it’s another world-famous Christopher Drake non-tourist tour!

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the edition

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ...... 4 Orientation ...... 6 A brief ...... 8 Map of the chapter divisions ...... 16

THE NEIGHBORHOODS OF SAN FRANCISCO ...... 18

1: Jackson Square, Embarcadero, Financial District & Rincon Hill ...... 20 2: Fisherman’s Wharf, Russian Hill, North Beach & Telegraph Hill ...... 38 3: Nob Hill, & Union Square ...... 48 4: Civic Center, South of Market & Mission Bay ...... 58 5: Marina, Cow Hollow & Pacific Heights ...... 70 6: Presidio, Richmond, Land’s End, Ocean Beach & Park ...... 80 7: Haight, Hayes Valley, , Fillmore & Addition ...... 92 8: Twin Peaks, Castro, Mission, Noe Valley & Bernal Heights ...... 100 9: Dogpatch, , Hunters Point & Bayview ...... 106 10: Sunset, West Portal, Excelsior & Visitacion Valley ...... 110

THE OUTSIDE LANDS OF SAN FRANCISCO ...... 116

Alcatraz Island ...... 118 Angel Island ...... 120 Treasure Island & ...... 122 The world north of San Francisco...... 126 The world south of San Francisco ...... 128

THE REFERENCES ...... 130

PREFACE

AUTHOR’S NOTE: this book is a result of my love of this great city and my pleasure at introducing people to it (and more than a few mentions from friends that I should “put a tour together”). This has also been a great excuse to learn more about San Francisco, under the guise of “research”.

I wanted to create a tour that was more than just a list of the obvious & famous touristy stuff; I wanted something with a little cultural & historical bite to it. I wanted to highlight the unusual stuff that most tourists (and even some residents) don’t know about, as well as show off the fascinating history & culture of this unique land over the last couple centuries. This isn’t meant to be just a tour of buildings, but of the space between them & the histories behind them.

Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER: this document was created primarily through “adaptation” [okay, plagiarizing] from numerous sources. Having admitted that, if imitation is supposed to be a sincere form of flattery… Well, I prefer to think of the following as less a “rip-off” than an “abridgement” of far superior works. (And of course it was always for purely personal use. So, there’s no need to sue me now, right?)

ORIENTATION

A few pointers for the non-residents amongst us…

A) "The City" vs. “the city” – San Franciscans call their town The City. San Fran is also acceptable, even SF. But whatever you do, don’t call it “Frisco” – that’s just not acceptable to the natives (though I’ve not been able to discover quite why).

B) Its cool dude – true to its liberal roots and “live & let live” mentality, unlike many densely-populated cities, most everyone here is pretty nice and friendly, and they will usually be very helpful if you need it. They love & enjoy their city, and they want you to too.

C) Weather – the weather can change a lot. It can be comfortable or even warm during the day (or in just one section of the city) and then be freezing cold & windy an hour later or somewhere else just a few miles away. As appropriately said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Dress accordingly, ideally in layers.

D) Eat, eat! – SF is known for its quantity & quality of restaurants – it’s been estimated that if everyone in The City went out to dinner on the same night, they’d all get a seat. So be adventurous & try small, neighborhood joints – there are a lot of great little hole-in-the-wall spots that can really impress.

E) Move around – SF is a transit-first town. Many residents walk, bike or take public transport almost everywhere possible (especially in the downtown area). Park your car someplace & walk or take MUNI buses & trains – they have extensive & convenient coverage and it’ll give you a native’s feel for The City and the people. There’s almost no place on this tour that isn’t within a few blocks of a bus or train line.

But enough of all that “present day” stuff – let’s go back in time to learn more about this magical land called San Francisco…

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO

The city & county of San Francisco currently has more than 800,000 residents in about 47 square miles (just under 7 miles across by 7 miles long). It is the 12th largest city in the US, and the entire Bay Area has 7.5 million people, making it the 5th largest metro area in the US. San Francisco currently has 5,321 blocks and 44 hills within its limits. And in more than 150 years of existence, the city of San Francisco has accumulated a rather unique history & culture like nowhere else….

At the end of the last ice age, ocean levels were much lower & the SF Bay was actually a dry mountain valley; the coastline was more than 25 miles westward of its current position, where the currently sit. About 5000 years ago, the sea level rose as snowmelt flowed from the Sierra Nevada Mountains into Sacramento, then through the (NW corner of the bay) and down between Tiburon & Angel Islands, out into the ocean (technically making the Bay Area a “tidal estuary” where fresh water & salt water meet).

For most of history, the was sand dunes & devoid of vegetation. Around 500 AD, there were nearly 1000 native people called the Ramaytush that lived all along the peninsula. But the first modern people to occupy this area (mostly in the area) were the Ohlone Indians, starting in the 1500s. Numbering as high as 10,000 by the early 1700s, these hunter-gatherers had no farming, beasts of burden or even tools beyond the Stone Age, and were gentle & non-aggressive toward others (which is why they were so easily dissipated or integrated after the Europeans eventually arrived).

In the late 1500s, sailing explorers repeatedly missed seeing the narrow inlet to SF Bay, which was often obscured by fog or rain; they usually stopped at the more obvious Drake’s Bay to the north or Monterrey Bay to the south. It would actually take an overland expedition by Spanish settlers in 1769 before the white man discovered SF Bay even existed. A permanent Spanish settlement arrived in 1776 and, on June 29th of that year (5 days before the signing of the Declaration of Independence), the two- dozen residents celebrated Mass near present-day Mission Dolores, marking what is considered the official founding of the city, then as part of the Spanish Empire.

But just a few generations later, Spain’s rule over its empire was floundering and Mexican colonists declared their independence in 1821. The new Mexican governors quickly realized they needed people to populate their land in order to maintain their claim on it, so they gave away vast tracts of land (especially in this, the sparse northern territory) to anyone willing to take out Mexican citizenship & live in the area. The largest ranchos went to the upper-class “Californios,” who had a corrupt influence over the governors.

In 1835, in the area north of Mission Dolores, near what is now the heart of downtown SF, a former British seaman became the first permanent resident of what had become known as Yerba Buena Cove (meaning

“good herb”, referring to a minty tea plant that grew wild around here). He had married into one of the Mexican landowning families & built a trading post here near Portsmouth Square.

By 1839, while this area was still part of the Mexican territory, there were enough residents in The Cove to warrant laying out an official grid of the first 7 unnamed streets in the city: Kearny, Grant, Clay, Jackson, Sacramento, Washington & Pacific Streets, all surrounding Portsmouth Square at the center.

In 1846, after the US won the Mexican-American war over Texas & , Captain John Montgomery raised the American flag in Portsmouth Square for the first time, claiming Yerba Buena Cove as part of the new American territory called California. The following year, the Cove changed its name to San Francisco.

Because the flat areas of the cove were already full, the 1846 “O’Farrell Street Plan” was created, extending the existing streets in all directions, including into the shallow bay, with the expectation that these “water streets” would eventually become piers & wharves. Because the separately-created north of Market streets didn’t line-up with those in south of Market, city planners decided to double the width of Market Street into a grand, European-style boulevard. They connected these grids to the village in Mission Dolores area a few years later.

Then, on January 24, 1848, everything changed for this struggling town: James Marshall found a gold nugget in the water wheelhouse at Sutter’s Lumber Mill, 130 miles northeast of SF, thus starting the famed California .

Initially, the town was nearly emptied (including the mayor), as everyone headed for the hills. But once the word of gold spread across the country & world, SF was soon refilled with new immigrants – the population swelled from 2,000 people in Feb. 1849 to more than 20,000 people just 8 months later. The sudden growing pains seriously strained living space – with so many people & so few real buildings, any available space was rented for sleeping at highly inflated prices (including one entrepreneur who rented out a board laying atop two sawhorses!).

But the canny newcomers realized that the miners were a more reliable source of wealth than the mines themselves, and many set up shop as merchants, saloon keepers, landlords, bank and business owners. Abandoned ships were used for storehouses, hotels & jails. There was explosive growth of gambling, prostitution & other entertainment (70% of the buildings surrounding Portsmouth Square was a casino and/or saloon). The town’s original canvas tents & shaky frame lean-to’s quickly gave way to brick & stone buildings (primarily in the Jackson Square area). And just in time – there were 6 great fires in the city from Christmas 1848 to mid-1849 that continually threatened to eliminate the burgeoning new, but mostly wooden, city.

During the Gold Rush, gold was being bought on the East Coast for about $18 an ounce ($460 today), but was going for less than half that in SF because of the vast supply & the far distance to the East Coast markets. Still, the average miner made $10-$15 a day ($250-$400 in today’s money), versus the national average of about $1 per day in the East. But the distance from the East also made everyday commodities & necessities skyrocket in price – bread was 50 cents vs. 4 cents in NYC ($12 & $1 respectively today).

And with mostly men in the town (only 8% of residents were women, most of them prostitutes), people ate out a lot (starting San Francisco’s continuing reputation for excellent gastronomy) – even when breakfast cost as much as $6 ($150 today!)

As people around the country & world decided to head to the riches of San Francisco, they had three transportation options: over land (8 months from St. Louis), over sea (4 months around the tip of South America), or both (2 months via 2 ships & an overland trek through Panama or Nicaragua in between). Despite the hardships of the trip, nearly 800 vessels left for San Francisco in 1850 alone!

After California was admitted to the US as the 31st state in 1850, the continuing explosive growth of the city required extending the street grid yet again. In some areas, the city’s geography was not considered, so some streets would dead-end at the top or bottom of huge hills. In other areas, planners simply turned the street into a stairway that lead to the top of a hill, which is why there are now more than 670 blocks of “stairway-streets” in The City. By 1854, there were 40,000 residents of the City (about 20 times that of the then-adobe village of ). The southern border of The City was an artificial line picked by a land surveyor in 1856.

Unfortunately, the 49er’s Gold Rush was rather short-lived – most of the easy-to-get stuff was gone in the first 3 years, and by 1856 The City was a recession-town instead of a boom-town. Merchants quickly had too much inventory and the residents had too little money to spend. Few had considered a future where gold wasn’t abundant, leading to many bankruptcies & a deep local economic recession.

So when the “Silver Rush” hit in Virginia City, Nevada in 1859, SF was in the right place at the right time, having learned how to handle & survive the onslaught that a Mother Lode brings. If the Gold Rush gave birth to San Francisco, the Comstock Lode was its trust fund, as this tiny town 250 miles east became an instant “outpost” of SF. (The largest silver vein, the “Big Lode”, was a silver behemoth 54 feet wide & 400 feet deep that was bringing in $500k ($7m today) every month; it was also the basis of the TV show “Bonanza”.)

While the Gold Rush mining had generated about $100 million ($2.5 billion today), the Silver Rush was worth 10 times that, and create proportionately massive economic growth for SF, though this time through diversified commerce, manufacturing, shipping, and large industry. The wealth of both Rushes forever solidified San Francisco’s permanence as a city.

By the 1870s, with the population doubling every 10 years, real estate ventures started putting up large planned communities of Victorian homes everywhere. Down payments were 25 to 50 percent of the average $7000 cost ($120,000 today), with the balance being paid off over the next 1 to 12 years. The greedy land developers tried to squeeze out as many plots of land as possible, usually creating lots 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep. To further maximize profits, they built the houses right up to the side property lines, butt-up against or even incorporating the neighboring building’s wall. While most homes did have front & back yards, they also had many ubiquitous bay windows to improve light & ventilation of the house (and increase the supposed square footage). The Victorian house era (1850-1900) occurred during SF’s fastest growth, going through 5 different variants, each more ornate than the previous, to better show off the implied wealth & class of the owner. (Only about 1/3 of the 48,000 Victorian houses built during this period have survived.)

By the late 1800s, the vast amounts of money flowing through the city created a small group of fabulously wealthy & powerful city leaders who led an openly-corrupt government, and built huge vanity mansions atop Nob Hill & downtown business landmarks like the Palace Hotel. They also lobbied Washington DC to help them finance the western half of the Trans-continental railroad, which started in Sacramento in 1863. (When the railroad was finished in 1869, a local newspaper headline proclaimed: “San Francisco annexes .”)

The railroad was built using mostly Chinese immigrants. When it was finished, most of them returned to The City. Their growing numbers were seen as the source of an economic depression in the early 1870s, creating unabashed racism & bigotry. City laws were quickly revised to restrict the Chinese to the then- remote area now known as Chinatown, and eventually led to California’s “Chinese Exclusion Act” of 1884, restricting the immigration & livelihood of all Chinese people (even second-generation, American-born Chinese).

But the new wealth in the city also created some famous public institutions in the 1870s, like – built amongst the pervasive sand dunes of the time and modeled after New York’s Central Park to symbolize The City’s growing size & power. 1873 saw the start of the once-ubiquitous cable car lines, which proved ideal for overcoming the many steep hills, and opening up vast new areas of the peninsula to growth. SF also became known as one of the “whaling capitals of the world” after 1880, as Atlantic whales had been diminished in population and international whaling shifted to the North Pacific & Arctic. It was not uncommon in SF to see whale bones drying on the piers, to later be made into corset-stays of the era.

A long-planned seawall was also started in 1873, wrapping from the northwest corner of the peninsula and moving west & south over time; it was completed in 1902. Thus started the decades-long habit of converting bay water into bay land. About 1000 years ago, SF Bay was also almost 50% larger than today, and up until the early 1900s, the waterway was navigable as far south as present-day San Jose and as far east as Sacramento. But because the gold & silver rushes increased hydraulic mining – pressurized water blasted at the rock – massive amounts of sediment flowed down the rivers into SF Bay, eventually decreasing it to the present size (3 to 12 miles wide east-to-west and 48 to 60 miles north-to-south). Currently, the deepest part of the bay is at the (350 feet); 70% of the rest of the bay is less than 18 feet deep.

Soon after the turn of the 20th century, San Francisco experienced its greatest setback: the Great Quake & Fire of 1906. The pre-Richter Scale earthquake is estimated to have registered around 8.3. Centered just a few miles off shore, the first jolt lasted 40 seconds, gave a 10-second breather, and then shot out a second, stronger jolt for another 25 seconds.

Because 90% of the city was made of wood buildings (which can flex), initial quake damage was actually quite low, except in the downtown area which had mostly unreinforced-masonry buildings that collapsed easily. The quake also managed to destroy most of the city’s clay water mains, killing off what few meager firefighting abilities the city had. What started as a few small initial fires (started by broken gas pipes) quickly merged and, with no resistance, the firestorm burned for 3 days and destroyed all of downtown & most of the highly-populated South of Market & Mission districts. On the 4th day, the wind suddenly shifted & blew from the south, blowing the fire back onto itself to burn out.

But the damage had been done: 28,000 buildings on over 500 city blocks were destroyed, calculated at more than $500 million in damage, about $12B today. (Insurance at the time didn’t cover earthquake damage, so many people claimed their building had survived the quake but “burned in the fire” afterward.) 250,000 people (about 2/3 of the total city population) were left homeless, and it took nearly a year (and the lives of 15,000 horses) just to clean up the mess. (This was also the first disaster of this magnitude to be captured on film; the whole world saw the destruction and responded with help.)

As always, though, The City would not be stopped. Temporary rail lines were run from the outskirts toward Downtown, the Marina District & Mission Bay. The debris – heavy stone and brick & mortar chunks – was hauled down and dumped into Mission Bay on the east. When that was full, dumping shifted to the Marina District (a decision that would come back to haunt 80 years later in the 1989 Great Quake). After a while, debris was just put on barges and hauled outside the Golden Gate & dumped into the ocean.

Though some citizens had permanently resettled over in the and south on the Peninsula, The City was still largely rebuilt within 3 years, with steel-frame buildings, earthquake-proofing & other cutting edge technology of the time. Less than a decade after the disaster, SF sponsored a World’s Fair (the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition in the newly created Marina District) that became the city’s re-introduction to the world. As The City expanded during the Roaring 20s, it opened its grand “City Beautiful” styled Civic Center & City Hall. The city also became an international port & hub – for the first time, you could travel from San Francisco to London via standard passenger transportation!

Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Roosevelt’s New Deal & the Works Projects Administration (WPA) started a lot of building & job creation in the Bay Area with projects like the Golden Gate & Bay Bridges, Treasure Island, two international airports, the East Shore Highway & the Caldecott Tunnel in Oakland. (If you look at the sidewalks in some residential areas, you can see “WPA” embedded in the cement.) They also built the final extension of the seawall along the eastern coastline, creating most of the city’s present-day shoreline.

During World War II, San Francisco’s strategic Pacific location further transformed The City, bringing a huge influx of soldiers, military bases & new residents looking for work in defense plants. As a military location, the closest this area ever came to seeing action was in 1941: from Dec 18-24, eight Japanese “mini-subs” were sited off the coast, but none ever came close to land.

After the war, many of the soldiers stayed & started families, giving life to the vast cookie-cutter western suburbs of the Richmond & Sunset Districts. This massive influx of youth also made SF ground zero for the counterculture revolution, with the Beat Generation in the 1950s, the Hippies in the 1960s, and the Gay Rights revolution in the 1970s.

Economically, the SF shipyards had started to die off by the 1960s & 1970s, as bigger container ships came into use. The larger ships required deeper ports, and Oakland had dredged but SF didn’t. Over time, the old SF shipyards & warehouses were converted into new residential neighborhoods.

Until the 1960s, the San Francisco skyline was always low & rather plain. But as heavy industry moved across the bay, white-collar jobs in SF grew, as did the size of the corporate buildings. When plans for a new public transport system called (BART) were announced, The City was now going to be open to commuters from the outlying areas, further fueling growth. Downtown grew into its iconic skyline silhouette in just a few decades.

