Every year, if we can, we visit the decorations installed by our wonderful Midtown Terrace neighbors – Santa’s Court. They’re always bright and beautiful, and nearly every house on the street participates with a brilliant display of lights.
I still have a hard time getting a good photograph. But if you haven’t been there, imagine those cutouts being larger than life, and some of them having motion, and all the light!
Wishing everyone light and peace this holiday season and for 2022!
Coyotes sometimes visit Forest Knolls – I’ve seen them here myself. So this message is important: Please don’t feed them.
Here is a public service message from Janet Kessler, who has been watching and documenting San Francisco’s coyotes for many years. Her observations may be found at the website CoyoteYipps.com
Neighbor Todd Campbell says that as of August 14th, 2021, our 36 Teresita bus is back to its normal 30-minute schedule (after the Covid pandemic re-routing earlier).
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Recently, Wildcare – a wild animal rehab organization – published a warning. It’s nesting season and they ask everyone to RESPECT the NEST. It’s republished here with permission.
Respect the Nest by Michael Schwab
With the help of nationally-acclaimed artist Michael Schwab, WildCare asks you to Respect the Nest this spring and summer! Learn more!
It’s almost springtime in the Bay Area, and even as you read this [post] email, birds, squirrels and other animals are nesting and preparing for their newborn and newly-hatched babies in your trees, shrubs and hedges.
WildCare has already admitted our first tiny, pink baby squirrels of the year!
Our Wildlife Hospital admits hundreds of injured and orphaned baby animals every spring and summer, many of them victims of tree-trimming and pruning accidents.
Michael Schwab created the Respect the Nest graphic to help us remind everyone to delay non-emergency tree-trimming and pruning until winter to avoid orphaning baby animals!
How can YOU Respect the Nest? Click to learn how to spot nesting activity and protect the wildlife in your yard.
Then join us for a free, informative Respect the Nest webinar presentation on Tuesday, March 9 [2021] at 6pm!
Attendees will learn:
– What animals may be using your trees and shrubs as a nursery… even as you read this!
– How to tell if there are active nests in your yard.
– What to do if you inadvertently cut down a nest or if you find an
injured animal.
– When it’s safe (and better for your trees) to prune and trim.
– How WildCare cares for baby animals orphaned by tree trimming.
Many people don’t know that timing our tree and shrub pruning is just one simple way we can minimize harm to wildlife.
Please Respect the Nest this spring and summer and help prevent baby animals from becoming orphaned.
On January 21, 2021, the UC Regents approved a significant revision of the earlier 2014 Plan for UCSF’s Parnassus Campus- despite objections from San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors who asked for a delay so the Plan could be studied further.
According to a UCSF report, “On Jan. 21, the Regents certified the Environmental Impact Report for Comprehensive Parnassus Heights Plan (CPHP), which amends UCSF’s 2014 Long Range Development Plan to adjust the space ceiling limit, projected campus population, and the Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve boundary.”
(You can find the new Plan here (as a PDF):
UCSF-Comprehensive-Parnassus-Heights-Plan)
For us in the Forest Knolls neighborhood, the main impacts of the change will be from the higher Space Ceiling, and the accelerated destruction of Sutro Forest.
THE SPACE CEILING
The Space Ceiling was established in 1976 in response to neighbors’ anger at the impact of UCSF’s unrestrained growth on surrounding neighborhoods. There is more about that here. It has been expanded from 3.55 million square feet – which had been exceeded several times, with existing square footage in as of 2014 in the range of 3.84 million square feet. This Plan will raise the ceiling to 5.05 million square feet.
In the forest, tree felling started in 2019, and the pace appears to be accelerating.
An article in SF Weekly in October 2019 discussed this new Plan, noting that neighbors had concerns and those were not really taken into account.
Anyway, the Plan is going ahead despite any objections, since UCSF is in practice only answerable to the Regents.
UCSF has revealed its plans for Aldea Housing. Back in 2014 when we reported that UCSF was removing Aldea student housing from the “space ceiling” that limited its expansion in the Parnassus area, we weren’t told what was planned. Now it’s been described in the 2020 DEIR (See the whole document here: UCSF-CPHP-Draft-EIR (1) ) Sept 11, 2020 is the last day for comments.
The plan is to demolish the existing low-rise wood-shingled buildings, and replace them with tall ones. The first phase will be three 8-storey and one 5-storey building. Here’s their impression from the DEIR document.
