Thursday, April 07, 2005
Yo, Topiary
I had always thought of it as a very bad place to try to run a business. The block was on a steep hill and this lot was actually mostly under grade; the wrap-around parking lot was bordered by an increasingly tall retaining wall that came right up to the edge of the sidewalk, as much as fifteen feet above the far end of the lot; an oppressive black welded fence marked the property line. Across the street was a featureless wall that ran nearly the whole block, and over that wall, a gorgeous view of downtown San Francisco, invisible from the store’s hidden acreage. Traffic patterns made it impossible to get into the lot except from one direction that was often not convenient. The paint store there had a dreary sun-bleached sign raised high enough up on a pole to be visible from the street above, and lots of open parking spaces. I think we only so much as set foot in the place once.
Eventually it closed. I expected the lot to be cleared, regraded, and turned into a commercially viable property with an expansive and expensive view. Instead, they only made one change: they took down the tired old sign for the paintstore and put up a new, yet exhilaratingly familiar, red-and-white sign with sort of chunky letters - Trader Joe’s was moving in. To my neighborhood. Thank you, Bacchus.
TJ’s was the one thing I missed most when I left LA. Those stores were always within a short drive no matter where you were, and they had everything the cheap gluttonous gourmand could desire, from produce and dairy to IQF fish to spirituous liquors to dog biscuits to dried fruit and 10-pound blocks of good chocolate.... it was a positive deprivation to move away from these cornucopii of concupiscence.
After we’d been in SF for a few years we discovered a TJ’s in San Rafael. It was 20 minutes and a toll bridge away, and it was a smaller store than those we’d grown accustomed to in the southland, but it was there and it had the goods: cookies and cheeses and fresh breads; frozen waffles and kitchen spices and coffee and tea and burritos - fresh and frozen.... On our first visit to this delightfully familiar store I overheard a young couple who were clearly at a TJ’s for the first time; their cart was half full and she was urgently whispering to him, “they’ve got to have chocolate here, we have to find it...” I’m still sorry I didn’t see her face when she found those 10-pound bars.
As time passed TJs kept opening stores closer and closer to us, and now, once again, I’d have one right down the boulevard. Frabjous. I awaited its opening with increasing anticipation and eagerness. But once they did open, I discovered that I hadn’t been the only one paying attention. Traffic was permanently lined up on that busy, barren street; the city wound up repainting the lines to give people waiting to park a place to stay out of the way. Parking was in such demand that the store had to hire people to direct traffic in the lot. The store itself was thronged, and it was generously proportioned too - plenty of everything. Before long, as I understood it, “store 100” was one of the most profitable shops in the chain.
Not long ago we were sitting in the car, one of a long line of cars patiently waiting to get into the TJ’s parking lot, and I noticed that, across the street, against the long, blank, wall that faced the obliviously unchanging black welded fence to my right, shrubs had been planted, dusty, dull, but living things, spaced every 25 yards or so. These were hearty specimens, six or eight feet tall, rising sturdily out of their missing squares of sidewalk and punctuating the cinderblock sameness of the wall with an additional, regular, but independent, constancy.
Except: I finally noticed, after more than a decade in this neighborhood, that those shrubs had been trimmed into different shapes - spheres and cubes, alternating. These large plants had not been suddenly transformed into Euclidian topiaries; they’d clearly been carefully, consistently, intentionally trimmed for many years to attain these full, dense, leafy shapes.
I wondered whether anyone had ever noticed all that hard work during all that time the paint store had been in the sunken lot. Back then, barely anyone walked these sidewalks - there was nothing worth walking to around there. Anyone who wanted to go to the paint store had been able to drive right down into the parking lot. Only with the advent of TJ’s came crowds that were forced to sit and wait in a place where the shapes of the shrubs could be discerned, their pattern recognized. How many years of effort and attention had gone ignored, and how many people were now finally to be granted an opportunity to appreciate it?
One more good thing in life - this time, brought to me by Trader Joe’s, some random gardener, and the strange little lot beneath Masonic Street.
What’s yours?