Fearing too much urbanization, starting in the 1970s, all new downtown SF high-rises were required to provide public open space & plazas. Some spaces are obvious from street level, but many are actually on the tops of buildings and not generally well known; most buildings don’t want unknown people just wandering around. But when these areas are legally accessed, they can provide unique views or just a quiet respite in the middle of a bustling city. In addition to these downtown open spaces, The City also owns or manages 245 pieces of open land, from the 1,017 acre Golden Gate Park to small house-sized parks in the middle of some neighborhood blocks. And all of the city’s acreage doesn’t even include other spots like The Presidio or , which are part of the federal park system.

In 1989, San Francisco experienced the second worst earthquake in its history – the Loma Prieta quake, which registered 6.9 on the Richter scale. This quake was centered about 75 miles south of The City, but most of the damage was concentrated in the landfill-based Marina District in SF – an area ironically created literally from the rubble of the 1906 quake. During the quake, the in-fill land “liquefied” and many structures in the Marina District were damaged beyond repair, and several small fires broke out after a gas main was broken. While many advances had been made since the first Big One, and there was significantly less physical damage from this newest quake because of it, there were still some casualties.

During the quake, a small section of the east span of the Bay Bridge had collapsed, exposing a design weakness that led to the current construction of a whole new eastern span of the bridge, a side-by-side configuration going up next to the old span. In 2013, the new span will open & the old span will be torn down. In 1994, the “Embarcadero Freeway” – a 50s era double-deck freeway – was taken down because it was very a similar design to the freeway in Oakland that had collapsed, killing most of the 63 people that died during the quake. The old freeway ran along present day Embarcadero Street, from downtown, south toward the I-80 freeway / Bay Bridge; very few wept at the loss of the eyesore that had blocked the view of the bay for decades.

The 1990s ushered in a new Gold Rush – or rather Silicon Rush – as the internet & digital technology wave exploded in the Bay Area. Through this unchecked new wealth, San Francisco briefly surpassed New York City as the most expensive US city to live in, though this status was lost back to NYC a few years later due to the tech stock crash in 1999.

In the new millennium, The City is experiencing another growth spurt. New SF neighborhoods were opened up south of downtown, where the Embarcadero Freeway & heavy-industry used to be, leading to new skyscrapers being built (like the 60-story residential building The Millennium Tower, which has permanently changed the famous silhouetted SF skyline). And other neighborhoods are evolving – in the next 20 years, Mission Bay will be come a top-notch biotech / mixed-use neighborhood; Treasure Island will become residential as the Navy moves out; Rincon Hill will become the northern terminus of a high-speed rail system reaching down to Los Angeles & ; South of Market & the Ballpark District will become condo farms and residential towers.

Despite the finite land mass, The City never fails to grow its population, unique history & culture.

SF POPULATION GROWTH (1850 – 2010)

1950 to 1980: 1980 to 2010: average 5% decrease average 7% growth per decade per decade

1850 to 1890: 1890 to 1950: average 100% growth average 25% growth per decade per decade

MAP OF THE CHAPTER DIVISIONS

2

5 3 1

6 4 7

8

9

10

# chapter numbers in the basic order of original coastline before the growth of The City seawalls and in-fill

THE NEIGHBORHOODS OF SAN FRANCISCO

San Franciscans often refer to their city in terms of neighborhoods or districts – like a bunch of different cities, each with its own personality & history, that collectively make up The City. While the map below shows the larger neighborhoods & districts, some areas are unofficially subdivided even further, with enclaves and even streets having their own vibe & culture.

MUNI MUNI BART above ground underground underground above ground

JACKSON SQUARE, EMBARCADERO, FINANCIAL DISTRICT & RINCON HILL

43 1 1 13 46 3 69 24 2 27 22 59 61 16 21 23 20 32 11 30 26 45 19 28 31 8 47 33 9 7 6 66 65 17 34 68 35 62 44 25 67 4 53 29 10 36 56 18 52 5 64 57 58 40 15 60 42 37 49 48 55 41 14 38 51 63 54 12 39 44 50

Original coastline former Barbary Coast former Embarcadero Freeway

Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the original coastline & cove was sparsely populated by the Ohlone Indians, who farmed the bay for food. Besides fish, oysters were so plentiful that the arriving white man often found vast mounds of empty shells along the bay’s edge (they were later crushed & used in cement & chicken feed).

By the mid-1850s, the Embarcadero was a small, noisy, smelly, grimy waterfront of ships, saloons & boarding houses near present-day (between California & Jackson mostly). The Gold Rush of 1849 had brought a flood of treasure seekers, including fleets of sailors who abandoned their ships to go strike it rich in the mines. Outgoing ships needing new crews were often filled via “crimping” or “Shang-Haiing” – drunken men who pass out in a saloon (via liquor or being drugged) and wake up on a ship already on the way to China. But mostly, hundreds of abandoned ships were simply scuttled at their pier and covered over with back-fill, as the hills were lowered & the peninsula was extended out into the shallow bay.

Because Montgomery Street skirted the original shoreline, from the beginning this was the logical location to set up shipping, banking & companies. Today’s Financial District is its legacy, making SF a permanent West Coast power center for banks, law firms, and corporate headquarters.

As The City grew up around Market Street & the Embarcadero, nearby Rincon Hill was the address for the moneyed elite to live. Rise of the cable cars in the 1870s made other hills more accessible and the rich folks soon moved away to higher & higher spots. The South of Market area eventually devolved into industrial space, working-class neighborhoods, and then skid-row, before being gentrified by a 1985 redevelopment plan.

Just north of downtown, Jackson Square was the original commercial district but was mostly just a rag-tag collection of wood & canvas buildings. During the Gold Rush, they gave way to the city’s oldest stone & brick buildings. In the 1870s, as commerce moved southeast toward Market Street & the Ferry Building, this neighborhood evolved into industrial uses & warehousing, mostly for liquor.

Nearby was the wide, main route to the passenger docks in those days, which attracted lots of transients & vice. In the decades before the 1906 quake, the western edge of this area was a very rough, free-spending area lined with dance halls, saloons, casinos & brothels that took on the same name as the well-known pirate-infested section of North African coastline: The Barbary Coast.

While the city officially disdained the goings-on here, it took a secret pride that this area was considered “the wickedest town in the USA” because it actually became more of a tourist attraction after the Quake, as clubs profited from shocking the tourists with its bacchanalia (including originating many of the dance crazes that swept America at the time: the turkey trot; the bunny hug; the chicken glide; the pony prance, and other animal-based varieties of semi-acrobatic dancing). Even the SF Examiner newspaper, owned by the pious, vice-bashing William Randolph Hearst, ran thinly-disguised classified ads for prostitutes.

But the residents were tired of it all & demanded city leaders use the city’s post-Quake rebuilding as an opportunity to drive out the ubiquitous vice. The 1914 Red Light Abatement Act required all private booths & unescorted women be removed from liquor establishments; this quickly reduced the Barbary Coast to about ½ its original size, and Prohibition soon afterward killed off what was left.

The area went through its most recent evolution during the 1950s & 1960s, as decorators, antique dealers, commercial stores, and eventually lawyers, architects, and other professionals moved in & renovated the classic 2 to 4 story brick buildings as we see them today.

1. Shanghai Kelly’s Saloon (33 Pacific Street) – one of the original Shang-haiing saloons, the mistress of the bar would move targeted drinkers to a specific spot, located over a trapdoor, and ply them with spiked drinks. When sufficiently drugged, she’d pull a lever that would drop them through the floor to the basement below, where thugs would move them to a ship set for China. In exchange, she would collect the victim’s first 3 month’s wages (just like modern-day job agencies).

2. Walton Square (Front, Pacific, Davis & Jackson Streets) – this was the location of a farmer’s market in the 1880s. Bank of America started here as a co-op of fruit buyers who advanced money to farmers to help plant crops & bring them to market (today we call them “micro-loans”). Del Monte Fruits also started here, moving in 1907 to a larger headquarters & factory at The Cannery in Fisherman’s Wharf.

3. Old Ship Saloon (298 Pacific Street) – in 1849, SS Arkansas berthed at the Pacific Street pier and was promptly abandoned by the crew who’d heard about the Gold Rush. The ship languished here for several years before bay fill was eventually poured around it. A hole was cut in the bow of what was now known as “The Old Ship” and it was turned into a saloon. In 1857, the parts of the ship above ground were dismantled and used to build a hotel above the saloon. The current 3-story brick building was erected after 1906, with the upper floors serving as a brothel during WWII. There are some great historic photographs inside.

4. Pacific Coast Stock Exchange (130 Pine Street) – started elsewhere in the 1880s, the PCSE bought this lot from the Vanderbilt family in 1909 & built this structure by 1915, in response to the economic growth we now call The Roaring 20s. The building was designed by the same architect who created the mural in 1917 and designed the Treasure Island World’s Fair in the 1930s. The Stock Exchange moved out in the late 1990s & the building is now home to a gym. (Look for the “public space” at 100 Pine, reached from a walkway along a parking ramp off Front Street, with business towers pressing in on three sides.)

5. The Banking Center of San Francisco (Montgomery Street south of Pine Street) –

 Nevada Bank of San Francisco (Pine & Montgomery Streets) – one of many banks started during the Gold Rush, this bank’s vaults were not destroyed by the 1906 catastrophe, despite its proximity. Guarded around the clock, when the ashes of the bank finally cooled & the vaults opened, it revealed the $3 million ($71 million today) in gold & silver was intact, and could quickly help finance the rebuilding.

 Bank of America (345 Montgomery Street) – founded in 1904 by A.P. Giannini as the Bank of Italy, the bank catered to small merchants, immigrants, farmers, and other risky agricultural enterprises. Giannini also helped finance the fledgling movie industry in the 1930s, helping bankroll movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Gone with the Wind.” He also helped save the Golden Gate Bridge project from being killed by The Depression by having his bank buy many construction bonds; other people soon invested after they saw his confidence in the project.

 Wells Fargo History Museum (420 Montgomery Street) – Wells Fargo was started in 1852 in a two-story building on this location, to provide banking & mail services to the Gold Rushers, via their ubiquitous throughout the western US. The museum has some good exhibits about US banking & SF history, as well as a 150-year-old stagecoach.

 Kohl Building (400 Montgomery Street) – built in 1901 in the shape of an “H” for its owner Alvinza Hayward, California’s first millionaire from gold & silver mining successes. Because the building survived the quake & fire of 1906, it became the fire department’s command post.

6. What Cheer House (Sacramento and Leidesdorff Streets) – built in 1852, this was a “temperance hotel” (no alcohol) to offer an alternative to the rest of the hard-drinking town; a room & three meals here cost 50 cents a day ($11.54 today). It was briefly home to a then-unknown Ulysses S. Grant in 1854; Grant later joined the Union army in the Civil War, and then returned here in 1879 as a former President & war hero. The original hotel fell into disrepair & was demolished a few years later.

7. Hoff Store (Sacramento & Battery Streets) – this was a commercial store connected to Howison’s Pier on the then-waterfront. The store burned to the ground in a fire in 1851, with all the contents dropping into the bay mud. All of it was buried when the city later expanded the cove via a seawall & in-fill; some it was rediscovered as the current buildings were erected decades later.

8. Long Wharf (Leidesdorff & Commercial Streets) –

 Leidesdorff Street literally paralleled the original shoreline, which is why it is only a few blocks long, each block of varying widths, and jogging several feet off the line of the block before.

 The premier wharf in 1849, it extended far enough into the bay to service deep ships directly, and even had houses & stores upon on it. Handcarts and carriages rattled up & down the plank boards of the pier, with a mix of people speaking all manner of languages, and gamblers, con- men and pickpockets ready to take money from the gullible.

 The street name comes from William Leidesdorff, a successful African-American businessman, a US diplomat to Mexico, and an active member of SF city politics, including serving as city treasurer & on the city school board. He died before gold made SF a boom town.

9. Commercial Street –

 Sub-Treasury Building (608 Commercial Street) – the site of the first SF branch of the US Mint in 1854, it stored bullion & coordinated transactions between the US government & individuals. When a larger mint building was erected at 5th & Mission in 1874, this building was converted to a Treasury office (which, in turn, moved to 301 Pine Street in 1915). This building originally had 4 floors but the top 3 burned off in the 1906 fire.

 Daily Morning Call Newspaper (612 Commercial Street) – home to one of the city’s many newspapers in 1864, it also briefly employed a young reporter named Samuel Clemens (later known as Mark Twain).

 Chinese Historical Museum (650 Commercial Street) – you can see artifacts & historic photos in a small but effective museum of life for the pioneer Chinese residents.

 Empire Park (648 Commercial Street) – now a public park, this was the site of the last abode of a colorful local character named “crazy Emperor Norton I”, who proclaimed himself "Emperor of the United States & Protector of Mexico" in 1859.

o Born in England & raised in South Africa, Joshua Norton emigrated to San Francisco in 1849 at age 30 after inheriting $40,000 ($1m today) from his father's estate. He grew the fortune six-fold with saavy real estate investments, but lost it all attempting to corner the rice market in 1853 during a Chinese famine. Bankrupt & mentally unbalanced (but in a fun way) & the Emperor “reigned” for 21 years.

o Norton spent his days wearing an elaborate blue uniform with gold-plated epaulets that was given to him by US army officers from The Presidio (he topped it off with a beaver hat decorated with a peacock feather). With a regal cane, he would regularly examine the state of public property and the appearance of police officers. (The city supervisors even replaced his uniform with another, when the original became tattered.)

o The eccentric was humored by the citizens & treated deferentially by shopkeepers who honored currency he issued in his own name. He regularly ate at the finest restaurants in town as restaurateurs coveted the "Imperial Seal of Approval" for the substantial boost to business, even adding brass entrance plaques declaring "by Appointment of his Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I of the United States." No play or musical performance in town dared to open without reserving balcony seats for Norton.

o Among his many progressive “imperial decrees” in the late 1800s: abolish US Congress (an emperor doesn’t need a legislature); create a UN-like “league of nations”; all religious conflicts & political parties are outlawed; suspension bridges & tunnels must be built to connect SF to the East Bay; and, referring to SF as “Frisco” would be a misdemeanor with a $25 fine ($600 today!). He also abolished the SF Board of Supervisors after his many proclamations were ignored; they ignored that one too.

o In 1867, a policeman arrested Norton to commit him to a mental institution. Outraged citizens & scathing newspaper editorials prompted the police chief to release Norton & issue a formal apology on behalf of the police force. Norton magnanimously granted an "Imperial Pardon" to the errant policeman & all officers thereafter saluted when Norton passed by.

o Nearly 10,000 people paid homage when he died in 1880, and the local paper had a front- page obituary declaring “The King Is Dead”. Norton's legacy has been immortalized in several plays of the time, in characters by Robert Louis Stevenson & Mark Twain (see the character King in “Huckleberry Finn”), and even in the 1930s’ “Sandman Comics” issue #35. In 1939, a plaque was placed on the Transbay Terminal (at the SF end of the Bay Bridge) to commemorate Emperor Norton's "A bridge will be built" proclamation and, in 2004, the new eastern span of the bridge was almost named after him (Oakland nixed it).

10. Bush at Battery (at Market Street) –

 Heineman Building (130 Bush Street) – this 1910 building is the narrowest in The City: just 20 feet wide (but 10 stories high). Instead of fading into the background, though, it lives proudly in Gothic façade & terra cotta spires.

 Shell Building (Bush & Battery Streets) – when this 28-story building was erected in 1930, it overshadowed it’s 3 to 5 story tall neighbors and even the former tallest building, the Ferry

Building. It was an apt metaphor for the gas & car culture that was then taking over the transportation business formerly dominated by the ferry industry.

11. Ferry Building –

 The first building on this site was erected in 1875, after the Gold and Silver rushes had created a steady population of travelers in the East Bay. While the other wharves served commercial shipping, the Ferry Building served people shipping. It quickly outgrew the modest original building, and was replaced with an expanded version in 1879. The much larger current version was built in 1898 and is modeled after a cathedral campanile in Seville, Spain.

 By the 1920s this was “grand central station west” moving 50 million people a year as 170 ferries a day connected SF to the East & North bays. This building even handled air-ferries – for a price that rivaled the water-ferries, water-planes left Oakland every 20 minutes for a 6- minute flight to the Ferry berth.

 But success quickly taxed the ferry terminal’s capacity, creating a call for bridges to relieve the pressure. Unfortunately, the bridges’ had even more success than their catalyst, and the ferry service & building quickly fell out of favor & into decline. The building finally closed completely in June 1958, after more than 100 years of continuous service. Around the same time, trains stopped running on the Bay Bridge; it was going to be a car-oriented commute into the future.

 Embarcadero Freeway (brown line on map)– the closed & neglected Ferry building was mostly obscured in 1957 by the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway that was built in front of it. When that monstrosity was torn down as a victim of the 1989 quake, The Embarcadero was overhauled and the Ferry Building was refurbished & repurposed into the current culinary mall of shops & restaurants. (Look for farmer’s markets & food stalls outside the building on Tuesdays, Thursdays & Saturdays.)

12. Wells Fargo Building & Crocker Galleria (1 Montgomery Street) – this 3-story building was built in 1908, but also had another 10-story tower above & behind it. When the property was purchased & renovated in 1982, the top 10 stories were removed. The mall covers what used to be Lick , a service alley that ran through the block & was covered during the renovation. The north end of the mall has subtle signs pointing to the stairways up to the public open space, which gives a very different view of the Financial District.

13. Piers 3 & 5 (north of the Ferry Building) –

 S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien – this ship is the last operable WWII Liberty Ship of more than 2700 that were built in the US to transport goods, soldiers, munitions, etc. to the war front. This ship was built in 56 days and launched from Maine in 1943, spent a year transporting goods across the Atlantic & then as part of D-Day, before two years moving goods to Brisbane, Shanghai & Manila in the Pacific Theatre of WWII. She was mothballed in (40 miles NE of SF, in the corner of the Bay) for 30 years before being renovated & put on display here in 1980.

 San Francisco Belle – this faux-Mississippi riverboat is run by Hornblower Cruises, giving dinner cruises around the bay.

 Santa Rosa ferryboat – this is the last of 6 identical car-ferry boats that were the cutting edge in the 1920s, before the bridges made them mostly obsolete.

