Sunday Streets Rolls on Great Hwy.

By Thomas K. Pendergast

The summer fog at Ocean Beach drifted thin and hazy on the morning of Aug. 9. It finally burned away around noon, as thousands of people walked and rolled down the Great Highway on bicycles, skateboards and roller blades. Families ambled over broken white lines, pushing baby strollers in cool weather under a bright sky, taking full advantage of Sunday Streets, which shut down the highway from Fulton Street to the SF Zoo.

Deanna Chan appeared thrilled to be rolling northbound on her electric scooter in the southbound lanes, going forward in the wrong direction at full speed. She wore large sunglasses and a determined grin, her hair flying in the breeze as she gripped the scooter's joystick.

She said later that when she'd gone to church that morning, she wasn't thinking much about the Sunday Streets event; the fifth in a series of recent street closures around The City, designed to promote community interaction and alternative transportation. She didn't know there'd be booths offering different services, information and amusements, nor that there'd be live music or bright day-glo hula hoops and exercise balls for play.

She only knew it was a beautiful day to go to the beach. Then she found she could also take her motorized scooter, which she rides whenever she leaves the house, up the Great Highway in any lane she chose.

"I loved it, it was so much freedom! It's just, you know, open space and seeing people going by me, some slow and some faster, and stopping to look at the waves. It's just a very nice afternoon. The cars can travel down another road," she said, giggling a bit mischievously.

Chan got the scooter from a settlement in a malpractice case from a 1980 accident. It gives her the only independent mobility to leave her home. Aaron Parsons said he also went to a July Sunday Streets in the Mission District, as he waited in a line in front of the Sports Basement tent, along with some 40 other bicyclists looking to get free work done on their rides.

"The last one was great," said Parsons, who lives in Pacific Heights. "That's why I came here. It's pretty cool that they close things off. I rode a bike for free last time for an hour, cruised around places I'd never really go, like down in the Mission. The vibe was nice."

Parsons explained that his bike had been in the closet for a couple of years and he wanted to take advantage of the free maintenance. His front brake cable had come off so he was looking for some help. He raised a plastic baggie with various brake parts up for inspection but some of them had "gone under a dresser, or something. Whatever they can do is cool."

At the corner of Lincoln and the Great Highway, more than a dozen small white tents were set up, each staffed with folks promoting local businesses, services or programs. A radio station offered peppermint and chocolate flavored water, a neighborhood center promoted a children's art program, there was a "Dogumentarian" to photograph the family pooch, the mayor's program for shaping up was represented, as were an association fighting Alzheimer's, a group looking to count people for the next census and a preschool that "aims to give children a strong foundation in Jewish practices."

In a nearby tent, another group tried to pull mom into its program. It set up scales for weighing babies and toddlers, and was handing out literature that "gives women the tools to understand and resist harmful media that affects their self esteem and body image."

For kids looking to have fun, there was a crew from the non-profit group Playland-Not-At-The-Beach with their centenarian pinball machines.

"Step right up here," Patrick Osbon told an eager young lad, with more than a hint of "Carney" in his voice. "So, what you do here, there's the ball, there's the lever, pull that back, let it go and what you want to do is score more than 4,100 points. If you do that, I'll give you free tickets to our museum."

Osbon volunteers as a tour guide at Playland's Museum of Fun, which is located in El Cerrito. The organization commemorates old amusement parks, such as Playland at the Beach. The boy stepped up to a wooden pinball machine with no wires, bells, flippers, flashing lights or tilt. Osbon said these were the standard pinball machines a century ago.

"See the pins and the balls," he told the boy, as they watched the ball bounce around under the glass. "That's where the name pinball came from. This is 104 years old, this machine."

Darryl Coe cranked the bellows pump of a street organ, or monkey organ as some call it. Like old player-pianos, it has a rolled strip of plastic with rectangular holes punched into it, in a different pattern for each song. The bellows create air pressure and the machine opens its valves according to a hole pattern, producing a range of 20 notes.

Coe admitted that traditionally he was supposed to use a live monkey dressed in a suit to collect money from people, however, he just used a monkey hand puppet.

He happily cranked away as the organ played the old standard, "Take Me Out To The Ball Game."