Looking for the chalked sidewalk tours authored by Richard Turner, Jason Dewees and me (and more recently, Sairus Patel)? You’ve come to the right place. Click here for the Bayview, Bernal Heights (North), Bernal Heights (South), Buena Vista, Castro, Castro/Noe Summit, Cole Valley, Cow Hollow, Dogpatch, Duboce Triangle, Fairmount Heights, Forest Hill, Forest Hill/Inner Sunset; Glen Park, Hayes Valley, Inner Richmond, Inner Sunset, Lower Haight, Lower Pacific Heights, Marina, Mission (central Mission), Mission (Inner Mission), Mission (Transmission), Mission Bay, Noe Valley (north), Noe Valley (south), Noe Valley (far south); NOPA (East), NOPA (West), Pacific Heights, Pacific Heights (west); Page Street, Potrero Hill, Precita Park/Peralta Heights, Richmond, Russian Hill, Salesforce Park, St. Francis Wood, Sunnyside, Sutro Heights, Telegraph Hill, Transmission, Valencia/Guerrero, Visitacion Valley, Westwood Park, West Portal and Yerba Buena Gardens tours.
Give a listen to this wonderful podcast by Jennifer Jewell of Cultivating Place - she interviewed the three of us in depth about how these "#covidtreetours came to be. Her blog piece about can be found here.
The impetus for these tours happened in March 2020, shortly after the initial COVID-19 outbreak, when everyone was trapped inside, and walking solo or with close family was the only permitted outdoors activity. A friend shared with me a social media story about someone in London who was walking around his neighborhood with a box of chalk, scrawling information about street trees on adjacent sidewalks - teaching people about local trees in a pandemic-permissible way. My friend said “you could do that!” - and I realized that she was right! The next day while walking my dog, I bought some chalk at Cole Hardware, and randomly “chalked” 25 or so trees in Cole Valley, jotting down the name of each tree, where it was from, and other bits of interesting info. My efforts got picked up in local online media, which led my friend and fellow tree wonk Jason Dewees to contact me. I can’t remember whose idea it was, but we decided to chalk some trees together, this time in San Francisco’s Forest Hill neighborhood, and to make it a tour, using -> arrows -> in the sidewalk to guide tour-takers from tree to tree. We had a lot of fun, and the neighborhood loved it, so we decided to do another tour, this time inviting our friend Richard Turner to join us.
Jason Dewees, me and Richard Turner (left to right) on the Potrero Hill tour. That’s a box of chalk in my hand.
Our first tour as a trio was of Noe Valley on April 28, 2020, and Richard invited Carl Nolte of the San Francisco Chronicle to join us. Nolte did a story on our tour in the following Sunday Chronicle, which was a jolt of publicity for the tours. The three of us had so much fun (and remember that in the Spring of 2020 there wasn’t a lot to do on Saturday or Sunday mornings) that we began to make it a habit, chalking a new tour every weekend. Bernal Heights was our second tour as a trio in early May, then Potrero Hill the following weekend, followed by a tour of the Mission, and so on. We’ve been doing these tours ever since - our count is now 38 tours in all.
After our first few tours, we settled into a routine. We’d jointly decide on a neighborhood and a starting point, and agree on a general route, but leaving lots of opportunity for serendipity to turn left or right as we discovered interesting trees this way or that, so the route was never known until we finished. Tours always started at 10AM on a Saturday or Sunday, and our ironclad rule was that we did the tours as a trio - our “quorum” was three! On each tour we’d jointly decide which trees to cover, and each tree got at least three things on the sidewalk: its common name, its scientific name, and its place of origin. Jason and I did most of the chalk scrawling, and Dick kept track of each tree’s address and info. Knowing that chalk fades, we realized early on that we could preserve the tours on this blog, so as part of our routine, Dick would dutifully type up each tour, forward to me, and I’d put it up here at sftrees.com accompanied by some iPhone photos. Voila - a tour that would live permanently online!