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5 Exploring San Francisco
San Francisco’s parks, museums, tours, and landmarks are favorites for travelers the world over and offer an array of activities to suit every visitor. But no particular activity or place makes the city one of the most popular destinations in the world. It’s San Francisco itself—its charm, its atmosphere, its perfect blend of big metropolis with small-town hospitality. No matter what you do while you’re here—whether you spend all your time in central areas like Union Square or North Beach, or explore the outer neighborhoods—you’re bound to discover the reason classic crooner Tony Bennett—and millions of visitors—leave their hearts in the City by the Bay.
1 Famous San Francisco Sights Alcatraz Island Kids Visible from Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz Island (aka “The Rock”) has seen a checkered history. Juan Manuel Ayala was the first European to discover it in 1775 and named it after the many pelicans that nested on the island. From the 1850s to 1933, when the army vacated the island, it served as a mil- itary post, protecting the bay’s shoreline. In 1934, the government converted the buildings of the military outpost into a maximum- security prison. Given the sheer cliffs, treacherous tides and cur- rents, and frigid water temperatures, it was believed to be a totally escape-proof prison. Among the famous gangsters who occupied cell blocks A through D were Al Capone, Robert Stroud, the so-called Birdman of Alcatraz (because he was an expert in ornithological dis- eases), Machine Gun Kelly, and Alvin Karpis. It cost a fortune to keep them imprisoned here because all supplies, including water, hadCOPYRIGHTED to be shipped in. In 1963, after an apparentMATERIAL escape in which no bodies were recovered, the government closed the prison. In 1969, a group of Native Americans chartered a boat to the island to sym- bolically reclaim the island for the Indian people. They occupied the island until 1971, the longest occupation of a federal facility by Native Americans to this day, when they were forcibly removed by the U.S. government (see www.nps.gov/alcatraz/indian.html for 08_571869 ch05.qxd 10/21/04 7:10 PM Page 106
Major San Francisco Attractions
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