One of our concerns is that they’ll remove even more trees to accommodate the new buildings and the construction space to build them. We can probably expect most of the forest lying between Forest Knolls and the Aldea Housing to be thinned to the point that it is merely a few trees standing around instead of something resembling a wood.
As it is, the picture is already obsolete – most of the trees between the Aldea and Clarendon Drive are gone, and most of the ones along Christopher will be removed or drastically thinned.
Beth Dean shared this on NextDoor:
Owls. Now that I’ve been working from home I noticed there’s a pair of owls who hang out outside my bedroom window during the day.
One was obscured by leaves so I couldn’t get a good photo but here’s the other one. A good reminder not to use poison for vermin as the owls might ingest it!
(This is published here with permission. Thanks for sharing them, Beth!)
I’ve posted here before about the 3.55 million square foot Space Ceiling that was meant to restrain UCSF from over-expansion in Parnassus Heights and Aldea Student Housing. UCSF never quite managed to adhere to those, but it did use it as a guideline and stayed close.
Those days may be over. UCSF is amending its Long Range Development Plan (2015-2035) to include a major 2 million square foot expansion of facilities and student housing, both in Parnassus and in Aldea. The real-estate website, http://www.socketsite.com, has released a good article that describes the expected developments, here:
UCSF’s Ambitious Plan to Expand Its Parnassus Heights Campus
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t show what’s on the cards for Aldea Student Housing, which is now much more prominent in our neighborhood with the removal of a lot of the forest and street trees that screened the student housing from the roads. We have some sense of it from planning meetings last year – we can expect taller buildings up to eight stories high.
(Meanwhile, it has dumped its Laurel Heights campus in a 99-year lease to a developer. This has been planned for a while now, to maximize the value of the site.)
All the pictures in this post are from the Socketsite article. If you want more detailed information, check it out.
UCSF Zoom MEETING JUNE 10, 2020
UCSF has announced a meeting of its Advisory Committee for the Future of Parnassus Heights. It’s planned for Wednesday, June 10, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Via Zoom online, and is open to the public.
If you RSVP at this web address, UCSF will send you a link to participate in the meeting.
https://ucsf.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3vqtvrnpTAC8xjqWxdU6Ug
I love that I can walk late at night in Forest Knolls. I’ve always enjoyed these magical (though infrequent walks). Now, with social distancing, they’re better than ever; there’s hardly anyone around.
Last week, I was out a couple of times. The first night was as still and quiet as if someone had turned off the world’s sound. On my way home I saw a dark shape on the sidewalk ahead. At first, it was so still that I thought it was a small abandoned suitcase or something. But as I came closer, it moved, and the light from the street-lamp showed me a raccoon. It looked at me and dived into the roadside shrubs. I went out to the middle of the road to give it enough room. Though I was pleased to see it. With all the precautions people (including us) take with their trashcans, I thought raccoons had abandoned our neighborhood for lack of food.
Another night, the quiet was broken by one of my favorite sounds: a Great Horned Owl up in Sutro Forest. It sounded like a lone owl, and stopped after a few hoots. Later in the year, perhaps I’ll hear the duets of a pair talking to each other.
And the same night, the best sighting of all: a coyote, out on Oak Park Drive near the staircase called Glenhaven Lane. When it saw me, it retreated up the staircase, and then onto the hillside so it could escape into the bushes if I pursued it. I didn’t, of course. I gave it a wide berth, and took a few blurry pictures with my cellphone.
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Some of you may remember when I wrote about our trees being poisoned?
This was the grove on the corner of Christopher and Clarendon, and was itself what was left of a lush dense grove that was cut when the pumphouse was built in 2009 (as shown in the poster visualizing the pump station):
Here’s what it looked like in 2013, when I was concerned about *two trees*!
Well, the trees have all been cut down, I think by UCSF.
There’s no grove between Clarendon and the pumphouse, just a couple of trees left.
These were beautiful old trees – maybe around 125 years old. All that is left are stumps.
Meanwhile, the planned trailhead from Clarendon is being built. It’s going to look *very* different from the charming visualization presented by UCSF.
CLARENDON LOSES ITS CENTURY-OLD TREES
Also gone – the tall trees that lined Clarendon Avenue in front of the Aldea San Miguel UCSF student housing.
I remember a time when you couldn’t even see the fence from the street. When UCSF thinned the vegetation there many years ago, they promised plantings that would conceal the chain link fence. Well, they planted some vines, but the concealment didn’t happen.
The chain-link fence is more prominent than ever.
