Dawson Place is an alley just off Mason street on the north side of Nob Hill in San Francisco. It hides in the shadow of the magnificent Fairmont Hotel, which sits astride the top of the hill, just up Mason.
I came to Dawson Place place because of a personnel connection: my wife’s parents lived here in the 1940’s. This photo was taken on a hazy Saturday morning in April, 2017. It was to be documentation: these stairs lead to the apartment occupied seventy years ago by my wife’s forebears.
Staircases are interesting. They go somewhere. Sometimes to doors, sometimes to plazas, and sometimes to the sea. The Dawson Place staircase makes a one hundred and eighty degree turn, up that first short flight of steps, just out of sight, and continues a few more steps up to two doors. One of which opens to the space the parents called home all those years ago. Who lives there now? Who lived there in the intervening seventy years? What did they know, do, see? The staircase won’t tell.
The photograph is awash in pastels: three different shades of blue on the stairs and surrounding walls, the muted reds of the fire alarm and the lighting sconce, the darker red of the wall in the background, and the yellows of the mailbox and the near wall. The blue of the staircase is faintly echoed by the siding on the building behind and fades into the white of the morning haze.
In contrast, in the upper left, modern buildings of steel and glass appear. They are soft in the haze of the morning but, even so, feel harder, colder, than the wood and muted colors of the staircase.
The diffuse morning light falls softly everywhere. You can see its shadow beneath the fire alarm. The lighting sconce barely casts a shadow at all. You can see a faint shadow thrown by the banister on the left of side of the stairs. The light is very gentle in the alley as if it knows that Dawson Place, at least for the morning, is a place of pastels, a welcoming place, and no place for the direct light of day, at least not yet.
The green plant looks as if it were swept into its leaning form by the sea wind. But there is no sea in Dawson Place alley and the salt wind does not blow. Instead, it is the soft light that stretches the branches into their reaching forms. The green tendrils beckon the weary workers returning up the stairs to home, to rest, to peace.
One wants to go back to Dawson Place, to walk into the pastel alley, ascend the pastel stairs, and come home to… what? Maybe the soft, safe, beckoning colors of the staircase continue in a pastel world beyond the doors at the top of the stairs. Do we want to know? Or do we want to just let it be?