Update on Codornices Park

Update—Bad, Bad, Bad (Codornices Park)

Sunday, 29 December 2013

The past two weekends we haven’t made it up to Codornices Park and Walk #10. Maybe The Plan is on hold until Spring. 

Anyway, we decided to stick with walks that have a lot of sun. That is, that don’t have a lot of chilly, shady walks.

We did Elmwood Park (Walk #3); Dracena Park (Walk #34); Grand Lake’s Rose Garden (Walk #22); Lower Piedmont Park (Walk #28); & today, Trestle Glen and Piedmont (Walk #25). Today, we skipped the Trestle Glen section and meandered around along St James Drive.

The “remarkable Japanese–themed house and garden at 288” St James has been sold and a lot of work is going on to open up the garden (page 152 in the Secret Stairs book).

The Japanese–themed fence is mostly gone, as is pergola near the front door. We made inquiries with a neighbor about the several “glazed Chinese tiles in a particular color of teal–green” used by Walter Steilberg (Walk #4, Panoramic Hills, page 33 in the book). The demolished fence had four or five of them. The neighbor reported the contractor broke them as the fence was demolished. We informed the neighbor about the tiles and “Julia Morgan’s engineer” and provided links to the San Francisco Chronicle story on Steilberg and the archives at the University of California. 

There are still two or three tiles intact in a remnant of the fence. With some diligence, perhaps they will be preserved.

The neighbor reports the house should be ready for sale in April, and the asking price will be about $2.5 million.

We spent the past two weekends on sunny walks.

Next—Who knows; the weather is a key factor right now.