I’m taking photos for my friend who moved, of the places she’s lived in San Francisco. I also did that with my grandfather, driving around LA taking photos of all the houses he lived in. Fun exercise! I’ll give you a written tour of mine.

1995: Page street, white building with red stairs. Walk up to the first floor, there’s a nice white painted one bedroom Victorian. Couch surfing on Page Street, at Lyon. Upper Haight, the point of origin for many newbies to SF. Don’t remember much, mostly just there on the weekends, never really even left a packed bag. Went to a lot of “Yale Parties,” though I’m not from Yale.

1996: That boring beige building on Waller Street at Steiner, near some nicely renovated Victorians. Walk up three flights straight up, on corporate grey carpet, to a five room flat. This was one of (what would be) a string of slumlords. At one point his ex-wife tried to convince us, in a letter full of typos, that our rent payments should go to her. Nice try, no cigar. Guy in the flat below us was deaf and played the TV at screeching decibles. Notable roommates: annoying cleaning fetish German roommate, as well as a guy addicted to porn.

1998: See the funeral home? See that pink building next to it? Walk up two stairs with the smell of mildew, and they have carved out a closet that I called home for two years. Market St. between Noe & Sanchez. Lots of fun, lots of partying. Tiny ass studio, where I got a shadow show of gay sex almost nightly on my floor, from neighborhing apartments. Once I was playing solitaire on my computer and someone in a nearby apartment yelled “Red queen on black king!” The vicinity to Peets (across the street) meant I got an ulcer.

1999: See the big Mission Church? Across are these Victorian apartment buildings all in a row. I was moving on up, to a two bedroom in the Inner Mission (and yet only 2 blocks away). 16th street between Dolores and Church. Got to live with another foodie, so we had some amazing dinners there in our Victorian kitchen: no counter space, one sink in a pantry, and the refrigerator was the most modern convenience. 1930s era oven leaked gas. Well, needless to say the building burned down last June.