UPDATE 03/18/18:
I revisited this stairway in 2018, knowing that the project to tile the stairway had completed in 2013. I basically decided to reformat the waymark with new pictures of this fabulous tile picture. I'm keeping all the original photos to show the before and after stairway.
The stacked sequence of seven pictures at the right shows the detail of each of the sections of the stairway design. Click on any picture to see that section in larger detail. The tiled are individually custom-shaped and depict things like a snail, butterfly, dragonfly, flowers, leaves and mushrooms. There are thousands of names of donors embedded in the tiles. The Hidden Garden website also has excellent photos of each section of the stairway.
The photos at the left are a selection of photos around the stairway.
This stairway in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco connects Kirkham Street at the bottom to Lawton Street at the top. It extends 16th Avenue for pedestrians up the side of a steep hill with an elevation gain of about 80 feet.
These stairs are part of a community project with the San Francisco Parks Alliance bringing public art to the Sunset district. Inspired by the nearby Moraga Stairway, a mosaic-tiled vertical mural has been planned to beautify these stairs and have them named the Hidden Garden Steps.
Currently (2012), a neighborhood project is raising money for tiles to be placed on the front of the stair steps, creating a mosaic tiled mural up the stairs. A mural at the bottom of the stairs calls attention to the fund raising.
This stair has a slight turn in it's path about one third of the way from the top. The mural plans shows the upper stairs to be in five flights of steps 10-10-16-10-10 for 56 steps. After the bend there are four flights of 23 steps, for a total of 148. (I thought I counted more steps than that).
Posted coordinates are the bottom of the stairs. The top of the stairs are at: N37 45.563 W122 28.413.
The stairway bottom can be seen in Google Street View. The top of the stairway can be seen in Google Street View. |