 Pier 5 – this formerly-dilapidated pier was rebuilt as a pedestrian pier stretching 600 feet into the bay, giving amazing panoramic views.

14. Wells Fargo Headquarters (1 Montgomery Street) – originally built as a Masonic Lodge in 1860, it was a just another of the many 2-3 story tall commercial buildings along Montgomery at the time. The building burned down in the 1906 quake & fire, and was rebuilt as a 13-story building for First National Bank. The building was expanded in 1921 when FNB merged with Crocker Bank. In the 1980s, Wells Fargo Bank bought Crocker & thus owned the building, removing the top 10 stories in order to use the air-rights on the sleek tower behind it.

15. 100 Block of Sutter Street --

 Hallidie Building (130 Sutter Street) – the first-ever building in the style called “glass curtain facade”, the glass wall is a full foot out in front of the concrete shell of the building. Letting in more light was one of the main design objectives for this former garment factory.

 Lick House Hotel (111 Sutter Street) – James Lick bought what was a mostly sand dune lot in 1848 for $275 ($6800 today) and built a hotel in 1861 modeled after the Palace of Versailles. It burned & collapsed in the 1906 quake & fire.

16. Columbus Tower (916 ) – not to be confused with the Flatiron Building at 540 Market Street, this 1907 building originally housed a basement-level restaurant called “Caesar’s” where the “Caesar Salad” was invented. In the 1960s, the Kingston Trio converted the basement to a recording studio, which was later used by the Grateful Dead to record their second album. Today, the building is owned by Francis Ford Coppola, where he runs his Zoetrope Film Studios and the ground-level Café Zoetrope, featuring wines from Coppola’s Napa vineyards.

17. Museum of Money of the American West (400 California Street) – see real gold nuggets, coins and other financial artifacts from the early days of SF. It is located in the basement of the Bank of California, built in 1908.

18. – This area is sometimes called the French Quarter because it was home to the first French settlers (approximately 3,000 sponsored by the French government) arriving in 1851. They shared the nearby Chinatown area with early Chinese settlers, and were more sympathetic than other people to the Chinese concerns. This street is closed to vehicular traffic and filled for lunch & dinner with portable chairs, tables, umbrellas, and outdoor heaters, candles & string lights. Every year, the area is the site of a boisterous Bastille Day celebration, the nation's largest, and Bush Street is temporarily re-named Buisson.

19. (Clay & Battery) – the four similar looking buildings from here to the water are collectively known as Embarcadero Center. In the daylight, they are said to look like stacks of old computer punchcards (popular when the buildings were built between 1968 & 1982). At night, the buildings are illuminated on their edges, looking like stacks of books.

20. Columbo Building (1 Columbus Avenue) – formerly a saloon, this building was home in 1904 to the Bank of Italy, later known as Bank of America. During the 1906 quake & fire, bank founder A.P. Giannini brought his horse-drawn cart in & loaded it with all the bank’s money – including $80,000 in gold bullion ($2 million today) – covered it with vegetables, and then drove it all to his home in San Mateo, 20 miles south. The fire later consumed the original building, and the current building, by the same designers of the Fairmont Hotel, was later erected in its place.

21. Montgomery Street (north of Washington Street) –

 Columbus Savings Bank (700 Montgomery Street) – A.P. Giannini got his start working at this bank. Recognizing a huge, untapped market – the individual consumer – he started his own bank across the street in 1928. He was so successful, he later bought this property, becoming his former boss’ landlord. He eventually even bought the ex-boss’ bank, as he grew the Bank of America into an empire.

 Old Transamerica Building (701 Montgomery Street) – this building was originally only two stories high when built in 1909, but a third story was added in 1916. In 1928, A.P. Giannini founded Transamerica Corporation as a holding company for his then-numerous banks, and moved the parent company here in 1938, making this the original Transamerica building. It is now the SF headquarters for the Church of Scientology.

 Langerman’s Building (722 Montgomery Street) – since being built in 1853, this building has been a tobacco & sugar warehouse, a theatre, city offices, a medical building, and a bathhouse. In the 1950s, it became the Law Offices of Melvin Belli, flamboyant lawyer to Erroll Flynn, Lenny Bruce, and Jack Ruby. It was rendered unsafe by the Loma Prieta Earthquake on October 17, 1989; all but the façade was subsequently replaced.

 Genella Building (728 Montgomery Street) – built in 1871, it has been home to a china & glassware warehouse, a meeting hall, city offices, a loan broker, and a theater. Oscar Wilde partied here in 1882. It was home to artists’ studios for about 70 years before Melvin Belli bought it in 1959, as an annex to his law offices next door.

 Golden Era Building (730 Montgomery Street) – built in 1852, this was the home to the Golden Era newspaper, most notable for publishing some of Mark Twain’s short stories.

 The first city improvement (744 Montgomery) – in 1844, a wooden footbridge crossed the neck of the lagoon that used to exist here. The entire town of Yerba Buena Cove – all 30 of them – came out to see the unveiling & test the bridge by jumping up & down on it. It held.

 Sherman’s Bank (802 Montgomery) – built for $84,000 in 1854 (nearly $2 million today), this building housed a bank managed by William Tecumseh Sherman, later known as the Union

general who laid waste to & the South during the Civil War. By the 1906 quake, the building housed a restaurant called The Eiffel Tower (guess what kind of food they served), and in the 1920s it was a sausage factory, then a soy sauce factory. Today it is home to retail space & offices. It had a third floor that was taken down after the 1906 quake for safety reasons, as was the granite façade on the Jackson Street side.

22. Jackson Street – this area is a prime example of what life looked like back in the 1860s, when the Gold & Silver rushes built up the city. Note the curvy line on the ground – this indicates the location of the original shoreline.

 Old Consulate Row (468-472 Jackson Street) – this started as a liquor warehouse in 1851 but it became the home for the consulates of France, Spain and Chile in the early 1900s; they’ve since moved elsewhere. Note the original shutters, which were considered a great home safety innovation in the 1850s. Unfortunately, they’re made of iron, which expands when heated, making the shutters unopenable – bad news if you’re on the flame-side of them.

 Hotaling’s Warehouse (451-455 Jackson Street) – built in 1866, it survived the 1906 fire, despite being surrounded by lots of buildings that didn’t. The only other structures to survive nearby were a hall & saloon, leading to suspicions that the owners plied firemen with liquor in exchange for saving their buildings.

 Railroad Car Barn (440-444 Jackson Street) – in the late 1800s, this was a horse stable for the horse-cart transit lines, but converted to an electric car barn after the 1906 quake, when the second floor was removed.

 Medico-Dental Building (435-441 Jackson Street) – the name comes from the caduceus symbols on the building, despite it never having had any medical or dental businesses within it. But in this commercial district of the 1800s, caduceus was also the symbol of Mercury, the Roman god of commerce.

 Ghirardelli Building (415-431 Jackson Street) – in the mid-1800s, this was the first production plant for Ghirardelli Chocolate. This is where Domingo Ghirardelli discovered how to create powdered chocolate, making him a multimillionaire. The business moved to in 1894 and then eventually to the East Bay.

 Balance Place (off the 400 block of Jackson Street) – this is the shortest street in San Francisco, named after the ship that was docked & scuttled here in 1849, when this was the original coastline. The ship became the street’s foundation when the coastline was extended out further into the bay.

23. Hotaling Stables (38-40 Hotaling Place) – this was originally two buildings (look for the wooden strip extending down from the cornice about 2/3 of the way along); both were stables for the Hotaling warehouse’s delivery-cart horses. Note the hayloft doors, now 2nd & 3rd floor windows.

24. Kentucky Stables (450 Pacific Avenue) – originally a carriage house & livery stable, as evidenced by the wide ground floor doors and the hay & grain doors (now windows) on the Osgood side, it

later had a Chinese cigar factory upstairs. The building next door (440 Pacific Avenue) was originally a brothel and then later transient housing. Notice the scorch marks on the brick, a remnant of the 1906 fire.

25. 343 Sansome Street – excavations in the 1980s at the sight of Hoff’s Store (see #7 above) discovered remnants & artifacts 15 feet below street level, some of which are exhibited in the lobby area of this building. There’s also has a 15th floor public rooftop garden accessible from the lobby.

26. The Niantic Block (Clay Street between Sansome & Leidesdorff) –

 The 120’ long whaling ship Niantic came to SF in 1849, after receiving word of the Gold Rush. The owners sold the ship to speculators who, at high tide, floated it inland, beached it & partially buried it, dividing it up into shops & offices – and bringing in $20,000 a month ($500,000 today).

 A few years later, the ship caught fire & burned down to the waterline, leaving 8 feet of hull in the mud. That was covered over & the 3-story Niantic Hotel was built on top of it, standing for another 20 years, until it was demolished in 1872 to build “The Niantic Block” a four-story brick office building that survived 34 years before it was destroyed in the 1906 quake.

 The Niantic Block was replaced by the 4-story reinforced-concrete Niantic Building, which lasted 70 years before it too was demolished in 1978 for the current Pacific Mutual building.

 Each time the site was destroyed & rebuilt, excavations uncovered more of the original ship’s hull, along with its cargo like intact bottles of champagne. About 30 feet of the bow portion still extends (but can’t be seen) under the Redwood Park next to the .

27. International Settlement (Pacific between Kearny & Montgomery) – this was the heart of the Barbary Coast in its late-1800s heyday, full of brothels, dance halls, cheap watering holes & opium dens. The area declined in the early 1900s but, during WWII, the “International Settlement” was an attempted revival of the old Barbary Coast spirit (though without the illegal parts). The idea never really took hold and by the 1960s, the area had quieted down to what we see today.

 Hippodrome (555 Pacific Avenue) – this 1849 saloon, casino, brothel, drug den & dance hall featured paintings & plaster casts of naked maidens, satyrs & nymphs, as well as prostitutes hired to pose nude in displays & window boxes. Other girls – the “pretty waiter girls” – earned about $20 a week ($500 today) to serve as waitress, entertainer & prostitute. For a small fee to the management, any man could view any pretty waiter girl free of her clothing. Alternately named The Red Light & Moulin Rouge, this site played host to so many ruthless criminals that even the police were afraid to go inside. The building originally had double-swinging doors running the length of the wall, not just the two that remain. It has been closed since _____.

 So Different Club (550 Pacific Avenue) – an African American-owned music & dance hall, it was one of the first jazz clubs in the early 1900s, and the start of some of the hottest dance crazes of the 1920s. In the 1930s, it was a dime-a-dance dance hall that also had “short rent” rooms upstairs, if men wanted to continue the dance “horizontally”.

 580 Pacific Avenue – the double swinging doors with brass bar handles & beveled glass is all- original from this building’s 1907 humble start as a typical no-frills saloon of the era.

 The Saloon and Dance Hall (Pacific Street near Kearny) – in the early 1900s, the women here earned $15 to $20 a week ($400 - $500 today) & a slight percentage of the drinks they sold, but were forbidden to wear underwear. They were also entitled to half of whatever they might pick from men’s pockets during dances. (The proprietors often complained to police that the girls were dishonest in reporting the true amounts they had stolen.) The girls also developed another source of income: selling their supposed house key to drunken patrons for a couple bucks (a quick $40 today). But police quickly put an end to this practice after complaints from homeowners that drunken men were searching hopelessly in the middle of the night for any lock to stick their key into. (When The Seattle was sold in 1908, it changed to The Dash, and the waitresses were replaced by male cross-dressers who, for a dollar ($25 today), would perform whatever sex act was requested. When it was revealed that the new owners were two officers of the Superior Court, the place closed six months after it opened.

28. The City Hotel (Clay & Kearney) – this was the site of the first hotel ever in SF when it opened in 1846 (and it was immediately already more expensive than the rest of the country).

29. The (235 Montgomery Street) – the original Russ House Hotel was built in 1862 and took up the entire city block. The hotel was destroyed & rebuilt several times in subsequent fires & quakes. The current 32-story Russ Building was completed in 1927 (with the city's first indoor parking garage) and was the tallest building in San Francisco until 1964.

30. Hilton Hotel (SE corner of Kearny & Washington Streets) –

 1850 – during the height of the gold rush, this was the site of 2 famous gambling saloons: the El Dorado leased for $40,000 a year (about $1 million today), and the Parker House next door rented for $10,000 ($250,000 today) per month ($3 million a year today).

 1852 – City Hall #1 was constructed on this site after the city purchased both buildings for $200,000 ($5 million today).

 1895 – city hall moved to the new Civic Center complex over on Market Street, and this building became the Hall of Justice, containing The City’s police department, jails, coroner & morgue.

 1970 – a sterile Hilton Hotel replaced everything that had come before.

31. Terminus (Clay Street near Montgomery) – not far from the Transamerica Pyramid was the western terminus of the Pony Express route, which started in 1860 & cut mail delivery time down to 12 days vs. 23 days on the regular overland stagecoach (essentially, the FedEx & USPS of their day). Unfortunately, 18 months after it started, a newer technology – transcontinental telegraph (an early form of email) – put the Pony Express out of business by late 1861.

32. Montgomery Block (Montgomery Street between Washington & Merchant Streets) –

 The original 1853 four-story building here was the tallest & grandest building west of the Mississippi River at the time and the first fireproof & earthquake resistant building in SF. It was built with three-foot thick brick walls on a foundation built of dovetailed & clamped redwood logs sunk 22 feet into the unstable shoreline; it cost $3M to build ($77M today).

 The building was home to lawyers, judges, scientists & businessmen. In the basement baths, Mark Twain once met a fireman named Tom Sawyer, whose name he later used for his novel. (The real Sawyer later opened a saloon on called “The Original Tom Sawyer’s.”) In the 1930s, this building was an artist’s haven, with rents around $5 a week (about $60 a week today). After more than 100 years of use, the Block was torn down to become a parking lot.

 Transamerica Pyramid (505 Sansome Street) – the tallest building in SF since it opened in 1972, it was initially decried by many but eventually became the iconic SF building. The solid white “shoulders” protruding from the top of the point are actually the elevator shafts for getting to the top-most floors (though there is no public observation deck). Transamerica Corp. was eventually sold to GE Capital & no longer exists. There is a “public-space” Redwood forest next to the building.

33. Hyatt Regency Hotel (5 Embarcadero Center) – built in 1972 (and looking it), it has a cavernous & dramatic pyramid lobby of terraced floors & hanging plants that stuns.

34. Federal Reserve Building (101 Market Street) – built in 1983, it became headquarters after almost 60 years on Sansome Street. It has an interactive museum in the front part of the building.

35. Matson Building (Market & Main Streets) – headquartered here in 1924, Matson Navigation started in 1882 with several three-masted shipping schooners and cruise ships, and has grown into an international corporation whose name can be found on many huge shipping containers today.

36. (Market & Bush Streets) – this monument is dedicated to Peter Donahue, an Irish immigrant who founded a blacksmith at Montgomery & Jackson streets that later grew into Union Iron Works. The statue was created by a local deaf & gay man named in 1899. (Note the plaque in the ground indicating the original shoreline.)

37. Hobart Building (582 Market Street) – built here in 1914 to replace the previous building destroyed in 1906, this was the headquarters of Walter Hobart, who prospered from successful investments in gold mines, utilities & real estate. During WWII, it served as an air-raid shelter. The odd-shaped lot dictated the building design, but when a neighboring, abutting building was torn down, the building’s large solid southern wall made it even more idiosyncratic.

38. Admission Day Monument (Market, Post & Montgomery Streets) – created by the same sculptor of the Mechanic’s Monument (#36 above), this statue commemorates the admission of California into the Union (September 9, 1850). It started out in 1897 a half-mile away at Market, Mason & Turk Streets but was considered a traffic hazard by 1948, when it was moved to Golden Gate Park, before being moved here in 1977.

39. Palace Hotel (50 ) – this 5-star hotel has been host to Oscar Wilde, Thomas Edison, J.P. Morgan, Amelia Earhart, General William Tecumseh Sherman, and US presidents Ulysses Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt and Warren Harding, the last of whom died here in 1923, just 20 months into his Presidency. (The last king of Hawaii also died here.) The hotel also played host to the inaugural session of the United Nations.

 Early 1850s – an Irish pioneer donated this parcel of land to the Catholic Church, which built a church & orphanage on the site. The church was moved twenty years later to Eddy Street near Divisidero (where it still stands), and this land was sold for six-figures (at least $2.5 million today) to Comstock Lode investor William Ralston.

 1874 – William Ralston spent $6 million ($115 million today) & 18 months (18 months today) to build a seven story, 120-foot high, 800 room grand hotel encircling a marble-paved courtyard & horse-carriage turnaround, all covered by a domed ceiling.

o Ralston created “New Montgomery Street” to use as the hotel’s front entrance, in order to connect prestigious “old” Montgomery Street to south of Market, and to encourage the city’s expansion southward.

o Each room had a marble fireplace & a crude form of central air conditioning, and could even receive messages by pneumatic tube (p-mail?).

o The Garden Court restaurant is where the covered courtyard & carriage turnaround stood.

o The walls included steel reinforcing bolts (essentially, crude rebar) to make the building more secure in an earthquake.

o A bridge was built crossing over New Montgomery, connecting the Palace & Grand hotels.

o The owner, Ralston, died 6 weeks before the hotel was completed.

 1906 – despite a 630,000 gallon cistern in the basement, the hotel did not survive the fire. It was replaced in 1909 with this similar looking structure. Enrico Caruso was staying here when the quake hit and was so shaken, he vowed never to return to San Francisco & never did.

40. Montgomery Street, between Bush & Sutter Streets –

 Occidental Hotel – the 1861 hotel occupied the entire city block. In the hotel bar in 1864, a patron told the bartender he had to go all the way to Martinez (35 miles NE of the city). The bartender said, “Too bad; let me make you a Martinez cocktail.” Today we call it the Martini.

– note that this mid-block address has its entrance at the corner of Montgomery & Sutter. Several retail stores were removed & the elevator lobby was connected to the bright, modern corner sliced off the building.

