Francisco’s Neighborhoods, her new book, which she says offers, “a visual journey through the well-known and not-so-well-known areas of the city.”
When Burke started, friends worried for her safety and warned her: Don’t go to Bayview. Don’t go to Visitacion Valley. “That just isn’t true,” she says. “People are quite friendly to a little lady on her scooter with a camera.”
Burke has stories to tell about every corner of the city — and hundreds of drawings of the quirks and oddities and beauties that caught her eye in various neighborhoods. “They all have their own flavor,” she says. “And it is flavor. Go down Third Street and you smell fried chicken. On Potrero, it’s beer.”
Burke grew up on Jackson Street in Presidio Heights. “Out of my bedroom window I saw the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge,” she says. She and her friends played together down the hill at the Julius Kahn Playground with their parents’ encouragement. “Parents worry more now,” she says. And yet she pronounces a definitive judgment about the changes that have come to the city during her lifetime: “Things have gotten better — across the board.” She hopes her book will “help people get out of their comfort zone.”
Sketching San Francisco’s Neighborhoods will soon be available for $25 at Browser Books on Fillmore, Books Inc. in Laurel Village and the Warming Hut at Crissy Field, plus other independent bookstores around the city.
“I want it to be in the neighborhoods,” Burke says, “especially the offbeat neighborhoods.”
She knows where they are.
