Visit San Francisco, CA: The UN-Official Guide

San Francisco

On the surface San Francisco has all the cliché tourist icons that we know: the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and Chinatown, to name but a few. But keep in mind that San Francisco itself is fairly small geographically, covering roughly 50 square miles.

“The City,” as it is called by locals, is the home of the Giants (MLB), the 49ers (NFL), and the Golden State Warriors (NBA). During the summertime, AT&T Park is a great family-friendly place to catch a ballgame. Sit in the upper deck to see the Bay and the real obvious tourist areas of SF, which are seldom visited by residents except to bring friends and relatives.

There are restaurants and lots of shopping geared toward tourists. Of course, at Fisherman’s Wharf, you can get the famous Dungeness crab. You can eat crab all year round but they’re best when they’re in season, which runs from September/October to about April. And while it’s really more of a Los Angeles tradition, the only In ‘N Out Burger joint in SF is in the Fisherman’s Wharf area so if you haven’t had one, get it there!

The Pier area (Pier 40 and further south at the Ferry Building) is where the ferries arrive from around the rest of the Bay Area. The mile between the Ferry Building and Pier 39 is an uncluttered waterfront view of underneath the Bay Bridge and the East Bay. Pier 39 itself is a popular landmark, as it has been transformed into a two-story outdoor shopping area, complete with sporting goods stores, a magic shop, and a number of eateries.

San Francisco is less a single city than it is an amalgamation of many neighborhoods. The major neighborhoods are North Beach, Castro, Mission, the Haight, Hayes Valley, Bernal Heights, Noe Valley, and South of Market. Not all of the neighborhoods are tourist destinations, but all of them contain good shopping and cute bistros and cafes.

San Francisco is home to a sizable gay population. The main gay neighborhood is the Castro. The Castro is a neighborhood unlike any other and it’s a fun one to visit, offering many fine restaurants and places to stay.

The Mission district is also popular. Although it’s become more gentrified, you can expect some wonderful burritos from places like el Farolito, Taqueria Cancun and plenty of wonderful tapas places.

Across the Golden Gate North is the North Bay, starting with Marin County. You can hop on a ferry at Pier 40 to visit the artisan cove, Sausalito, for the day (it is also accessible by car). Further north along the coast are Stinson Beach and Point Reyes – both beautiful and romantic whether you travel up Highway 1 or through the forest via Sir Francis Drake Road off Highway 101. There are also other fun, romantic and charming towns in the South Marin area such as Tiburon, Mill Valley and San Anselmo. All of these are within 30-45 minutes of SF.

Mt. Tamalpais State Park is another recreational area encompassing biking, hiking, water sports and so forth. You can continue along (another hour or so) to the quaint quasi-resort-rustic village of Mendocino – or choose from dozens of coastal rustic-fishing-resort communities such as Tomales Bay, Inverness, Bodega Bay (where Alfred Hitchcock filmed “The Birds”) and Olema along the way – each with its unique charms! You can even take a regional bus to various Marin County parks and overnight camping at Samuel Taylor State Park.

To the Northeast is Napa Valley and to the North is Sonoma Valley, both part of Northern California’s famed wine country. Many of your favorite vineyards are located along these highways and backroads. Napa Valley is the more famous of the two, but both offer opportunities to visit small, rustic, family-owned vineyards and larger, more commercial wineries. Calistoga is famous for the spa treatments, mudbaths, massages and body wraps.

To the East is the East Bay, home of UC Berkeley, one of the premier public education universities in the world, and Oakland, the home of the A’s (MLB) and Raiders (NFL).

SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies just 48 hilly square miles at the tip of a slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California coast. Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the US, it remains true to itself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small city whose people pride themselves on being the cultured counterparts to their cousins in LA – the last bastion of civilization on the lunatic fringe of America. It’s a compact and approachable place, where downtown streets rise on impossible gradients to reveal stunning views of the city, the bay, and beyond, and blanket fogs roll in unexpectedly to envelop the city in mist. This is not the California of monotonous blue skies and slothful warmth – the temperatures rarely exceed 70°F, and even during summer can drop much lower.

The original inhabitants of this area, the Ohlone Indians, were all but wiped out within a few years of the establishment in 1776 of the Mission Dolores, the sixth in the chain of Spanish Catholic missions that ran the length of California. Two years after the Americans replaced the Mexicans in 1846, the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills precipitated the rip-roaring Gold Rush. Within a year fifty thousand pioneers had traveled west, and east from China, turning San Francisco from a muddy village and wasteland of sand dunes into a thriving supply center and transit town. By the time the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, San Francisco was a lawless, rowdy boomtown of bordellos and drinking dens, something the moneyed elite – who hit it big on the much more dependable silver Comstock Load – worked hard to mend, constructing wide boulevards, parks, a cable car system, and elaborate Victorian redwood mansions.