Street – completed in 1967, this was the first building to incorporate a direct connection to the still-being-built BART system, and what was originally imagined as an underground retail complex connected to all the downtown skyscrapers. This is the only remaining BART entrance from that plan.

41. Coffee central (Howard & Spear) – the Folgers Brothers opened their coffee factory & roastery here during the Gold Rush, popularizing what was then a “luxury” drink. In the early 1900s, they were joined in the area by Hills Brothers, MJB and Schilling, the other top roasters in the country.

42. Elim Alley – only 8 feet wide, it is the 2nd narrowest street in the city, but it is a real street.

43. Clark’s Point (Broadway at Front Street) – SF’s first wharf was established here in 1847, extending out 150 feet over what was then the waterline. When gold was discovered 2 years later, this was the only deep-water pier that could handle the massive cargo influx that started coming in.

44. Telephone Pioneers Communication Museum ( Street) – see the development, invention & evolution of telephony, through photos, old equipment & switchboards.

45. Buried ship (425 Battery Street at Clay Street) – metal strips in the sidewalk indicate the outline of the ship, General Harrison, buried here in the 1850s.

46. Sydney Town (Montgomery between Broadway & Pacific) – in the 1850s, the origins of the Barbary Coast began in this area, where Australian ex-patriates (and, by definition at that time, ex- convicts) were living and creating trouble, from muggings to murders, theft to gambling. During the major fires that were common in SF, the Aussie hooligans would go out robbing the unprotected warehouses, while everyone else was watching the fire.

47. Vigilance Committee Headquarters (Sacramento near Embarcadero Center 2) – this was the location of the Vigilance Committee headquarters in 1856. They were a group of do-gooder vigilantes that arose from the lawlessness of the Barbary Coast & related gangs (like those in Sydney Town). The Committee “tried”, convicted & executed bad people on the spot, despite laws against it at the time (many cops turned a blind eye).

48. Transbay Terminal / Center (south of Mission Street, between 2nd & Fremont streets) –

 The Transbay Terminal – the original concrete Art Deco terminal opened here in 1939 as part of the Bay Bridge transportation corridor, providing a centralized hub for SF busses & trains to connect with Key Route trains coming from the East Bay via the lower deck of the new Bay Bridge. The terminal was converted from rail to road in the late 1950s, as the Key System trains were replaced with busses. Eventually other transportation systems from the North & South bays were using this centralized hub, though it was eventually just a shadow of its former self.

 The Transbay Center – this $4 billion project not only replaces the outdated Terminal but creates a new residential neighborhood.

o The bus terminal was moved to a temporary site a few blocks away in 2009, on land where the old Embarcadero Freeway used to connect to I-80. The original terminal was demolished in 2010 to make way for the new Transbay Center, set to open in 2017.

o The new glassy, undulating building will cover the same footprint & serve the same local-bus hub function, but will also accommodate regional-rail and new high-speed rail from Los Angeles (via a 1.3 mile long tunnel connecting to the current terminus at 4th & King streets). Busses will arrive at street level, and trains will arrive on two underground levels. It’ll serve 100,000 commuters a day via 11 different Bay Area transportation systems.

o The structure will include three airy & naturally lit levels above ground for retail, a museum & a 5-acre “green roof” in the form of the landscaped “City Park” public space running the entire length of the 3-block-long building. It will feature a “light column” piercing all 5 floors, to bring natural light to all levels.

49. Transbay Plaza (Mission between Fremont & 1st streets) – when the new Transbay Center opens, it will include other planned parts of the project:

 Mission Square (Mission & Fremont) – this will be a small, open, park-like area at ground level, with a funicular up to City Park on the roof of the Transbay Center.

 Transbay Tower (Mission & 1st Street) – a glass residential & office tower will be built where the original building’s grand entrance used to be. Planned to be a 1200-foot tall spiral glass & steel structure, it will be the tallest building west of the Mississippi (knocking out LA’s 1000’ tall iconic US Bank tower). Builders had to get a special exemption for the Tower because it will cast a shadow over part of Justin Herman Plaza near the Embarcadero & Ferry Building, which is a violation of a 1984 law that prohibits new structures from casting shadows over plazas & parks.

50. (between 2nd & Main streets) – the area that is now mostly parking lots will become SF’s newest neighborhood, with 2600 new townhouses, low- and mid-rise buildings, and a few slender high-rise towers spaced apart to provide sunlight to the numerous plazas & parks below. Folsom street will be narrowed & the sidewalks widened to allow for cafes, markets & other retail.

51. Transbay Temporary Terminal – once the new Transbay Center opens in 2017, the current Temporary Terminal located here will be turned into a public park (using the existing palm trees, which already had been re-purposed from a demolition site in the East Bay), as part of the new residential neighborhood.

52. Rincon Park (Embarcadero near Folsom Street) – the sculpture, "Cupid's Span", was created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in 2003. Resembling Cupid's bow and arrow pointed at the ground, the statue symbolizes the place where Tony Bennett "left his heart".

53. Embarcadero Station (Market Street near Embarcadero) – BART is the public train system that connects SF with cities in the East & South Bay via five lines, 44 stations, and 104 miles of track. BART is the fifth-busiest rapid transit system in the US with an average of 350,000 passengers a day, and successor to the Key System, which ran above-ground streetcars in the East Bay & across the lower deck of the Bay Bridge into SF until the late 1950s. Embarcadero Station is the first / last

SF stop but, ironically, was not in the original building plans in the 1960s. Back then, this was a sparsely developed & run-down area, but by the time BART opened in 1972, it was a burgeoning new part of the Financial District. This heir-apparent to the Ferry Building was added in the late- 70s, which is also why it has such a different look & décor from the other Market Street stations.

54. Future Transbay District towers (TBD) – the original Transbay redevelopment plan called for only six towers of about 300 feet scattered about the area, with a 550-foot tower attached directly to the new terminal (now called the Transbay Tower; see #49 above). By 2007, the tower plans grew in height & number until the most ambitious proposals called for up to 13 buildings between 300 to 1200 feet high, including a cluster of 5 “supertall” buildings (800 feet or higher) built right near the Transbay Tower. The other buildings have been proposed for Main & Howard Streets, and Folsom Street at Spear, Essex, Fremont & 1st streets. The number & size of the buildings has created concern that this area might turn into a glass canyon of skyscrapers. Recent economic changes have put most of the planned towers on indefinite hold, except for the few listed below:

55. Street – eventual 700-foot tall tower.

56. – currently a 550-foot tower, but it could rise as high as 700 feet.

57. Between Main, Howard, Mission and Beale streets – several buildings as high as 600’.

58. Wild Parrots (Sue Bierman Park, SW corner of Clay & Drumm streets) – prior to 1993, it was legal to import wild parrots from South America, and they were brought in by the millions as pets (costing less than $100 per bird). Unfortunately, their new owners found that the wild birds despised captivity, were very noisy, and bit a lot. Not surprisingly, many of the birds “accidentally escaped” or were released by frustrated owners. There are now several hundred in the flock, and have been made famous in a 2003 documentary. You can usually find them (or more likely hear them) in the trees of this park, most often around dusk. (Another large flock inhabits the trees in the median of Dolores Street, near 24th Street.)

59. Overhead walkways (Front & Clay streets and northward) – this area was part of a 1960s redevelopment master plan. Using a design trend popular then, a collection of walkways was constructed to elevate the population above the traffic that ran along Washington & Clay streets, which were high-volume on & off ramps for the former Embarcadero Freeway. People were able to live & work safely, walking over & between the Embarcadero Center & neighboring residential & retail buildings. When the freeway was removed, the walkways became an anachronism.

60. Heald Building (24 Post Street) – the original building on this site was built in 1863 as Heald Business College, the first business school west of the Mississippi. In 1879, the college introduced typewriters, shorthand & women to the curriculum. It eventually moved to Mission & First Streets, near the old Transbay Terminal.

61. Old Produce District (Washington between Drumm & Davis Streets) – this area was a wholesale produce district, before being rehabilitated in the 1960s as the Embarcadero Center live-work area. The spirit of this produce district lives on in the Embarcadero Farmer’s Market.

62. The Tweezers Building (345 California) – this tall white building that looks like it has toothpicks sticking out of the top is actually the top 48 floors of the 345 California complex. The twin towers

were built at a 45-degree angle relative to the street-grid in 1986, sitting in the middle of the block and anchored at each corner by four existing historic low-rise buildings. The top 11 floors of the towers were originally planned as condos, but the luxury Madarin Hotel now occupies the space, having added several glass skybridges that offer great views of the Bay Area.

63. Infinity Towers (160 Folsom Street) – built in the footprint of the former Embarcadero Freeway, these residential towers were finished in 2008. Midway through the excavation process, a whaling ship called The Candace was found just to the south of Spear Street. The 125-foot ship was found 20 feet below street level in what was then the harbor.

64. Crown-Zellerbach Building (1 Bush Street at Market Street) –

 this 20 story building was completed in 1959 in the “International Style” (glass curtain exterior) as headquarters for Crown-Zellerbach, a paper products conglomerate. The building was the first significant downtown structure erected in the 30 years following the Great Depression. Because South of Market street was in decline during the time it was built, designers faced the building away from it & toward Bush St. & the financial district north of it, putting the elevators & other utilities on the “ugly” Market Street side.

 A plaque in the northeast corner commemorates the 1895 invention of the coin-operated three- reel slot machine. The highest payout was 10 nickels ($13 today) if you got all 3 bells lined up.

65. – this complex of three office buildings starts at 1 Market Street with the historic 11-story Southern Pacific Building, completed in 1916. Development 60 years later added the white towers behind it: the 43-story Spear Tower and the 27-story Steuart Tower.

66. – this 48-story office building was completed in 1982. The faceted cylindrical tower features a seven story, glass enclosed lobby and a granite plaza with flower beds and a fountain. The plaza is dedicated to the victims of a mass shooting which occurred here in 1993, when a disgruntled law-firm client killed 8 people & wounded 6 more before killing himself.

67. Bank of America Center () – completed in 1969, this 52-story skyscraper is the second tallest building in SF (after the Transamerica Pyramid). It served as the world headquarters of Bank of America until the 1998 merger with NationsBank, when they moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. The building is now 30% owned by Donald Trump, and features bay windows symbolic of those common in SF. In the movies, it was the roof-top perch of a sniper at the beginning of “Dirty Harry”, and the plaza served in “The Towering Inferno”.

68. The Corporate Goddesses () – this 1987 building features 12 statues outside the 23rd floor, called the "The Corporate Goddesses" by artist Muriel Castanis. Fears of concrete statues falling during a quake forced the statues to be recast in Styrofoam.

69. The Condor Club (560 Broadway) & Big Al’s (556 Broadway) – these clubs started the strip-bar phenomenon, featuring topless female dancers in 1964, bottomless in 1969, and back to topless in 1972. The Condor closed in 1986, but reopened in 2000 as a sports bar / bistro, converting back into a go-go bar in 2007. Big Al’s, by the 1990s, claimed the largest porn collection in town. It closed in 2002.

FISHERMAN’S WHARF, RUSSIAN HILL, NORTH BEACH & TELEGRAPH HILL

26 27 45 28 25 2 38 39 29 37 31 30 35

10 9 6 8 23 40 32 24 1 13 7 33 43 22 12 5 49 14 21 11 3 4 15 2 19 44 47 16 36 34 41 46 17 20 48 18

Russian Hill was originally named after Russian sailors who were buried here in the early 1800s. While the city had expanded to the south & west during the mid-1800s, this 340-foot high hill was simply too steep for horse-drawn vehicles to haul building materials or much else. Eventually, some hearty souls changed this in the 1880s and residential growth started. Almost from the start, though, it developed as a bohemian enclave, with writers & artists inspired by the isolation, great views and cheap rents. But the same inaccessibility that slowed its development also saved it from the flames after the 1906 quake. And once street paving arrived in the 1930s, this hill became one of the city’s choicest & most expensive residential areas.

Telegraph Hill was originally called Signal Hill, named in 1850 for the simple flag pole (a semaphore) that was built upon it to help signal to the populace what kind of ship was approaching the city. (Prior to that, men rowed out to each ship to bring back the info.) Sections of the hill were quarried for in-fill & for construction of the seawall.

Until the 1860s, the city’s north shore originally ran near present-day Bay Street, before it was filled in with the seawall that was started in the 1870s. The North Beach area was mostly inaccessible due to the huge sand dunes until 1872 when Columbus Avenue was cut across the strict grid layout of the streets, creating a direct connection to downtown and turning this into a fashionable area to live.

Once cable cars made other hilly areas easier to traverse, people moved to those newer districts & population here began to change. From the 1890s to 1950s, Italian immigrants settled near the Telegraph Hill area – it reminded them of the hill towns of their native Italy, while also being close to the waterfront for fishing – turning the area into “”.

After World War II, many Italians moved out to the “suburbs” of Eureka Valley (now Castro & Noe Valley), and the nearby Chinatown district slowly expanded into North Beach, even though the area kept its name. North Beach later became a historical and cultural hub for the 1950s Beat Movement and the Jazz music scene & still retains much of this flavor. The 1960s saw the coming of rock-and-roll clubs, and a lot of strip joints (a few of which still survive), and then punk & heavy metal in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the entertainment clubs have moved to larger venues, leaving mostly bars & restaurants behind today.

1. Columbus Avenue – built in 1873-74, it cuts through the grid-street pattern to join downtown to the north waterfront, following the natural lay of the land toward The Presidio. Called Montgomery Avenue until 1909, when many streets were renamed, it now honors Christopher Columbus.

2. Sansome Burial Ground (SE corner of Vallejo and Sansome Streets) – by 1846 or earlier, sailors were buried here, but the graveyard was forgotten until 1857 when an excavation exposed bodies; they were moved to the Yerba Buena Cemetery (present day Civic Center).

3. Green Street at Sansome –

 The Gray Brothers Quarry (the hill behind 202 Green Street) – in the 1880s, the Gray Brothers built a rock crusher at this intersection, creating “artificial stone” (we call it cement) for paving sidewalks throughout the city & creating ballast for empty ships leaving SF.

 The Genius of Green Street (202 Green Street) – this is where television was invented by 21- year old Philo T. Farnsworth on September 7, 1927. The first transmission was 2 years later, to a receiver ½ a mile away.

4. Fort Montgomery (Green Street at Battery) – this was the site of a waterfront fortification when the US took over Yerba Buena Cove in 1846. A simple log wall construction, it was disassembled a few years later as building material for other structures nearby. Running beneath Green Street are the original tracks from the Belt Line Railroad, which moved goods from the Port of SF to waterfront warehouses & docks.

5. Armour Packing Co. (1050 Battery Street) – note the arches on the Front Street side, which were large enough so a train could go right through, loading & unloading inside the warehouse.

6. Belt Line Railroad Roundhouse (Lombard at Sansome Streets) – starting in 1891, this was the blacksmith shop, water tank, car barn & turntable for the Belt Line Railroad, a shortline rail that

connected the Embarcadero & Ferry Building to nearby warehouses. The Belt Line ended in the late 1960s, and this building was remodeled into offices in 1984.

7. Levi’s Plaza (Battery & Filbert Streets) –

 Levi Strauss started a dry-goods store nearby in the mid-1840s, specializing in goods for miners. Because the miners kept complaining about their clothes wearing out in the harsh conditions, Levi transformed sturdy canvas – until then used mostly for tents – into his “riveted waist overalls” (now called “jeans”). He eventually shifted to the softer but equally sturdy denim.

 He moved the company here in 1848 and it evolved from a small factory into the worldwide headquarters it is today. During The Depression, some of his undeveloped land was used for a soup-kitchen, laundry, and sleep-camps. (More info available on the sign at the northern corner of the Plaza park, on Embarcadero).

 The Levi Strauss Museum (1155 Battery Street) has 150 years of clothing history, including the world’s oldest known pair of pants from 1879.

8. SF Art Institute (800 Chestnut Street) – AI was established in 1871, and moved here after selling their original location, the Mark Hopkins Mansion (see chapter 3, item 25), which burned down in the 1906 fire. This concrete “monastery” was built specifically for the needs of the artists in 1926; the modern addition built behind it in 1969 has a great rooftop deck & view.

9. Old County Hospital (SW corner of Stockton & Francisco Streets) – where the playground & basketball court are now stood the original county hospital that eventually became San Francisco General Hospital (which is now on Potrero Hill); at the time, this was a half-block from the coastline.

10. Stockton near Chestnut –

 Pfeiffer’s Castle (NE corner of Stockton & Chestnut) – built by an immigrant for his wife & kids in 1859, it resembles a castle on the Rhine in his native Germany. But building the home bankrupted him, forcing the family to move into the alley next door to the house (now called Pfeiffer’s Alley). In 1862, the castle became a rehab center called “Home for the Care of the Inebriate” before being absorbed into St. Mark’s Hospital in the 1890s.

 Toland Medical College (SE corner of Stockton & Pfeiffer Streets) – this three-story medical college building was created in 1864 and joined the University of California a few years later. In 1898, it moved to larger space in Parnassus Heights, where it is now known as the UCSF Medical Center.

11. Washington Square (Columbus, Union, Stockton & Filbert Streets) – the first settlers of North Beach used this area as a dairy ranch & garden, before it became a “public square” in 1849. It was mostly a muddy dump until city improvements came in the 1860s & 1870s. The Ben Franklin statue was a gift in 1879 from a strict prohibitionist, complete with now-dry taps at the base of the monument that provided water to the public. Like most city parks after the 1906 quake & fire, this was a site of “refugee cottages” of the survivors. The Fireman statue was erected in 1933 with

money from the same bequest that created the Coit Tower, and the square was landscaped into its current state in the 1950s.

12. Saints Peter & Paul Church (666 Filbert Street) – started in the early-1910s and finished a decade later, it was the backdrop for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 classic “The Ten Commandments”. One of the longtime parishioners was Joe DiMaggio, who grew up in the area, married his first wife here (he wed second wife, Marilyn Monroe, at SF City Hall), and had his funeral here.