And across the road, a swath of trees adjacent to the homes on Clarendon have been felled too, I think by SF Rec and Parks (or possibly Sutro Tower, not sure).
Over the last decade, we have lost a lot of the glorious trees that made Forest Knolls a community surrounded by forest. I’m glad I had a chance to see them in their former beauty.
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I got an email requesting me to post this notice about the Forest Knolls Block party…
It’s on Sunday May 19th 2018, from 12 noon to 4 p.m. and will be held in the 100 block cul-de-sac of Forest Knolls Drive (that’s just above the Clarendon School playground.) There’ll be snacks (tacos, empanadas) and drinks, a bouncy house, balloons, a fortune teller and a photo booth and more. Representatives from SAFE – Neighborhood Watch, the NERT Neighborhood Emergency Response Team, and from the Fire Station and SFPD may be present. Please RSVP to Walter Caplan at forestknolls@comcast.net
You can also download the flyer above as a PDF here: 2019-block-party
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I attended a meeting at UCSF’s Milberry Union last evening, 20 March 2019.
UCSF is rejigging its plans for Parnassus. After spending the last many years focused on its new location at Mission Bay, they want to come back to where it all started: Parnassus. They’re planning a new hospital by 2029, which will comply with new seismic codes. Beyond that, they want to improve the aesthetics of the Parnassus experience – create a sense of entry, strengthen the connection to Golden Gate Park and Mount Sutro, and build more space. They have a community group working on it, with mostly Inner Sunset residents and UCSF staff. (The list is here as a PDF: UCSF_Parnassus_Heights_Roster )
NEW PLANS FOR ALDEA
For those who aren’t aware of it, UCSF’s Aldea Student Housing adjoins Forest Knolls to the north just above Christopher Drive from Clarendon Avenue to where the forest is cut for the pipeline.
Among the plans to expand housing for students and staff, they are considering rebuilding the student housing at Aldea, from 171 units now to 500+ units when the project concludes. Aldea used to be subject to the “space ceiling” (explained in this post: UCSF’s Space Ceiling Saga) but apparently in 2014, the UC Regents decided to exempt it – as with all the other student housing.
To do this, they plan to replace their current, mostly 3-storied buildings, with 5-8 story buildings. They will probably start with the oldest ones, which are nearest to Forest Knolls.
For our neighborhood, it raises several questions:
THE PRESENTATION
I’m uploading a bunch of pictures I took of the presentation. They said that they would be putting it on their website, so hopefully you can get better quality pictures there soon. (I might download it here if it’s feasible.)
Most of us, very fortunately, haven’t ever had to run for our lives ahead of a fire or flood or earthquake. But if it happens – it’s difficult to think straight. Someone posted this “Grab & Go” to Facebook and it looked so useful that I printed several copies. 
May none of us every need it!
Just in case you didn’t get the Forest Knolls annual holiday party flyer in your mailbox, here is the information.
The Forest Knolls Holiday Party is set for Sunday, 12/9, from 4-8pm with a dinner buffet at 5pm. The event will be held at the Armenian Church at 275 Olympia Way, next to our fire station.
If you plan to attend, PLEASE RSVP to forestknolls@comcast.net. There’s a form to be filled in and mailed to Forest Knolls Neighborhood Organization, PO Box 31387, SF 94131 (or you can email forestknolls@comcast.net). Adults are $25/person, kids are free. Photos of the front and back of the flyer are given below.
Questions? Just email forestknolls@comcast.net
It’s that time of the year again, with the orange flyers in your mailbox, telling you about the Halloween loop. The Forest Knolls Neighborhood Organization does this each year.
Here’s the flyer as a PDF (the image is below): Halloween 2018
If you’re on the loop and want to trick-or-treaters coming by, you’ll need to be home on Wednesday Oct 31 between 5.30 and 8 p.m. (with candy!). Email the organizers by Sunday Oct 21 at forestknolls@comcast.net or call them at 415-621-0500. They’ll give you a pumpkin and a sign to indicate you’re participating.
If you want to take your kids trick-or-treating, bring them to the loop between 5.30 and 8 pm. on Oct 31 – and look out for the pumpkins of participation!
They’re replacing sewer pipes on Woodhaven, right here in Forest Knolls. If you’re an aficionado of big machines (or have kids who are!), there are plenty.
I took these photos over the last week.
Every day is different and fascinating.
This was today!
Here’s the notice about the Sewer Replacement Project. It’s 5-6 weeks, they said, and started Aug 6, 2018. The first of many, from the sound of it. The big machines may be coming to a street near you!