In the midst of the city’s golden age, however, a massive earthquake, followed by three days of fire, wiped out most of the town in 1906. Rebuilding began immediately, resulting in a city more magnificent than before; in the decades that followed, writers like Dashiell Hammett and Jack London lived and worked here. Many of the city’s landmarks, including Coit Tower and both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, were built in the 1920s and 1930s. By World War II San Francisco had been eclipsed by Los Angeles as the main West Coast city, but it achieved a new cultural eminence with the emergence of the Beats in the 1950s and the hippies in the 1960s, when the fusion of music, protest, rebellion, and of course, drugs that characterized 1967’s “Summer of Love” took over the Haight-Ashbury district.

It’s estimated that over half of San Francisco’s population originates from somewhere else. It is a city in a constant state of evolution, fast gentrifying itself into one of the most high-end towns on earth – thanks, in part, to the disposable incomes pumped into its coffers from its sizeable singles and gay contingents. Gay capital of the world, San Francisco has also been the scene of the dot.com revolution’s meteoric rise, fall and steadier recovery. The resultant wealth has pushed housing prices sky high. Despite the city’s economic ebbs and flows, your impression of the city will be that of a proudly distinct place.

The City
San Francisco is a city of hills and distinct neighborhoods. As a general rule, elevation means wealth – the higher up you are, the better off you are. Commercial square-footage is surprisingly small and mostly confined to the downtown area, and the rest of the city is made up of primarily residential neighborhoods with street-level shopping districts, easily explored on foot. Armed with a good map and strong legs, you could plough through much of the city in a day, but the best way to get to know San Francisco is to dawdle.

Union Square

The city’s heart can be found around Union Square, located north of Market Street and bordered by Powell and Stockton streets, which was recently spruced up with the addition of shady trees and benches. Cable cars clank past shoppers and theater-goers who gravitate to the district’s many upscale hotels, department stores, and boutiques. The statue in the center commemorates Admiral Dewey’s success in the Spanish– American War, though the square takes its name from its role as gathering place for stumping speechmakers during the US Civil War. The square witnessed the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford outside the St Francis Hotel (now Westin) in 1975, and was also the location of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation, where Gene Hackman spied on strolling lovers. Many of Dashiell Hammett’s detective stories, such as The Maltese Falcon, are set partly in the St Francis; in fact, during the 1920s, he worked there as a Pinkerton detective.

On Geary Street, on the south side of the square, the Theater District is a pint-sized Broadway of restaurants, tourist hotels, and serious and “adult” theaters. On the eastern side of the square, Maiden Lane is a chic urban walkway that before the 1906 earthquake and fire was one of the city’s roughest areas, where homicides averaged around ten a month. Nowadays, aside from some prohibitively expensive boutiques, its main feature is San Francisco’s only Frank Lloyd Wrightbuilding, an intriguing circular space at no. 140 that was a prototype for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Now occupied by the Xanadu Tribal Art Gallery, feel free to wander inside, but just don’t expect a warm welcome from the tourist-weary staff.

Cable cars

It was the invention of the cable car that put the high in San Francisco’s high society as it made life on the hills both possible and practical. Since 1873, these little trolleys have been an integral part of life in the city, supposedly thanks to Scots-born Andrew Hallidie’s concern for horses. Having watched a team struggle and fall, breaking their legs on a steep San Franciscan street, Hallidie designed a pulley system around the thick wire rope his father had patented for use in the California mines (the Gold Rush was slowing, and so the Hallidies needed a new market for their product). Despite locals’ initial doubts, a transportation revolution followed. At their peak, just before the 1906 earthquake, over six hundred cable cars traveled 110 miles of track throughout the city at a maximum 9.5mph; over the years, usage dwindled and, in 1964, nostalgic citizens voted to preserve the last seventeen miles (now just ten) as a moving historic landmark.

Today there are three lines. Two of them, the Powell & Mason and the Powell & Hyde lines run from Hallidie Plaza off Union Square at Powell and Market streets to Fisherman’s Wharf. The Powell & Hyde is the steepest, reaching a hair-raising 21-degree grade between Lombard and Chestnut streets. The oldest route, the California line, climbs Nob Hill along California Street from the Embarcadero, rattling past the fanciest hotels in the city. The cars fasten onto a moving two-inch cable, which runs beneath the streets, gripping on the ascent then releasing at the top and gliding down the other side. You can see the huge motors that still power these cables in the Cable Car Museum and Powerhouse, 1201 Mason St at Washington Street (daily: April– Sept 10am–6pm; Oct– March 10am–5pm; free; Telephone 415/474-1887, Websitewww.cablecarmuseum.org).

he Financial District

North of the city’s main artery, Market Street, the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of the Financial District have sprung up in the last twenty years to form the only real highrise area. Sharp-suited workers clog the streets and coffee kiosks during business hours, but after 6pm, the area pretty much shuts down. Stop at the corner of Kearny and Market streets to admire Lotta’s Fountain, one of San Francisco’s most treasured artifacts, named after Lotta Crabtree, one of the first children brought to the city by pioneering families. It was around here that people gathered to hear news following the 1906 earthquake and fire, and also where famed soprano Luisa Tetrazzini gave a free concert on Christmas Eve, 1910.