13. Old Graveyard (east side of Powell Street between Greenwich & Lombard) – far from downtown at the time, this cemetery was created in 1847 but closed 3 years later, after more than 900 burials. The graves were moved 3 years after that to the then-new Yerba Buena Cemetery, where the Civic Center is today. They were relocated one more time in 1907 to Colma, when all cemeteries were banned inside the San Francisco city limits.

14. between Filbert & Vallejo Streets – this was the heart of the Jazz culture in the 1940s and the Beat culture in the 1950s.

15. Anxious Asp (528 Green Street) – this was a Beat Generation café & bar that served Jack Kerouac & Janis Joplin. The bathroom walls were wallpapered with pages from “The Kinsey Report”, the then ground-breaking book on human sexuality.

16. Vallejo Street –

 St. Francis of Assisi Church (610 Vallejo Street) – first a wood-frame building in 1849 and then an adobe structure in the mid-1850s, the current structure was built in the early 1860s. This is the oldest building in North Beach and is relatively unchanged from its original design (except for steel framing added after the 1906 quake & fire). The Archdiocese closed it in 1994.

 Caffe Trieste (609 Vallejo Street) – one of the few original hangouts from the Beat Generation, Francis Ford Coppola wrote part of the script for “The Godfather” here in the 1970s. It is now flagship for a chain of coffee houses across the Bay Area.

17. Wagner’s Beer Hall (1232 Grant Avenue) – a French immigrant built this structure in 1861 to house his saloon, while he and his family lived in the two floors upstairs. The saloon is relatively unchanged from that time.

18. The Condor (300 Columbus Avenue) – started in 1964, this was the site of the first topless bar in the country. By 1967, over 30 other clubs were crowded into the immediate area, each trying to outdo each other in nudity. In the mid-70s, they all were in decline as VCRs made nudity available in the home. The Condor became a bar & restaurant exclusively in 1991, the red light on the original sign (now inside) being the only remnant of it’s past.

19. “Tales of The City” street ( between Leavenworth & Taylor streets) – this mid- block alley was inspiration for the fictional Barbary Lane in the book & movie series. It is a 2-block long pedestrian lane with brick sidewalks & sheltering vegetation.

20. Broadway –

 Mr. D’s (412 Broadway) – in the 1960s, this was the top venue for pop acts, when it was partially owned by Sammy Davis Jr. In the 1970s, it changed names & switched to soul, blues & reggae. By the 1980s, it was retro James Brown, the Temptations & the Four Tops, then heavy metal groups such as Metallica, before closing in 1995. It is now an upscale strip club.

 Ann’s (440 Broadway) – the 1950’s era nightclub was a lesbian hangout when, in 1958, it discovered an unknown comic named Lenny Bruce, who became famous for his meant- to-shock brand of humor.

 Old Broadway Jail (534 Broadway) – in 1851, this was the site of the original city jail. Later as the Swiss American Hotel, tenant Lenny Bruce, nearing the end of his career & life, jumped or fell from the second floor, falling 25 feet to the ground, breaking both ankles & his left hip.

21. Montgomery Street (near Union Street) –

 Calhoun Terrace (east of Montgomery & Union Streets) – now a dead-end, the street used to connect to Green Street to the south until the late 1800s, when the Gray Brothers started quarrying the eastern slope of Telegraph Hill. This eventually cut off Green Street completely, and even caused the collapse of 7 houses that used to sit on the eastern side of Calhoun. In 1939, the street was graded, divided and paved.

 Hudson Windmill (1254-62 Montgomery Street) – the southeast corner is the highest point on the hill, which was why they built a windmill here in the mid-1800s for the Hudson coffee mills. By 1880, the current apartment building was built.

 1301 Montgomery Street – this 1850s two-story building is one of the oldest in the city, and has been a grocery, barber shop, pool hall, and finally converted to residential units. (A similarly-aged home is located a block north at 31 Alta Street, built in 1852.)

 1360 Montgomery Street – this 1936 Moderne-style has been the backdrop for several movies, including “Dark Passage” in 1947 and “Nine Months” with Hugh Grant in 1995.

 Cooney House (291 Union Street) – one of the oldest sites on the hill, in 1850 Irish immigrant John Cooney built a house here with a first-floor grocery, and then the rental house next door at 287 Union a few years later.

22. Step Streets (Filbert & Greenwich streets at Montgomery) – Greenwich & Filbert streets are official city streets but access is restricted to foot traffic because of the 31% grade. The steps are actually built over the Telegraph Hill cliffs that were quarried for building materials & ship ballast in the 1880s. Both streets are accessible by foot from the Coit Tower parking lot or Montgomery Street (1 block east), with wooden walkways amid gardens tended by the residents of the block. The homes date from the 1860s & 1870s and were bohemian & artist cottages, most accessible only from the Steps (thus, several fire hydrants (and 1 parking meter?) located along the steps). Grading of Montgomery Street in 1931 & creation of Coit Tower made the area much more accessible, causing gentrification from a working-class hill it had been for 6 decades.

23. Julius’ Castle (1541 Montgomery) – the original building in 1889 was a grocery & liquor store, then a private residence, before burning down. Julius Roz built his namesake restaurant here, complete with a turntable for turning around cars on this one-car wide street.

24. Telegraph Hill –

 Pioneer Park – in the late 1800s, this was the highest point closest to the bay opening, but was thought insurmountable for daily living. The tall cliffs were used as a communication (semaphore) station to notify residents which ships were arriving through the bridge-less Golden Gate. The 5- acre Pioneer Park now crowning the top of Telegraph Hill was built to commemorate the US centennial, and includes a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus, placed in 1957 by the city's Italian-American community.

 Coit Tower – this 210-foot tall tower stands where the original semaphore station stood. After cutting off the top of the hill to level it, Coit Tower was built in 1933 with a $118,000 bequest ($1.5m today) from Lillie Coit to honor the fire department she was such a fan of (though the tower was not built to resemble a fire hose pointed into the air). It was going to have a first-floor restaurant but eventually became the pioneer museum, with elaborate murals on the walls (the murals were actually the very first project of the New Deal’s “Public Works Arts Program”). The tower has some nice 360-degree views from it but it can be a little crowded (and unnerving for those with height issues).

 Layman’s Castle – in 1882, the north half of this parking lot was once an L-shaped wooden castle that served as a restaurant & observatory, including weekly jousting contests. A cable car line added some access to the location, but it never succeeded & closed within a few years. After a 1903 fire, it was dismantled & carted off as firewood.

 1730 Kearney (north & below Coit Tower, at Lombard & Telegraph Hill Blvd.) – this 1931 six- story apartment building was the catalyst for the first building height limits in The City. By 1963, a forty-foot or four-story limit was imposed on the entire waterfront, to prevent a Miami-like wall of high rises that block the rest of the city’s views.

25. – this neighborhood was always home to fish markets & seafood processing & packaging plants. Originally just one of the many coastline piers jutting out of the SF peninsula, the current retail complex was built over the original 1905 pier. It was opened as a 45-acre tourist-destination starting in 1978, and now has 110 specialty shops, 14 restaurants, plus amusements, street performers, tours and gorgeous views of the Bay (look for the little-used perimeter walkway for the best & quietest views).

 Forbe’s Island – the “only floating island in the world” – complete with palm trees, tiki huts, a waterfall & 55-foot-tall lighthouse you can climb – it has a seven-room, 100-seat restaurant under the sandy beach, with portholes for diners to watch fish swim by. Decorated inside like a 1800s sailing ship, it was built in the 1970s as a home that the owner lived out of in Sausalito. In 1999, he turned it into a restaurant & moored it permanently off Pier 39.

 The Sea Lions of Dock K – prior to 1989, these creatures mostly lounged on Seal Rock, out west near the Cliff House. But when Dock K was emptied for refurbishing, some sea lions took advantage of the open spaces safe inside the bay. There were only a few dozen of them initially, so when the boats returned a year later, no one bothered to shoo them away. Shortly, there were more than 500 of them on the docks, and the boat owners started to complain about the smell, noise & hassle of trying to navigate around a ½ ton animal. But The City shooed away the boats not the beasts, leaving the entire dock as a sea lion sanctuary. There are now almost 1200 sea lions living in this cove. Each Fall, the visible population dwindles as most of the brood chases larger food sources in the waters off , returning to SF in the Spring.

26. Fisherman’s Wharf – in 1853, Bay Street was the north shore of the City & had a huge ship- building wharf. The 1870s seawall & landfill brought the shore to its current location, and the flat expanse became a warehouse & industrial area, and new home to the fishing fleet. But by the 1960s the area was in serious decline, as most of the maritime industry moved across the bay to the expanding Port of Oakland. Redevelopment in the 1970s of The Cannery, Ghirardelli Square & Pier 39 created a tourist mecca by adapting the existing warehouses & wharves into shopping, eating & entertainment destinations.

 Muni F-Train – the entire area is easily accessible by the light rail that runs from here down the Embarcadero & up Market Street to the Castro district. (It’s a much saner option than driving!)

 Museums & stores – Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, a Wax Museum, the Musée Mécanique….and lots of “3 t-shirts for $10” stores.

 Restaurants – as would be expected, seafood is plentiful here, especially if you like Dungeness crab, a local specialty.

 Fleet Week – every second week of October, The City is overflowing with seamen, as the Navy docks several ships & subs for open house, and does demonstrations on the water & in the air with the Blue Angels.

 James Bond movie location – this was a filming location for the 1985 film “A View to a Kill.”

27. Blossom Rocks (near ) – a crescent of tiny islands once arced southeast from Alcatraz back toward the mainland. In 1870, all except Alcatraz were demolished in order to enlarge the shipping channel.

28. U.S.S. Pampanito (Pier 45) – one of only a few WWII submarines still in existence, you can tour this museum and experience what it was like to live in these cramped conditions for 80 men. The sub was launched in 1943 and saw 2 years of duty in the Pacific, sinking 6 Japanese ships, damaging 4 others, and rescuing 73 Allied POWs.

29. The Cannery (Jefferson & Leavenworth streets) – Del Monte Fruit Co. moved their headquarters here in 1907, in what was then the world’s largest food canning factory. It now houses touristy shops & restaurants, including the Museum of San Francisco, which has photos & artifacts from the 1906 & 1989 quakes, and other memorabilia from the early days of The City.

30. Ghirardelli Square (Beach & Polk streets) – Domingo Ghirardelli learned the chocolate business in Italy, moved to Peru to be closer to the beans, then came to SF in 1850 with the Gold Rush, building an eponymous chocolate factory with his sons. The original offices were at Ghirardelli Square, while the expanding factory moved into this former wool processing factory in 1893. (The famous sign went up in 1923.) Note the building’s angle; it was built in 1866 and oriented to the then-shoreline. Eventual backfill of land, and expansion by the Ghirardellis, left the building a bit askew to the rest of the complex. (By 1965, the company had been bought by General Mills & moved across the Bay to San Leandro.) The square was declared a city landmark in the late 60s and is now a collection of shops & eateries. Look for plaques & signs in most of the pedestrian areas for additional historical info.

31. Buena Vista Café (2765 ) – this is where “Irish Coffee” was invented in 1952.

32. Hyde at Chestnut Street – drive north on Hyde Street, following the cable car tracks. As you approach this intersection you will see a steep drop, revealing a gorgeous view. Similar sights can be found on parallel streets to the east.

33. Lombard Street (between Hyde & Leavenworth Streets) – the “crookedest street in the world” was built in 1922, when the owner of the land on both sides regraded the 27-degree slope of the straight street into 8 switchbacks totaling only 16 degrees (plus 248 pedestrian steps on each side). As hoped, the surrounding land increased in value, which the owner then sold as home parcels. A lone resident-gardener now tends the beautiful gardens all along this block.

34. 29 Russell Street (off Hyde, between Green & Union) – Jack Kerouac lived here in 1952 with Carolyn & Neal Cassady, Jack’s off-and-on-again lover, while drafting his major works “On the Road”, “Visions of Cody” and “Doctor Sax”.

35. Fontana Towers (1093 North Point at Van Ness) – the epitome of 1960s design, these two towers created such a furor at the time that they were a big reason the height limit for new buildings was lowered to 40 feet maximum on the northeast waterfront.

36. Alan Ginsburg home (1010 Montgomery) – the author lived here from February to August 1955, as he wrote his seminal Beat poem “Howl”.

37. Maritime National Historical Park (Beach Street at Polk) – this Streamline Moderne style building, first called the Aquatic Park Casino (i.e. a public bathhouse) opened in 1939 as part of a WPA program during the Depression. The building is now home to the National Maritime Museum, illustrating the technological evolution of maritime power from wind to steam, photomurals of the early SF waterfront, and other artifacts. The beach area is open to the public.

38. Hyde Street Pier –

 Prior to the bridges, this was the principal automobile ferry terminal in the early 1900s. The pier connected SF with Marin County to the north and Berkeley in the East Bay, using car ferries operated by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The pier & ferries were actually designated part of US-101 before the Golden Gate Bridge opened & took over that role.

 Today you can climb aboard a half-dozen historic ships permanently moored here, including the 1886 whaling ship Balclutha. There are free exhibits on the pier as well, and some beautiful bay views. (Free maps of the GGNRA are available here.)

 Hyde Street cable-car turnaround – the most scenic of the surviving cable car lines, the turntable was originally in the middle of the intersection of Beach & Hyde streets, but growing tourism traffic required moving it into the 5.6 acre park with sweeping bay views.

39. (160 Jefferson) – original home of the famous SF bread, they have a restaurant, demo bakery, tasting room and museum including a “what is your bread type?” interactive exhibit, and a 150 year old “mother dough” that has the original yeast that all their subsequent bread was made from.

40. The New (Piers 15 & 17) – having outgrown the current site at the , the Exploratorium is building its new home upon these shored-up 100 year old piers. Opening in 2013, it will be 5 times larger than the old space & cost up to $20 million to build.

41. Alhambra Theatre (2330 ) – built originally as a twin to the , it opened in 1926 with 1625 seats, was converted to twin theaters in the 70s & 80s, but closed as a movie theater in 1998. Designated an official San Francisco landmark in 1996, it is now a Crunch gym, but has retained most of the interior detail, with movies still shown on the big screen as people work on cardio machines.

42. Avalon Ballroom (1268 Sutter Street) – built as a dance academy in 1911, it had its heyday from 1966 to 1968, when bands were frequently booked to perform on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, usually advertised by psychedelic posters of the era. The local Hare Krishna temple once hosted the 1967 Mantra-Rock Dance musical event, featuring Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape and Janis Joplin. The Dead recorded their live albums here in the autumn of 1966.

43. Real World: San Francisco house (949 Lombard Street) – the show was filmed here for 5 months in the summer of 1994.

44. Cavalli Building (1435 Stockton Street) – upstairs, inside the bank, is a small museum devoted to the history of North Beach. An 1862 panorama of SF hangs on the landing.

45. Al Scoma Way (west of Pier 45) – now named after the founder of the restaurant on the corner of Jefferson Street, this street / pier juts west, covering the small sand & mud shoal beneath it. It was originally named Tonquin Street, after the ship that wrecked here in 1849. This is one of the last working fishing boat piers in The City, and is often referred to as “Fish Alley.”

46. 1000 Block of Green Street (between Leavenworth & Jones streets) –

 1088 Green Street – former Engine House No. 31 was built in 1908, after the quake & fire proved the need for more firehouses. It was decommissioned in 1952 & turned into a meeting house in 1958.

 Feusier Octagonal house (1067 Green) – built in 1859 for local merchant Louis Feusier; the second story & mansard roof were added in the 1880s. It is a private home, but a similar octagon home from the era is open to the public at 2645 Gough (see chapter 5, item 7).

 South side of Green street (near Jones) – note the dozen or so various houses clustered here. Though all were built around the same time as part of a single housing development in the 1870s, each has been renovated into its own unique personality & style.

47. 945 & 947 Green Street (east of Jones Street) – after the street is pinched off by a rocky outcropping, it opens to a cul-du-sac, as the street becomes a stair-street down to Taylor. Of the two slim, light-colored towers on the south side, 945 was put up first, in the 1920s. Because the building now blocked the view of another building, that neighbor built the tower at 947. Notice that the later building is taller & L-shaped, to guarantee blocking as much of 945’s view as possible, yet still allowing maximum light into all sides of his building.

48. Russian Hill summit (Vallejo Street east of Jones) – this is the highest point of the area, once worthless & unwanted, until cable cars made access possible. Now it is a very expensive locale with great views.

 A planned community – these ramps, stairways & retaining wall were all part of the original neighborhood improvements, built in 1915 as part of a planned community of upscale homes. Complemented at the other end of the block are gorgeous views of the Bay & a long stairway down to Taylor street.

 Russian Hill Place – originally a private cul-du-sac built for the community, this street ran behind the developer’s property (the beautiful light-colored structure on the west side). The street was deeded to the city in 1926 to be a public street.

 Florence Street – another private street built for the housing community, it was built as a cul- du-sac; the staircase down to Broadway was added when the street was deeded to the city.

49. Alice Marble Tennis Courts (between Hyde & Larkin and Greenwich & Lombard streets) – this entire block was the site of one of the city’s early reservoirs; the tennis courts & park were built over the current reservoir. (Note the 16-story tower at 2238 Hyde Street. It was built into every inch of this standard house-sized lot in 1927, before building height limits were imposed.)

50.

NOB HILL, CHINATOWN & UNION SQUARE

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Originally called Knob Hill because of the rocky knob that was leveled in favor of building homes, Nob Hill was chosen by the moneyed-elite of the 1870s because of the great views & protection from the cold westerly winds. They dropped the “K” in the name by the time the world’s first cable car line was built on this 376-foot high hill in 1873. The transit line caused an explosion of mansions owned by silver & gold mine magnates and railroad & shipping barons, replacing Rincon Hill as the place for the city’s elite. This area is still the epitome of swanky richness in SF, preserving some of the original character.