Of course, it’s a lot of noise and dust and access/ parking limitations for the homes on Woodhaven and nearby, but hopefully it will prevent plumbing problems in future. Like this broken water main from 2009. That wasn’t even a sewer line, which would be more insidious!
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Recently, I saw a new trail marker/ map on Clarendon Avenue, across the street from “The Woods” townhome complex, and decided to explore.
It goes through the ravine that probably was part of the lake in olden times. It’s now dry, and forested with eucalyptus and understoried with blackberry. Laguna Honda Hospital (LHH) gets it cleared out occasionally with goats. It’s quite delightful, a narrow winding trail that climbs up the other side of the ravine and comes out in LHH’s front yard.
Hiker and blogger Tony Holiday tried out the same hike – though he went a bit further, beyond the juvenile detention facility – and has given me permission to use his story and some pictures here. (For lots more great pictures, see his blog post, Daisies, on his site Stairways Are Heaven. It’s also a great resource for transit-friendly hikes.)
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From DAISIES by Tony Holiday
Thanks again to a good Facebook friend who told me about a new multi-use trail. And it’s a beauty!
The trailhead is on the Midtown Terrace side of Clarendon, just past Laguna Honda Reservoir. This is the south side of Clarendon, across the street from “The Woods” residences. There’s a sign with a map at the trailhead. It’s also a short distance from Olympia Way and the Midtown Terrace Playground.
Does this trail have an official name? If not, how ‘bout the “Woods” Trail?
Loved it immediately. Lush, narrow, definitely magical, with beautiful old trees.
It curves round, winding up to a south ridge.
No one on the trail but me (and Karl the Fog).
Nearer the summit was chainlink fencing and some old trash just off the trail. The cans, etc. will probably eventually be cleaned up. An old dumpsite for Laguna Honda Hospital?
To my left as I climbed were backs of Dellbrook Ave. homes. To my right, above, some of the many hospital buildings, old and new.
Then there were all these amazing white daisies along the trail.
There are benches just inside the hospital grounds behind one of the buildings. Still no one around but me. Continued up to a way out at a hospital parking lot.
From here delighted to see more woods just ahead.
Hidden away in the forest here are two huge graffiti-covered tanks.
Started down (west) alongside the hospital grounds to my right; to the left the Juvenile Probation Dept. Down at street level was Woodside & Idora. Continued curving downhill to the #43 bus stop that’s just across from the Forest Hill Metro Station.
Another treat —the colorful mural at the entrance to the hospital grounds on Laguna Honda at the bus stop. I think this has to be my favorite of all murals seen so far. [For lots more mural photos, see Tony’s original blog post.]
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As everyone probably knows by now, West Portal tunnel is closed while they repair and replace the hundred-year-old lines.
The main staging area is West Portal, the commercial street. It’s a big mess. But a big intriguing mess. (And, we hasten to add, it’s open for business and the shops and restaurants are operating normally.)
We were fascinated by the huge, specialized machines parked everywhere in the first couple of blocks of West Portal.
And here are some more:
All in matching, very visible yellow, though each machine is different.
It’s all very much under control, and as long as you avoid Ulloa and Vicente and the stretch between, it’s not difficult to drive there or find parking.
But the stores sure could do with some support, so if you were thinking about shopping or dining there… please do. And if you have kids who are interested in huge machines and construction activity – it’s the perfect time to ogle the earthmovers!
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I got an email requesting me to post this notice about the Forest Knolls Block party…
It’s on Sunday May 20th 2018, from 12 noon to 4 p.m. and will be held in the 100 block cul-de-sac of Forest Knolls Drive (that’s just above the Clarendon School playground.) There’ll be snacks (tacos, empanadas) and drinks, a bouncy house, balloons, a fortune teller and a photo booth and more. Representatives from SAFE – Neighborhood Watch, the NERT Neighborhood Emergency Response Team, and from the Fire Station and SFPD may be present. Please RSVP to Walter Caplan at forestknolls@comcast.net
You can also download the flyer above as a PDF here: 2018-block-party
I was taking the Muni downtown yesterday, when a Muni employee stopped me. She handed me the flyer below, and told me the station would be closed weekend nights (Friday and Saturday) from 11 p.m. to 9 a.m. It’ll last through June 17th, and they’ll have buses. All the details are available at SFMTA.com, or on 311.
I really appreciated the outreach. I’m seldom that late on the Muni, but when I am – it’s often a weekend.
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FOREST KNOLLS NEIGHBORHOOD 