Once cut off from the rest of San Francisco by the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway – damaged in the 1989 earthquake and finally torn down two years later – the Ferry Building, at the foot of Market Street, was modeled on the cathedral tower in Seville, Spain. Before the bridges were built in the 1930s it was the arrival point for fifty thousand cross-bay commuters daily. A few ferries still dock here, but after years of playing home to colorless offices, it has finally undergone a massive renovation that’s seen shops and cafés line its halls. The first new tenant was the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, which moved indoors from its old site in front of the building – it’s an excellent place to sample the sumptuous local produce (Tues 10am–2pm & Sat 8am–2pm; Telephone415/353-5650, Website www.ferryplazafarmersmarket.com).

Since the freeway was pulled down, the area around it, known as The Embarcadero, has experienced a dramatic renaissance – from an area of charmless office blocks into a swanky waterfront district with some of the city’s finest restaurants and hotels making the most of the bay views.

From the vast and unimaginative Embarcadero Center shopping mall and the square concrete tubing of the fountains in Justin Herman Plaza at the foot of Market Street, it’s a few blocks down to Montgomery Street, where the grand pillared entrances and banking halls of the post-1906 earthquake buildings era jostle for attention with a mixed bag of modern towers. The best known is undoubtedly the Bank of America monolith, 555 California St, at Kearney, where the state’s largest financial institution has its headquarters; this enormous building was initially unpopular when finished in 1971, though affection has grown over the years for the broad-shouldered hulk. The Wells Fargo History Museum, 420 Montgomery St (Mon– Fri 9am–5pm; free; Telephone 415/396-2619, Website www.wellsfargo.com), traces the far-from-slick origins of San Francisco’s big money, right from the days of the Gold Rush, with mining equipment, gold nuggets, photographs, and a genuine retired stagecoach.

Jackson Square and the Barbary Coast

A century or so ago, the eastern flank of the Financial District formed part of the Barbary Coast. This area of landfill appeared thanks to the hundreds of ships that lay abandoned by sailors heading for the Gold Rush; enterprising San Franciscans used the dry ships as hotels, bars, and stores. At the time, the district was a rough-and-tumble place that gave San Francisco an unsavory reputation as Baghdad by the Bay, packed as it was with saloons and brothels where hapless young males were given Mickey Finns and forcibly taken aboard merchant ships and pressed into involuntary servitude. William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner newspaper lobbied frantically to shut down the quarter, resulting in a 1917 California law prohibiting prostitution. Remains of the cradle of San Francisco can be seen in the Jackson Square Historic District, not an actual square but an area bordered by Washington, Columbus, Sansome, and Pacific streets; these were the only buildings downtown to escape the catastrophic 1906 fire unharmed, and Jackson Street in particular provides a hint of what early San Francisco looked like. A detour down the redbrick-lined Hotaling Place, with its hitching posts and antique lamps, is similarly revealing.

The landmark Transamerica Pyramid, at the foot of diagonal Columbus Avenue and Washington Street, is San Francisco’s tallest building. The 48-story structure, capped by a colossal 212-foot hollow spire, arose in 1972 amid a city-planning furor that earned it the name of “Pereira’s Prick,” after its LA-based architect William Pereira, and since then it’s been indisputably the signature of San Francisco’s skyline. Though it survived the 1989 earthquake undamaged, for security reasons there’s no longer access to the 27th-floor viewing deck. The block on which the Transamerica Pyramid stands is a historic one: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and William Randolph Hearst all rented office space in the building that originally stood on this site, and regularly hung around the notorious Bank Exchange bar within. Legend has it that Dr Sun Yat-sen – whose statue is in Chinatown, three blocks away – wrote the Chinese constitution and orchestrated the successful overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty from his second-floor office here. Next door is the pleasant TransamericaRedwood Park with fountains perfect for an outdoor lunch. Heading west on Jackson or Pacific streets from the area leads you back to Columbus and the green-copper siding of the ColumbusTower, 906 Kearny St, the de facto beginning of North Beach. Director and San Francisco native Francis Ford Coppola owns the building, and his Niebaum-Coppola Café on the ground floor serves sandwiches, pasta, and wine from his Napa Valley winery.

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