Chinatown was settled by the Chinese immigrants who arrived for the Gold Rush and eventually helped build the western half of the trans-continental railroad in the 1870s. Racism of the times relegated them to this area of discarded or abandoned buildings from the 1840-60s, all of which were owned by white landlords. The area quickly became a haven of opium dens, prostitution & gambling. The 1906 quake & fire leveled it all, and it was mandated to be rebuilt under a “classic Chinese look”, such as the building “roof rolls” which didn’t exist anywhere in the area prior to the quake. It was an attempt – albeit a racist one – to make the area more tourist-friendly & hopefully drive out vice. This area has been & is still one of the most densely-populated areas in the US, and has the largest concentration of Asians in the world, outside of Asia. The tourist version of Chinatown is on Grant Street, but two streets up you can see the real Chinatown on Powell Street, which is so Chinese- focused, they don’t even bother to post signs in English.

1. Cable Car Barn & Museum (1201 Mason Street) – the SF cable cars are the world’s only moving historical monument.

 In the late 19th century, the “modern transportation” of cable cars ran on a dozen lines stretching 112 miles, extensively serving most of the much-smaller city that existed then. Today, the three remaining lines cover only 10.5 miles.

 This is the last car barn for the last cable car system in the world, housing the cars after service ceases at 1am each day. It is also a museum complete with the original car from 1873 and a look at the still-active cable that currently circulates through the city (at 9.5 mph).

 In the 1890s, cable car conductors & gripmen were paid 22 cents per hour ($5.27 today) for an 11 hour shift, and were paid daily. There was also a rolling post-office car that attached to the cars that ran between Powell & the Ferry Building.

 For almost 100 years, women were not allowed to stand on the outside step of the cars. In 1965, it was discovered that there was no legal basis for the prohibition & it was lifted.

 The cars in use now are faithful reconstructions of the original cars, using the same techniques & repurposing materials & fittings from older cars. Each renovation-rebuild costs about $500k & 18 months to complete.

 Currently there are about a dozen double-ended cars (on the California Street line) and about two dozen single-end cars (which requires a turntable at each end of the line).

 The cable is regularly replaced – 1 to 3 times each year – and the old cable was once used as reinforcement for new concrete buildings (i.e. the invention of what we call Rebar).

2. Taylor & California Streets --

 Grace Cathedral (1100 California Street at Taylor) – purchased in the 1870s, this land once held two huge mansions owned by Charles Crocker (founder of Crocker Bank). The land was donated to the Episcopal Church after the 1906 fire leveled the mansions, but money problems plagued the subsequent church building from the start. The cornerstone was laid in 1910, but construction didn’t start until almost 20 years later, and wasn’t finished for almost 40 more

years. But the cavernous insides were worth the wait. It features bronze doors on the Taylor Street entrance that are one of only three duplicate sets ever made of the doors (Ghiberti’s “Doors of Paradise”) from The Baptistry in Florence, Italy (casts were made during WWII because of fears of Nazi looting). The eagle-topped oak choir lectern was carved in 1908 by Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mt. Rushmore (which was built from 1927-1941).

 Spite Fence (south side of Sacramento, just west of Taylor) – look for the granite markers in the ground, to indicate the location of the Nicholas Yung House. This was the only property on the entire block that Charles Crocker could not buy, so Chuck put up a “spite fence” – a 40-foot tall fence surrounding the Yung house on three sides & blocking the natural light & views. A few years later, Yung moved the house, but didn’t sell the property. Only after both Chuck & Nick died, did the Yung family sell the land to the Crockers. The space between the two buildings here are all that remain of their feud.

3. Flood Mansion (1000 California Street) – this lot was a sand dune almost as high as the current structure when it was purchased in 1882 by silver magnate James Flood & given the 42-room New York style brownstone we see today. This building is currently occupied by the elite Pacific-Union Club, a private men’s social club founded in 1889, who purchased the building after the 1906 holocaust, gutted it & left only the façade. They added a third floor between the second floor & the roof, took 10 feet off the central tower, added the two semicircular wings that house the dining room and a reading room, with a swimming pool in the basement.

4. Fair Mansion / Fairmont Hotel (950 Mason Street) –

 Silver-magnate James Fair, who owned this entire block, built a mansion here in the 1870s. When he died in 1894, his daughters commissioned the Fairmont Hotel here in his honor. It was completed – and then sold – only 2 weeks before the 1906 quake. The façade held, but the hotel was gutted by fire. It was rebuilt by the new owners with quake-reinforcement, and opened again on the first anniversary of the ’06 quake.

 By the Great Depression, the hotel was in a spiral of “benign neglect” and was housing mostly permanent residents instead of tourists. But when WWII ended, the hotel was purchased by Ben Swig, an East Coast hotelier who knew how to turn a property around. It was renovated in marble & bold colors, and restored to her former glory. Swig also added a private penthouse apartment that he lived in for decades. It has since been converted into a Presidential Suite that rents for $12,000 a night, and has been home to celebrities, presidents & foreign heads of state (but viewable by the public upon request).

 The Garden Room is where the initial UN Charter was drafted in 1945, and the Venetian Room is where Tony Bennett first sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” The , with its musical boat, tiki huts and South Sea ambiance, has become an iconic SF bar. (The dance floor was built with decking from the S.S. Forrester, one of the last of the tall ships that plied the route between San Francisco and the South Sea Islands in the 1800s.) In 1961, the 23-story tower & 16,000 sq. ft. ballroom were added.

 For a quick tour of the hotel & to see the great views, enter the main doors, follow the corridor to the immediate left, then right at the sign to the tower elevators. The long corridor is lined with photos of Nob Hill after the 1906 fire, and ends at the glass-walled elevator up the modern tower at the corner of Sacramento & Powell streets.

5. Stanford Mansion (905 California at Powell Street) – on this site was the former Leland Stanford mansion, a big stone edifice built by the ostentatious head of the “Big Four” SF power brokers (he also founded Stanford University on his enormous former horse farm in Palo Alto). The mansion burned to the ground in 1906 because most of it was just redwood covered with plaster made to look like stone. The current building was erected in 1912 and served as the Stanford Court Apartments until the late 1960s, when the 90 apartments of 5-12 rooms each were converted into 393 hotel rooms & reopened in 1972 as the Stanford Court Hotel. (NE across the intersection is the red-brick University Club, where the Stanford mansion’s local stables stood.)

6. St. Francis Hotel (335 Powell Street) – take the glass-walled elevators to the 31st floor for a spectacular view of the skyline & east bay. During the history of this hotel:

 1921 – Fatty Arbuckle was having a party in rooms 1219-21 & a young woman died during it. Rumors spread that the obese actor had raped & crushed the girl. He was acquitted after three trials, but his acting career was over because of the scandal.

 1975 – President Ford was leaving a fundraising lunch at the hotel via the Post Street exit when Sara Jane Moore shot at him; she missed because a bystander saw the gun & jostled her arm. She was sentenced to life in prison.

7. Portsmouth Square – starting in the 1830s, this was the center of Yerba Buena Cove & the central gathering spot for town meetings & political events, commercial & social activity, as well as serving as a produce market, corral, gambling den, saloon, etc., when the shoreline was only one block east. It is named after the SS Portsmouth that landed nearby in 1846. Captain John Montgomery planted the American flag in the SE corner of the park, claiming the area for the US after winning the Spanish-American War.

 Old Custom House (NW corner of the square) – this was the site of the town’s first seat of government in 1844 (and the site of a lynching in 1851).

 California Star newspaper (743 Washington Street) – Mormon leader Samuel Brannan rented this site in 1847 to house his printing press to publish the first San Francisco newspaper, California Star. Two weeks after starting, it printed the official proclamation that Yerba Buena would now be known as San Francisco. The paper went out of business after a year, when the Gold Rush basically emptied the town. (Brannan later built a resort in Napa that he wanted to call “Saratoga of California” but was too drunk at the dedication & accidentally called it “Calistoga of Sarafornia”. The name lasted; the resort didn’t.)

 First public school in California (SW corner of the square) – the school opened in 1849 but only held class for about 2 months before closing because so many local families had decamped for the Gold Rush. The building was demolished 3 years later.

 Clay Street (south side of the square) – on August 2, 1873, Andrew Hallidie guided the first cable car down Clay Street from Jones Street to Kearny Street (1/2 mile). As the City’s first public-transit system, with a 5-cent fare (89 cents today), it was immediately profitable & cable cars lines quickly expanded around the growing city, making horse-drawn cars obsolete.

 Chinese Telephone Exchange (743 Washington Street) – a telephone switchboard was located here from 1894 (the current building is post-1906), and the Chinese operators had to speak English & five dialects of Chinese. The exchange produced the only hand-painted telephone directory, a 40-page book that used only Chinese characters. Direct-dial technology closed the exchange in 1949; it is now a bank.

8. Union Square – this is the second oldest park in The City, deeded in 1850 for public use. It was so named because it was the original gathering spot for pro-Union rallies during the Civil War, but now it is the center of one of the most upscale shopping areas in the country. The column in the center of the plaza was erected in 1901 to commemorate Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War; Alma Spreckels was the model for “Victory” statue at the top.

9. Wild ride in SF (Taylor Street) – this is a particularly fun drive, if you are a little daring and you do it right. Take Geary Blvd. and go north on Taylor Street. You’ll start climbing a fairly steep hill, and when you start to approach the highest point of the hill, give it a little gas. As you come over the top of the hill, you’ll see nothing but sky until the front end of the car finally comes over the top of the hill and the hood stops obscuring your view. Then you get gorgeous views of Alcatraz & the North Bay. (Don’t worry – you have the right of way on this one-way street & sides streets have to stop. You won’t hit anything if you keep driving straight; it’s very easy to do this safely. And it’s a bit of a rush...)

10. 185 Post Street – to bring this oft-altered 100-year-old building up to current safety codes, in 2008 it was encased behind a weather-tight “veil” set in front of the original masonry walls. The glass is clear at the windows & translucent elsewhere, allowing maximum light and privacy.

11. Mark & Claude Lanes (SW of Bush & Kearny) – lined with cafes. There are actually lots of similar small alleys between Pine & Bush streets, and for several blocks either side of here.

12. Old St. Mary’s Church (NE corner of California & Grant Avenues) – opened in 1854, it was the first cathedral built in the city. It was made of granite from China and bricks & ironwork from New England, a rarity in the then-mostly wooden city. It was occupied by a Catholic church until 1891, when nearby prostitution & crime drove them to move to Van Ness & O’Farrell (more than a mile west). A Paulist order took over the church before the 1906 fire gutted the church but left the façade. It was rebuilt and the brothels nearby were replaced with the current St. Mary’s Square.

13. 600 California Street – in 1988, archeologists discovered the foundation of a Chinese store that stood here until a fire in May 1851 wiped out the business district. Artifacts from the time can be seen in southeast corner of the lobby.

14. Chinese Six Companies (843 Stockton Street) – formally known as The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Society, they aided new Chinese immigrants, serving as a bridge to the larger white society that was racist & discriminatory toward them.

15. Donaldina Cameron House (920 Sacramento Street) – The Chinese Presbyterian Mission Home started in 1876 for Chinese girls seeking refuge from forced prostitution and abusive employers, while teaching the girls English & work skills. The present building replaced the original using bricks from the rubble of the 1906 quake & fire.

16. YWCA (965 Clay Street) – this was designed by the same woman who designed the Heart Castle in San Simeon & renovated the Fairmont Hotel. This building was part of her bread-and-butter business, but Julia Morgan still studied hard and designed it to look like a proper Chinese building.

17. Chinatown Red Light District – by the early 1900s, the alleys of Chinatown were the nexus of prostitution, drugs & other vice. In 1909, the Police Commission attempted a policy of “regulated toleration” by restricting it all to the area bounded by Stockton & Kearny and Broadway & Sacramento, and issuing “working girl” ID cards, medical exams and other regulations. Church groups pressured the police to abandon the plan of toleration & drive out the vice.

 Duncombe Alley – the west side of this gated dead-end alley was lined with opium dens in the 1870s & 1880s. Dark, smokey basement rooms, with little more than bunk beds against a wall, were provided for patrons to recline & trip out. Today, it is packed with Chinese seamstresses.

– this inviting street was once called “the street of gamblers” because it housed two- dozen gambling dens in this short distance, each with a reinforced door to thwart police raids.

 Beckett Alley – location for some of the lowest brothels in the city, prostitutes occupied 5-foot- wide cubicles (called “cribs”) in which they entertained sometimes dozens of men each night (the men were not allowed to remove any clothing but their hats; nor would they want to, for fear of theft). It was ground-zero for a VD outbreak in the 1880s since boys as young as 10 could get sex for as little as 25 cents (less than $6 today).

 The Municipal Crib (620 Jackson Street) – starting in the late-1890s, this was the site of a 3- story brothel with about 90 cubicles. Rebuilt with insurance money after the 1906 fire, it became four stories tall with 130 cribs. Though equal-opportunity about their sex-trafficking, there was a definite hierarchy: French women on the top floor were $1 ($24 today), black women on the middle floors got about 75 cents ($18) and the Mexicans in the basement got less than 50 cents ($12), and a variety of other ethnicities & nationalities were offered throughout the building at various rates. The facility was closed in 1907 when it was discovered to be part-owned by the mayor & other city bosses (thus its arrogant name). It was the last Barbary Coast-era brothel to exist in the city.

 The Palace Hotel – the version with “the” in the name, this was a squalid tenement that once existed across from the real & luxurious “Palace Hotel” that it was mocking. This one had open sewers & a communal kitchen in the courtyard.

 Cooper Alley – in the 1860s & 1870s, this was the site of a “hospital” that tended to elderly women & diseased prostitutes who were too sick to be of further service. They were housed on rice-mat covered shelves in a windowless basement, left to die of starvation or by their own

hands (or those of the watchman who would smother or strangle them if necessary or profitable). The alley today serves as a service corridor for a restaurant and a resident’s entry to the building at the end (at only 6 feet wide, it is considered a real city street).

 Wentworth Alley – besides the bordellos up & down this alley, it was also known as Fish Alley because of the number of fish markets & for the rooftops that were used to dry fish for export.

 St. Louis Alley – now a placid walkway, this was a 1860s slave market, where Chinese girls were stripped naked & auctioned off to begin a life of involuntary prostitution.

18. Maiden Lane (between Kearny & Stockton) –

 In the late 1800s, these two blocks were named Morton Street & were more densely packed with bordellos than anywhere else, and averaging one murder a week. Destroyed in the 1906 fire, the street was rebuilt as the unironically-named Maiden Lane, an upscale merchant area, deliberately to erase it’s unsavory past.

 The Nymphia was a three-story building erected here in 1899. With 150 prostitute cribs on each floor, the owners intended to name it the Hotel Nymphomania & stock it with women suffering from that condition. When the police refused permits for that name, the owners shortened it to The Nymphia. Each female resident was required to remain naked at all times & obliged to entertain any man who called. For a dime ($2.50 today), customers could just look in on the action, via a narrow slit in each crib door. After numerous legal battles, it closed in 1903.

 Frank Lloyd Wright building (140 Maiden Lane) – the only FLW-designed building in San Francisco, this tan brick building was built in 1949 to house the VC Gift Shop. The interior circular ramp was a test-run for the version he used in NYC’s Guggenheim. Wright also designed the city hall building in Marin, his last major work before dying in 1959.

19. Ross Alley – this alley was known as Old Manila Alley, because of the brothels & gambling dens favored by Filipinos & Latinos, and even Old Spanish Alley before that, for the Spaniards who lived here long before it was Chinatown. Fortune cookies were invented here (at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company, not in China) and they can be seen being made even today (they give free samples too).

20. Commercial Street – in the shadows of the Financial District, and rebuilt after the 1906 fires, this street’s buildings were filled with “female boarders” (prostitutes).

 Parisian Mansion (742 Commercial Street) – an “upscale” brothel with 19 rooms and 6 bathrooms, they charged $3 for sex instead of the city average of $1 ($60 today instead of the $20 city average). But the charge was tripled if you wanted to use the “virgin’s room” – which also had a viewer’s gallery that charged $5 to watch ($100 today)

 The last brothel (736 Commercial Street) – after trying to ignore the California Supreme Court decision upholding the Red Light Abatement Act of January 1917, this brothel finally closed in May 1917, the last of the legal brothels in The City.

 Rube Goldberg property (755 Commercial Street) – Ruben Goldberg purchased this lot & contracted to build this two-story-with-basement brick structure after the 1906 fire. He lived here briefly before moving to NYC, living off the rental income of a brothel in the growing Red Light District. The Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist – known for his complex contraptions designed to do simple tasks – sold the building in 1916 after becoming a writer for the NY Evening Mail, earning $1K a week ($20K a week today).

21. Dragon Gates (Bush & Grant streets) – this ornate portal is the “official” entrance into Chinatown.

22. The Beat Generation –

 City Lights Bookstore (261 Columbus Avenue) – started in 1953 in the pie-shaped corner of this 1907 building, it later expanded to occupy the entire first floor. Recognized as the first paperback-only book store in the US, City Lights became the center of the Beat poetry movement, hosting & publishing Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac and others of the era. The owner was arrested for obscenity for selling Ginsburg’s “Howl” but was acquitted, setting the precedent for publication of other previously-banned books, like “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”, which in turn lead to the growth of the porno industry in the 70s.

 Kerouac Alley – next door to City Lights, it is only 60 feet long, and symbolically has one end open to The East (Chinatown) and the other open to The West (North Beach).

 Vesuvio (255 Columbus Avenue) – this was a favorite watering hole for the Beats, and is little changed. Two other hangouts are across the street: Spec’s (12 Kenneth Rexroth Alley) and Tosca’s (242 Columbus).

