Michael In our series "Views of San Francisco," today we focus on the old hippie stronghold "Bernal Heights." It is pronounced "Bernel Hites". The name comes from Don Jose Cornelio Bernal, a rancher who was granted the area of today's Bernal Heights in 1839 to let his cattle graze there. Later, as the city of San Francisco began to grow, Bernal Heights was initially sparsely populated but experienced significant growth when the area, founded on stable rock, was largely spared from the 1906 earthquake.

Bernal Heights is home to hordes of super-rich old hippies. Day in and day out, they mock the neighboring district of Noe Valley, claiming that it became completely yuppified during the dot-com boom of the 90s. In their eyes, Bernal Heights is still home to true alternatives.

That is, of course, nonsense. The truth is that in Bernal Heights, while many people don't maintain their gardens and some park very old cars on the street, the house and rental prices have also reached dizzying heights. If you look closely at the photos, you'll notice that I've edited them all with a filter that makes them appear somewhat dreamy and blurred. This way, you see the area through the eyes of the old hippies who live there!

In Bernal Heights, it is noticeable that there are hardly any shops. Hardly anyone is on the street; everyone is sitting in their expensive hippie houses counting their money. To spend it, they would have to drive two kilometers to Noe Valley, as there is no good public transport, because that would be bourgeois. Yet the area is really beautiful, very hilly (the speedy newsletter reporter had to shift to the first gear on his mountain bike and even had to push once) and offers breathtaking views of the surrounding neighborhoods like Mission, Downtown, the San Francisco Bay, and various highway interchanges. On clear days, you can see all the way to Oakland and Berkeley on the other shore of the Bay.

The satellite image of Bernal Heights shows the easily locatable, light brown grass hill named "Bernal" in the summer, on top of which stands a radio tower. If you drive east from Bernal Heights, you will reach a neighborhood that we will probably never feature in the "San Francisco Views" series: Hunter's Point, one of the last truly violent neighborhoods that no hippie dares to enter.

What stands out about Bernal Heights is its enormous density of dead-end streets. Roads either end abruptly on steep hills or at the adjacent 280 freeway. If there were a statistic on American neighborhoods with the most dead ends, I wouldn't be surprised to find Bernal Heights at the top of the list. Anyone who makes the mistake of entering the labyrinth without a navigation system will never find their way out. Of course, the speedy newsletter reporter had his new GPS system with him (see illustration 6) and escaped the old hippie fools after completing his work with just a few strong pedal strokes.

• More topics you might be interested in:

  	Dying in San Francisco
  	On the State of the Nation
  	Garbage Collection
  	Words that nobody knows
  	Top product: Roomba
  	The Best Toilets Downtown
  	Threatening To Cancel
  	In-N-Out Burger
  	Do-Not-Call-List
  	Baby Bullet

  
  

• More topics you might be interested in:

  	Dying in San Francisco
  	On the State of the Nation
  	Garbage Collection
  	Words that nobody knows
  	Top product: Roomba
  	The Best Toilets Downtown
  	Threatening To Cancel
  	In-N-Out Burger
  	Do-Not-Call-List
  	Baby Bullet