Cottage Row, Mini-Park, San Francisco

This row of wood-frame houses bisects a block in the Western Addition of San Francisco. They cannot be reached by car. The paved walk that runs in front of them is  designated as Cottage Row by street signs at either end. If you lived in one of them, your mailing address would be, for instance, 3 Cottage Row.

These houses and the Victorian-style houses on the adjacent streets were built as rental properties in the 1880s. Now they are individually owned. Recent listings show them as having either 1000 or 1500 square feet of living space, depending apparently on whether the basement is finished.  Prices are approaching $2 million. 

One compensation for paying that much for a house with no parking space is the green space that runs along the other side of the paved walk. It is a mini-park, maintained by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. 

There are pedestrian-only "streets" (often called lanes) here and there throughout the city.  Some are on steep hillsides such as the eastern face of Telegraph Hill. Some, like Cottage Row, are on flat ground. Most are remnants of a time when people mostly got where they were going by walking.