23. The Hungry i Restaurant (SE corner of Jackson & Kearny Streets) – in the 1950s & 60s, this was the premier showcase of new talent – including Woody Allen & Barbra Streisand on a double-bill for 3 weeks – with stars such as Frank Sinatra & Gregory Peck often in the audience.

24. Casa Grande (823 Grant Avenue) – now in the heart of Chinatown, this was the site of the first permanent private dwelling in Yerba Buena Cove, built in 1835. William Richardson, an English sailor who deserted his ship when it landed in 1822, was given the land (and Mexican citizenship) by the Mexican governor after marrying his daughter. He used this then-waterfront property for a business trading with the local missions. The original tent & wood structure he erected was replaced in 1837 by a one-and-a-half-story adobe building known as Casa Grande. It was purchased by the Mormons in 1852 & torn down. The current bland edifice was built in 1907.

25. Mark Hopkins Property (999 California Street) – Mark Hopkins was a founder of the Central Pacific Railroad, and used his riches to buy this property for his wife to build a house on.

 Mark Hopkins Mansion – a whimsical fairy castle of wooden towers, Gothic spires, and ornamentation run amok that overshadowed the not-insignificant Stanford mansion next door. Hopkins died in 1878, just before his mansion was finished, but his widow got it finished & then

married her interior decorator (the last known time a straight interior decorator was found in SF). The building survived the 1906 quake but burned in the fire.

– the land was sold & the current 19-story Gothic hotel was built. The “” bar (included in the original drawings despite being designed during Prohibition) is the highest point on Nob Hill & great for an expensive drink & free sunsets. The building subbed as the St. Gregory Hotel in the 1980s TV show “Hotel”.

26. Central Subway (under Stockton Street) – with the first leg open in 2015, this is the newest of Muni’s transit lines. Though requested for decades, the plan was renewed when the Embarcadero Freeway was demolished, which had provided the quickest access to the congested Chinatown area. With bus travel in the area actually slower than walking, the subway is badly needed. It travels down 4th Street to the Caltrain Station, and will eventually connect to Fisherman’s Wharf & the F-line to the north.

27. Sutter Medical Building () – this 26-story building was completed in 1929, and is noted for the remarkable Neo-Mayan Art Deco style lobby.

28. William Westerfeld House (1198 Fulton Street) – this mansion sits across from the northwest corner of Alamo Square, and has had a colorful history:

 1889 – the 28-room mansion is constructed for $9,985 ($240,000 today) by William Westerfeld, a German-born baker who built a chain of successful bakeries in the late 1800s. His family of 6 lived in this mansion with an adjoining rose garden and carriage house.

 1895 – when Westerfeld died, the home was sold to John Mahoney, noted for building the St. Francis Hotel and the Palace Hotel after the 1906 earthquake. Mr. Mahoney replaced the rose garden with flats to meet the city's dire need for housing.

 1928 – a group of Czarist Russians buys the home and turn the ground floor ballroom into a nightclub called Dark Eyes, and use the upper floors for meeting rooms.

 1948 – the home is converted into a 14-unit apartment building, rented mostly to negro jazz musicians who played in the neighborhood clubs.

 1965 – The Calliope Company, a fifty-member co-operative, moves in.

 1967 – underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger takes up residence, eventually filming “Invocation of My Demon Brother” starring Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil and featuring music by Mick Jagger.

 1968 – members of the Family Dog live here while promoting acid rock concerts at the Avalon ballroom. The Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company are frequent visitors.

 1970s – after surviving a massive urban renewal project that destroyed 6,000 Victorian era buildings over a 60 square block area of the Western Addition, this house was purchased by two men for $45,000 ($260k today), who started a long needed cleanup & restoration.

 1986 – Jim Siegel purchased the home & completely retrofitted it (re-wired, re-roofed, re- plumbed) and did a complete interior and exterior restoration to the original specifications, including the historic, ground-floor ballroom and 25-foot ceiling, all with period-correct wallpaper.

29. Lurline Baths (Bush & Larkin streets) – in 1892, the Olympic Salt Water Company opened public saltwater baths here, which included a swimming pool and water slide. They used an intake pipe located 600 feet offshore, plus almost 4 miles of iron pipe along present-day , to fill the facility. As private, in-home baths became the norm, the Lurline closed in 1936, and the pier at Ocean Beach protecting the water-intake pipe existed until about 1966. The baths were immortalized by Thomas Edison in August 1897 when he shot 20 seconds of film at the pools.

30. Broadway Tunnel (Broadway between Powell & Leavenworth streets) – this tunnel was constructed under Russian Hill in 1952.

31. Huntington Park (Taylor & California Streets) – this was the site of the mansion of Collis Huntington, one of the gold & silver bonanza kings known as the “Big Four” in the late 1800s. He was a humorless & stingy man that was the backroom political lobbyist of the bunch. The mansion was built in 1892 but burned in the 1906 quake & fire. The lot stood empty until 1915 when Collis’ widow donated the land to become a city park. The paths are laid out in the footprint of the former mansion, and the center of the park has a copy of a 1585 Roman fountain.

32. Chambord Apartments (1298 Sacramento Street at Taylor) – built in 1921, this was the height of opulent single living. Each floor had only two units off a common elevator foyer, and each 1- bedroom unit featured an oval dining room in the billowy corner bays. The incongruous 6th floor penthouse was added in 1926 for a new owner of the building.

33. 1300 block of California Street (either side of Leavenworth) – most of the bay-windowed apartment buildings along this stretch are prime examples of the types of buildings going up all over The City in the Post-1906 decade. As with many other Victorian buildings, subsequent owners have “renovated” them, changing the decorations of each. (Note that most of the buildings have woefully few parking spaces: these close-to-downtown apartments were built during the heyday of public transit & before middle-class city dwellers owned their own cars, so few spaces were required by building codes of the time.)

34. Hotel Vertigo (940 Sutter Street) – this 1928 building was formerly The Empire Hotel, the home of Kim Novak’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 movie “Vertigo”. It was remodeled recently as an homage to the movie.

35. Trader Vic’s (20 Cosmo Place) – the Polynesian-themed restaurant chain started in Oakland in the 1940s & grew during the Tiki-culture fad of the 1950s and 1960s into two dozen restaurants around the globe. It was at their SF location that Vic & his partner Don created the Mai Tai cocktail in 1952. (Don went on to create his own Polynesian-style restaurant called Don the Beachcombers.)

CIVIC CENTER, SOUTH OF MARKET & MISSION BAY

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30 13

15 28

Prior to the 1850s, the Civic Center was a sandy, swampy backwater of springs & creeks. Because it was so far from the city center, it was literally a graveyard (between Larkin, McAllister & Market Streets) and was full just 10 years after it opened. In 1870, the more than 9,000 graves were moved to The City Cemetery in Lincoln Park, so this land could be used for a new government center.

Market Street was created in 1860 to be the grand main boulevard of The City. Twice as wide as other streets, it was graded & installed with wood plank sidewalks. It quickly became a major transportation artery, helping expand transit lines & opening up access to new city lands to the south and west. The first Ferry Building was built at the foot of Market in 1875, marking the street’s position as the major transportation hub for the Bay Area for many decades to come.

The SoMa area was originally called "South of the Slot" in reference to the many cable cars that once ran up and down Market Street. But the 1906 quake & fire was used as excuse to replace the numerous cable cars with electric streetcars, and they’ve run down Market ever since. Arrival of the Golden Gate & Bay Bridges in the late 1930s drastically increased car traffic & reduced ferry traffic, changing Market Street into more of a transportation artery than hub, and it has been that way since. In fact, today Market is so overcrowded with cars & busses that it may get closed to all private cars & allowing only busses, taxis and streetcars – and pedestrians – returning it to something near its original intention of nearly 150 years ago.

In the early days of the city, the South of Market area was sparsely populated & mostly rural. When the 1906 quake and fire obliterated the area, most of the district was rebuilt as a thriving industrial area & working-class residences. In the 1930s, some of the area was sacrificed in favor of the anchorage & ramps for the new Bay Bridge & freeway. Containerization of shipping in the 1960s, along with the favoring of trucking over railroads in the 1970s, led to decline of shipping & a general abandonment of the SoMa area. The 1980s saw the next evolution, as old warehouses were converted to lofts or torn down for residential housing. Zoning changes in the 1990s saw this evolve into the current spate of expensive residential skyscrapers.

1. Rincon Tower (425 First Street) – in the 1860s & 70s, this was the fashionable area for residents with money to live on quiet streets in large houses with servants & coach houses. In the 1930s, the area was developed as the on- & off-loading of the Bay Bridge, and since the 1950s, a giant clock tower with a Union 76 sign on it was known to millions. The tower was demolished in 2005 and this 60-story tower (apparently designed by the makers of air purifiers) was erected & permanently changed the iconic SF silhouette.

2. Second Street between Harrison & Folsom Streets – this was the site of the “Second Street Cut” which cleaved a road through the 75 foot high hill in 1869. Unfortunately, before that, this had been the favored location for many rich folks’ mansions. Look at any modern office building on this street and then count up 7 stories; imagine your house left sitting that high above the current street level after the Cut. Most of the sand dunes in this area (circled) were leveled by the early 1900s & used as in-fill around the bay.

3. Clock Tower Lofts (461 Second Street) – in 1902 Schmidt Lithograph built its factory here (and then built it a second time 4 years later), growing to become the largest printer of canned-food labels. When the Bay Bridge construction came along in the 1930s, the powerful businessman threatened to move his huge company out of The City if they didn’t shift the Bay Bridge approach around his factory instead of demolishing it. The city did, which is why the freeway jogs around the clock tower a little. The lithograph company vacated 50 years later and the building is now residential lofts.

4. South Park (between 2nd & 3rd and Brannan & Bryant Streets) –

 The park & homes were built in 1854 as a London-inspired neighborhood, complete with a planned community of stores, residences and cafes, all a surprising oasis in the middle of a mostly warehouse district. The 17 mansions & townhouses (58 residences total) surrounded the 550-foot oval park, which had a windmill in the center to pump water for the residents, and featured paved streets & sidewalks (a first in SF).

 The houses sold mostly to the moneyed elite of the time; they liked the peace & quiet away from the brothels & rowdy gambling joints of downtown. They insured this tranquility by banning any saloons in the neighborhood & making the park gated and for residents only.

 The neighborhood began to lose exclusivity after the construction of Second Street Cut in 1869, making the area accessible to less-affluent residents. Rich residents moved to the newer Nob Hill neighborhood & the city took over the park in 1897.

 When it was all leveled by the fire in 1906, the surrounding area was rebuilt as warehouses, light manufacturing, , and hotels, but South Park was rebuilt as it had looked before.

 For 7 decades, this was a quiet enclave of small factories & rooming houses, until the neighborhood began to attract artists and young professionals beginning in the 1970s, and when SoMa was rediscovered in the 1980s, this area turned back into a quiet nook with a few European-style bistros & cafes.

5. 600 Block of Third Street –

 Birthplace of (615 Third Street) – this area was residential in 1876, when Jack was born in the 2-story Victorian that used to occupy this site. The family moved to Oakland before Jack turned 3.

 Rolling Stone offices (625 Third Street) – originally built as a warehouse in 1909, it was famously the headquarters of Rolling Stone magazine when it was founded in the early 1970s; they moved to NYC in 1977. The building address at the time was 645-47, which you can still see on the shields flanking the north entrance to the building.

6. Townsend buildings –

 The Townsend Building (123 Townsend Street) – this was a gas & coal burning plant in 1865, complete with a 40’ x 90’ gas tank that helped light the city’s gas lamps, and a 50’ tall coal depot near the wharf. The present building was a railroad warehouse serving the waterfront piers, later storing things like fireworks & coffee beans (not together), and eventually converted to office space.

 Hooper’s Warehouse (72 Townsend Street) – this is the second-oldest warehouse in the district, built in 1874 and surviving the 1906 quake & fire, it is a rare example of the way the area looked in the late 1800s.

 SF Fire Department HQ (698 Second Street) – this building was a result of the 1906 fire, housing 8 engines designed to pump bay water to help fight fires. The SFFD HQ was moved here in 1998.

7. Colin Kelly Street – originally called Japan Street, it was unironically renamed for an aviator who sank the first Japanese warship in WWII. Note the sidewalk near the fire hydrant – it says “1857 shoreline”.

8. Oriental Bonded Warehouse (650 Delancey Street) – this is the oldest warehouse in the waterfront, built in 1867 for the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. as a mail & cargo storage. Until 1910, it was also the chief west coast US entry point for most Chinese immigrants, before the seawall & in-fill reached the area. Today they are live/work condos.

9. Chinese fishing village (Federal Street) – in the 1850s & 60s, this was a bluff about 20 to 40 feet above the water & fishing boats, with a cluster of buildings atop it, making up one of many Chinese fishing villages that dotted the shoreline at the time.

10. St. Mary’s Hospital (NE corner of Bryant & Rincon Streets) –

 A group of Irish Catholic nuns founded St. Mary’s Hospital at this site in 1861 & featured the latest in sanitation, like marble basins & floor-to-ceiling tiled rooms. The 1906 quake did no damage, but the fire consumed the building (the patients had been moved toward the waterline beforehand). The hospital was rebuilt on across from Golden Gate Park, where it stands today.

 Look for a faded bronze plaque on the wall attached to what was the doorway leading to the west entrance of the hospital, with a granite step still visible. Posted in 1981, it also recognizes the official historic Rincon Hill that today is nearly invisible beneath the Bay Bridge approach.

11. Bay Bridge – thousands of men worked without nets to build this 8.4 mile bridge in just over 3 years. It opened 6 months before the Golden Gate Bridge, and now carries 300,000 cars daily (twice that of the GG Bridge).

 The Depression-era project was financed through a $77 million (nearly $1 billion today) loan from the government (then-President Hoover was an engineering grad from nearby Stanford).

 It is actually 4 bridges in one: two suspension spans between SF and Yerba Buena Island, plus the span from the East Bay that connects to a separate cantilevered section connected to Yerba Buena Island.

 The western span location was decided simply because of geography: there was a narrow ridge of rock that stuck up significantly higher in the water than in the surrounding bay, making construction easier & the foundations stronger.

 The center concrete pylon of the western span was built from the top down. A steel form was built, cement was added & cured, and then another layer added on top. Rinse & repeat until it slowly lowers itself into the water and then anchors to the bedrock 200 feet below. The entire pylon is the equivalent of a 48-story building.

 When the bridge opened to traffic in November 1936, it was the longest in the world. It isn’t any more, but it does still have the largest diameter vehicular tunnel (on Yerba Buena Island).

 The first car across the bridge was a Nebraska couple who accidentally got on the bridge & drove across it a day before the grand opening. The first car to stall out on the bridge came just seconds after the official opening.

 Until 1958, trucks & the Key Line trains (a precursor to BART) ran on the lower level of the bridge, and the upper level had cars going both directions.

 The bridge sustained some damage in the 1989 Quake & has since been retrofitted. The entire eastern span is being replaced with a new $6.3 billion side-by-side configuration that opens in 2013. It will include bike & walking paths for the first time.

12. The EndUp (6th & Harrison) – this is the first gay bar I ever went to in SF, when friends took me to the “wet underwear contest” (it was exactly as fun as it sounds); that’s when I decided I loved SF.

13. Mission Creek – in the 1850s, the northern bank of this creek was originally the southern coastline of the SoMa area, and the bay actually extended west in a crescent-shape. The streets start curving south near 10th Street because they originally were mapped to the curve of Mission Creek & Mission Bay. Mission Bay was eventually filled in through landfill & sea walls, and Mission Creek now goes underground at Berry Street.

14. Houseboats (300 Channel Street) – these houseboats slips have been here since the 1950s, when only freight trains were neighbors. With the Mission Bay & Ball Park neighborhoods growing up around them, one can only imagine what they will look like or be worth when their current slip-lease comes up…in 2055.

15. Showplace Triangle (8th Street at 16th Street) – this block was always a traffic pain, so it was made into the first of several “parklets” around the city, to close the street & increase pedestrian traffic. Located at the original coastline, you can also enjoy the art at the Wattis Institute across the street.

16. Rammaytush language plaques (South side of King Street between 3rd & 4th streets) – 104 small brass plaques in the sidewalk are engraved with all of the known words from the language of the Ohlone people who lived here more than 1000 years ago.

17. Security Pacific Bank Building (One Grant Avenue) – this former bank building and now retail space was modeled after the Pantheon in Rome.

18. Powell & Market Streets –

 Cable Car Turnaround (Powell and Market streets) – the most famous of the 3 cable car lines in the city, this location is always popular with tourists, and thus usually has a long wait. (Go down Market to California Street to catch a quicker & more interesting trip.) Now $6, cable car rides were 7 cents in 1942. In the 1870s, riding the cable cars was called “riding the rope.”

 Flood Building (870 Market Street) –

o this site was once home to the gargantuan Baldwin Hotel, which occupied the entire triangular block from 1877. But it had opened just as the silver mines were being depleted, and the hotel struggled until it was gutted by a fire in 1898. It was torn down & replaced with the current 1905 building.

o Because it was one of the few buildings to survive the 1906 quake, the Southern Pacific Railroad moved in until 1917, when it moved to its own new building at One Market Plaza.

o In the 1920s, Dashiell Hammett, author of the Sam Spade detective novels, worked for Pinkerton Detective Agency (room 314) & made this building the setting in his books for the Continental Detective Agency.

o The Woolworth store once located on the basement, first & second floors was the largest in the chain until 1992, when it was downsized and later closed.

19. St. Ignatius College / Emporium Store / Nordstrom’s (835 Market Street) – in 1855, this was a “hole surrounded by sand hills” as put by a Jesuit priest who described the rickety wood building of the new St. Ignatius College, the city’s first institution of higher learning. (It was later renamed University of San Francisco, and moved in 1880 to where the Davies Symphony Hall now stands in the Civic Center.) In 1896, a new building was erected on this site, for the upscale Emporium store. The 1906 quake & fire gutted the building, leaving only the original façade; the current building was put up behind it in 1907. Emporium was bought by Macy’s in the 1990s, and the newest owner, Westfield Mall expanded the stores into several attached buildings in the 2000s. (Check out the Nordstrom’s with the world’s first curved escalators; it was impressive in the 1980s.)

