After our epic 7 mile hike around Blithedale Summit Open Space Preserve in Mill Valley yesterday, Rachel and I managed to muster up enough energy to organize a one mile walk around Urbano Street today in the little Ingleside Terrace neighborhood in San Francisco. Where we live in SF is only about two miles from Entrada Court. So, it’s rather sad that in the four years that we’ve lived in the city we hadn’t gotten over there to explore the neighborhood built around a racetrack. You can see the outline of the track in the GPS tracks we followed along the walk.

That circle in the middle of the track is Entrada Court. There’s a massive concrete sundial constructed right in the center of an elaborate garden. I took six pictures there with my iPhone 4 and merged them into a panorama with Photoshop (and filling in missing parts of the sky with Content Aware Fill (don’t ask)). What’s amusing is that the girl on the bike just kept riding in circles around Entrada Court over and over again. So, she appears in the panorama four times. Rachel is also standing there in the far right of the picture being annoyed that I was getting in the way of her taking a picture with her Panasonic TZ10.

The base of the sundial is now filled in. But, originally, it appeared to have a circular reflecting pool beneath it with two bronze seals and colored lights with grass growing around the perimeter. Now, the entire perimeter is concrete and the roman numerals are colored.

You can see the current state of the hour markers here. We also noticed that the shadow appeared to be a bit early on the dial. Perhaps this is due to the solar noon of San Francisco being slightly off during the winter months.

The Bay Citizen recently published an article (picked up by the New York Times here) elaborating on how the sundial was constructed to lure people into buying homes in Ingleside Terrace. In it, they describe the christening of the dial.

The sundial was dedicated on the evening of Oct. 10, 1913, at a lavish event with 1,500 people in attendance. After children dressed as nymphs unveiled the sundial and four surrounding columns, a midnight supper was served, and couples danced until dawn.

Unbeknownst to the revelers in 1913, the sundial itself would not be scaled by human feet until November 2009 when intrepid Flickr user yelserpluapnaes literally rose to the occasion by running full speed straight up the face of dial.

FoundSF has an article and a picture from the early ’20′s showing the dial surrounded by a cavalcade of cars, a large truck filled with people, a large estate, and five largish houses.

The article on FoundSF with the photos from the 1920′s appears to be incorrect though. Horse racing ended at the track in 1898 because it became illegal to gamble horses and then automobile (i.e. “loco-mobile”) racing stopped in 1905 for business reasons. Starting in 1910, Ingleside Terrace was built around Urbano Street which was the old race track. Outside Lands has a picture of horse racing at the track in the late 1890′s courtesy of Greg Gaar.

Outside Lands has another article about the auto racing with a great shot of the “loco-mobiles” from 1900 here.

San Francisco has quite a number of incongruous sites like the Ingleside Sundial. However, I’m slightly dismayed that it took a New York Times article to alert me to something that’s a mere 10-minute-bicycle-ride away from my house.

First attempt using a Canon EOS 7D.