20. Old Mint Building (Fifth & Mission Streets) – from 1874 to 1937, this was the site of the . By 1877, over $50M dollars in coins were produced here, and by the 1930s, one- third of the US gold reserves were stored at the Old Mint. During the 1906 quake & fire, protecting the Old Mint saved $200 million in gold & silver, which helped finance a quick rebuild of the city. The mint moved to its current iconic building at Market & Duboce in 1937, and the Old Mint became a federal office building & then a museum.

21. (between Mission & Howard and 3rd & 4th streets) – this 87-acre cultural & retail area was built atop the convention center buildings in the 1990s as a redevelopment from the “skid row” neighborhood it was in the 1960s & 1970s.

 Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial – behind the waterfall are glass tiles inscribed with his words, and excerpts from his 1956 SF & 1963 Washington DC speeches.

 Sister Cities Gardens – overlooking the MLK memorial, this park offers flowers from SF’s 13 sister cities around the world.

 SF Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) – featuring rotating international exhibits, the museum will be expanding in the mid-2010s.

– opened in 1999, it was intended to be the first of a chain of “urban entertainment centers” by Sony, but by 2006 it had been sold to Westfield Properties, who refashioned it to a food-oriented mall. That too has failed & it will reopen as the first Target store in SF in 2012.

 Zeum – a non-profit, hands-on kid’s multimedia arts and technology museum, it aims to nurture the "3Cs of 21st-century literacy: Creativity, Collaboration, Communication”, letting youths produce their own media through interactive & creative processes in animation, digital art, live performance, and music production.

 Other entertainment – there is a playground, ice skating rink, bowling alley, and other stores, as well as a merry-go-round that was restored from Playland-At-the-Beach (see chapter 6).

22. Newspaper Row – in the late 1800s, Market Street was the main business boulevard, Kearny was the main retail street, and Third Street was the main traffic artery leading south down the peninsula. So this intersection was considered to be the “center” of it all & thus the location for the city’s three newspapers.

 DeYoung Building (690 Market Street) – at 10 stories tall, this was The City’s first “skyscraper” and the tallest building west of the Mississippi when it was built for The Chronicle newspaper in 1889. It was fireproof & one of the first to be completely electric when it was rebuilt after 1906. (The newspaper eventually moved to its current home at Fifth & Mission in 1923.) This is now the home of the Ritz-Carlton hotel (and the Ritz Residences, in the modern tower behind the original building).

 Central Tower (703 Market Street) – finished in 1898, this building was originally The Call Building, named after the newspaper it housed. After a merger in 1913, it was called the Spreckels Building, for the paper's new owners. The 18-story steel-frame building survived the 1906 quake but not the fire. The fire actually broke in at the 3rd floor but shot up the elevator shafts to the top floor and burned downward from there. (It literally burned down but it didn’t actually burn down.) It was rebuilt within 2 years, and with the city’s first rooftop restaurant. In 1938, new owner Albert Roller completely refurbished the building, removing the original ornate dome & cupolas and restaurant, and increasing the number of stories from 15 to 21.

 Hearst Building (5 Third Street) – the original 1853 hotel here was torn down & replaced with a seven-story building in 1890, which itself was destroyed in the 1906 quake & fire. The current building was home to the SF Examiner, flagship of the Heart Newspapers chain, from 1910 to 1965. However, Hearst was only permitted to build the current 12-story structure, not the 26- story one he wanted in order to intimidate his competitors.

 Bancroft Building (731 Market Street) – this 5-story brick building was put up in 1869 to house the bookstore, publishing, printing, and stationery empire of Hubert Bancroft. By the late 1800s, he turned the business over to his brother and concentrated on collecting rare books, which he sold in 1905 to UC Berkeley for $300,000 ($6.8 million today), and which forms the basis of the Bancroft Library there.

 Lotta’s Fountain (Market, Geary & Kearny Streets) – this horse drinking fountain was a gift from famous singer & actress Lotta Crabtree in 1875, who got her start in SF. It became the rally point in 1906 for people looking for lost relatives, and now every April 18th, it is the site of a ceremony commemorating the 1906 quake & fire. It was refurbished in 1999 to its original luster & appearance, just like Lotta herself.

23. City Hall #2 (Larkin Street between Fulton & McAlister) – taking 27 years to complete, City Hall #2 finally opened in 1898. Eight years later, it came down in the first seconds of the 1906 quake, leaving nothing but the dome’s steel skeleton, exposing the poor construction & massive corruption that existed then.

24. – after the 1906 catastrophe, The City took the opportunity to redesign the entire government center. Initially moving to the Market & Van Ness intersection, four blocks to the southwest, it was finally decided to just rebuild everything, in the “City Beautiful” style that was popular at the time.

 Commerce High School occupied the southern half of the open square until 1913, when it was moved to its current spot at Fell & Franklin Streets. Notice the three manhole covers embossed with “Cistern SFFD” – at 500k gallons, this is the largest of a dozen city cisterns.

 City Hall #3 (Polk Street, between McAllister & Grove streets) – the current version, built in 1916, is 400’ long & 300’ wide, covering two full blocks. The 307-foot high dome is higher & larger than the national capitol in Washington DC. It was retrofitted after the 1989 quake to include base-isolation disks under the 600 columns that support the structure, and to add a four- foot wide “dry moat” around the building to allow it to sway with a quake.

 Davies Symphony Hall (Van Ness & Grove Streets) – the home of Thomas Hayes was here from the 1850s, but was demolished & replaced in the 1880s by St. Ignatius College, moving from the Market Street location (see #19 above). The college later moved to The Haight & became the University of San Francisco. In 1924, this site became the athletic field of Commerce High School across the street. It became a parking lot in 1952, and then the current symphony hall in the 1980s.

 Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (Grove Street between Polk & Larkin) – it started out as the Mechanics Pavilion in 1882, then became a general meeting hall & sports arena, and then a hospital during the 1906 catastrophe. Since then, it has hosted concerts, trade shows, circuses & prize fights, and the 1920 Democratic National Convention in which a pre-polio & walking FDR accepted the nomination for vice-president.

 Old Main Library (Larkin Street between Fulton & McAlister) – this was the site of City Hall #2 before it was destroyed in the 1906 fire. When city hall moved across the street in the civic center redesign, the SF library system built its first permanent home here in 1917 as it too rebuilt after the fire. In 2003, the library moved across the street, and this building became the new home of the Asian Art Museum (itself moving here from the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, where it was founded in 1966).

 New Main Library (Larkin Street between Grove & Fulton) – the library reached capacity in the old building across the street in the 1940s but didn’t move to these new, larger quarters until 1996. The 6th Floor SF History Room has an extensive collection of materials, artifacts & relics from all periods of SF history.

 Earl Warren Building (McAllister Street between Larkin & Post) – one of the original four Civic Center buildings, it was started in 1917 but WWI slowed completion until 1926. It was closed by the 1989 quake, until 1998, when it retrofitted & renamed after the former California governor & chief justice of the US Supreme Court.

 War Memorial Opera House (401 ) – in 1927, $4 million ($50m today) in municipal bonds were issued to finance the design and construction of the first municipally- owned opera house in the US. The architects of the complex were the same that designed the SF’s City Hall & Orpheum theatre, and the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The symphony performed here from 1932 to 1980, and the UN had their first official conference here in 1945. Numerous expansions & renovations have made it a state-of-the-art facility.

 Herbst Theatre (in War Memorial Performing Arts Center) – this 928-seat theatre features eight large murals originally created for the 1915 Pan-Pacific Expo. On June 26, 1945, the stage was the setting for signing the original United Nations Charter, after two months of conferences at the nearby Opera House.

 Green city – among the many green technologies incorporated into the government center, streetlights have a solar panel & wind turbine on the top to help power the light, and there are several electric car charging stations.

25. McAllister Tower (100 McAllister Street) – in the 1920s, several small churches joined together to build one large downtown church. The resulting 28-story building had a church & offices for the first 4 stories, with an income-generating hotel on the other 24 floors. But after six unprofitable years the church was sold & the new owner converted the top 14 floors of the hotel into apartments. By 1936 it was reopened as the Hotel Empire, but because “Blue Laws” prevented a bar within 200 feet of a church, the new owners had to open their restaurant / bar on the 24th floor with its 360- degree view. From the 50s to the 70s, this became a government office building, but has been student housing for the Hastings College of Law next door since the late 70s.

26. Federal Plaza (100 block of Seventh Street) – across the street from each other, this block shows the past & future of federal building design, each with its own pros & cons…

 US Court of Appeals (95 Seventh Street) – started in 1905, it survived the 1906 quake except for a little subsidence in the SW corner, where a dried stream bed once was. This prompted a downsize from 5-storys to a 3-story building that the land could support (the extra money was spent on the expensive décor inside. The building was damaged in the 1989 quake, retrofitted & reopened in 1997, again showing off its original splendor.

 SF Federal Building (90 Seventh Street) – this unconventionally-designed 18-floor building is a naturally-ventilated office building (i.e. no central AC), as an attempt at building design to help

reduce the carbon footprint. The building also features elevators that stop on every third floor, to promote employee interaction and health, by forcing users to walk either up or down one floor via stairs (normal elevators also exist for the lazier amongst us). Unfortunately, design awards notwithstanding, employees have criticized the building as being dysfunctional, with open windows that can send papers flying or some employees needing umbrellas to keep the sun out of their cubicles.

27. SF County Jail (425 Seventh Street) – the backside of this jail faces the I-80 freeway, with undulating waves of cloudy glass, facing drivers. But what is supposed to represent the famous SF fog instead looks like a bad spray job of Christmas window “snow”.

28. Seals Stadium (16th & Bryant) – built in 1931 for the local minor league baseball team (slow travel prohibited major league teams west of the Mississippi then). When the NY Giants moved to SF in 1958, they played the first 2 years here, before moving to Candlestick Park in 1960 (and AT&T Park in 2000). Seals Stadium was demolished in 1961 & replaced with a Safeway grocery store.

29. Streetcars on Market – in 1860, the Market Street Railroad became the first light rail system in the western US. It was one car – part steam engine locomotive & part passenger car (including exposed seats on the roof), riding on a pair of rails down the middle of Market, from 3rd Street south to Valencia, then over to 16th Street. By 1867, the noisy & dirty steam trains were replaced with horse-drawn railroad-length cars. In another 15 years, the system was converted to cable car. The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the Market Street cables and were replaced by overhead- electric streetcars. From 1913 to 1949, there were four streetcar tracks on Market Street, serving two competing companies, sometimes with only 2 feet between the side-by-side cars. Accidents were so common, that on the Market Street lines alone, they averaged 7 to 10 deaths each year.

30. Folsom Neighborhood (Folsom Street between 7th & 12th streets) – from the 1960s to the 1980s, this was a major locus of gay activism. Home to the “leather” crowd and bathhouses, it fought redevelopment in the 1970s, and advocated safe sex in the 80s as AIDS decimated the community.

31. (Third & Howard streets) – named after the mayor that was assassinated in 1978, the convention center opened in 1981, along with the Yerba Buena Gardens next door, as part of a massive redevelopment of the “skid row” area. (Moscone, ironically, opposed redevelopment of this area when he was alive.) The convention center hosted the 1984 Democratic Convention & every MacWorld & Apple convention ever.

32. Lefty O’Douls (333 Geary Blvd. at Union Square) – started in 1959 by the former professional baseball player (he hit .398 in 1929) & former manager of the SF Seals minor-league team, this is a meat-and-potatoes working-man’s restaurant & bar, one of 2 hofbraus left from dozens that once populated the city.

33. Archstone Fox Plaza (1390 Market Street) – this 29 story building was built in 1966 on the site of the former Fox Theatre (1929-1963). The bottom 12 floors contain office space, and the rest are rental apartments. Unlike many superstitious buildings, Fox Plaza does have a 13th floor labeled as such, although it’s a service floor & not rented out. The attached corner retail building will soon be replaced with a 10-story condo building.

34. Marriot Marquis Hotel (55 Fourth Street) – this 39-story hotel is recognizable by the distinctive postmodern "jukebox" appearance of its high-rise tower. The building was completed in 1989, and contains 1,500 hotel rooms.

35. Alice Street Community Gardens (Lapu Lapu Street) – nearby Mambini Street used to be called Alice Street, and these gardens are a result of & named after a community protest that occurred here many years ago. The 240 planter-boxes are cared for by residents of nearby apartments.

36. AT&T Park (24 Willie Mays Plaza) – opened in 2000, this $350 million, 42k seat stadium is the new home of the Giants baseball team. The park features a “splash hits” counter which counts the number of homeruns that land in the bay outside; boaters & kayakers often hang out there during the game in an attempt to catch one of these balls. The park is accessible by car, train, and even ferry from the East & North bays, and includes a children’s playground featuring a slide through a giant metal Coke bottle.

37. O'Farrell Theatre (895 O’Farrell Street) – in a former Pontiac dealership, the Mitchell Brothers opened one of America’s most notorious 24-hour adult-entertainment clubs in 1969.

 The fully-nude girls invented the “lap dance” downstairs & upstairs the brothers filmed famous porno films like “Behind the Green Door”.

 The theater stopped adult features at midnight on Wednesdays & re-opened as “The Nickelodeon” with five-cent admission & free popcorn. The audience of young hippies would be shown movies like The Marx Brothers, Abbott & Costello, Yellow Submarine, and other counter- cultural favorites (all non-pornographic), with much communal drinking & pot smoking.

 In February 1991, Jim fatally shot his unstable brother & partner in a drug-fueled haze.

38. The Orpheum Theatre (1192 Market Street at Hyde) – opened in 1926 as part of theater-circuit owner Alexander Pantages collection. In 1998, there was a $20 million renovation to make the Orpheum more suitable for modern Broadway shows.

39. The Warfield Theatre (982 Market Street) – built in 1922 as a vaudeville theater, it became a movie theatre in the mid-century, but by the 1980s was a music venue. It can hold up to 2000 people and was a favorite performance space for The Grateful Dead.

40. Sinking buildings (Howard between 7th & 8th Streets) – on the northside of Howard, you can see several industrial buildings that seem to lean to the left or right a little. This is evidence that the area is reclaimed bay land subject to settling. Side alleys & smaller streets nearby show similar subsidence, which were devastating in the 1906 and 1989 major quakes. Many of the buildings are being replaced with modern, earthquake-ready buildings.

MARINA, COW HOLLOW & PACIFIC HEIGHTS

49 13 35 34 5 33

36 32 15

51

17 1

2 5 3 6 7 4 8 10 9 14 11 52 12 29 28 24 16 23 55 21 22 26

20 27 25 18 19

42 38 31 37 43 39 44 40 30 41 45 46 50

47 54 53 48

The original rocky shoreline of this area was ill-suited for ships in the late 1800s, so the huge natural lagoon was used for laundry washing after Yerba Buena Cove was founded. Resulting pollution issues forced the lagoon to be filled in, and it got its current name of Cow Hollow from the dozens of dairies that soon moved into the new grasslands. By 1900, pressure from residents forced the smelly cows to move out to make room for residential development. The area still has some of the city's original Victorian architecture, and is a tony area known for busy shopping districts, vibrant nightlife, and a young & affluent restaurant scene.

The nearby Marina District was originally under water, but a seawall was built in the late 1800s and the area was filled in to create more developable port acreage. The land-reclamation was completed for the Pan-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 – the second of three “world fairs” held in SF within a few decades. Designed to showcase the city’s rise from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake, the PPI Expo covered 636 acres or almost 500 football fields in the Marina District. When the expo was over, most of it was demolished and the pre-sold land was developed into residential neighborhoods. 80 years later, the land reclamation created a problem in the 1989 Loma Prieta Quake: when the high water table of the Marina was shaken, it “liquefied” the in-fill, making the ground & buildings unstable and creating the most damaged section of The City during that quake.

Pacific Heights has been an upper class neighborhood from the late 1800s, with numerous palatial mansions, most with included servant’s quarters. In fact, many owners here spent so much time at their other homes elsewhere down the peninsula, that the city houses would be occupied only by the servants for long periods of time. In the early 1900s, the younger inheritors of this wealth eschewed the more opulent lifestyles of servants & large homes, causing many Victorians to be torn down & rebuilt with apartment buildings, some rented by the former servants who had worked at the mansions & knew the neighborhood & their neighbors well.

1. Blackstone Court – this dead-end alley is the last of the first street grid (1837). In 1889, streets were realigned to the predominant grid that started in downtown. At 11 Blackstone Court is a home built elsewhere in the 1850s as a single-story cottage and moved here in 1893, when a new first floor was inserted underneath (it’s also been renovated several times since then). The house was originally at the Greenwich side of the lot, with a windmill, water tower, and five greenhouses in the surrounding land. In 1947, the house was lifted, turned 90 degrees & placed where it is today.

2. Pixley Street (between Steiner & Gough Streets) – this six-block long street initially had its eastern three blocks under water at Washerwoman’s Lagoon, before being back-filled & named after The Argonaut newspaper publisher of the 1880s.

3. Vendata Temple (2963 Webster Street) – originally erected in 1908, the house became the first Hindu temple in the US. The five domes on the roof represent the five major religions of the Earth, consistent with the Vendata creed that all religions are merely different paths to the same goal.

4. 1890s barn & stable (3011 Steiner Street) – the original home here was lifted up so horse stables & a barn could be inserted underneath.

5. Six Gallery (3115 ) – this long and narrow store was a cooperative art gallery in the 1950s when it hosted a bunch of local poets who read their works to an audience of about 75. The evening turned out to be the public debut of the Beat Generation, featuring Allan Ginsburg & Jack Kerouac. (The term “Beat” was coined by Jack Kerouac as a comparison of his “beaten generation” to the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. Local columnist Herb Caen then invented the term “beatniks” as a comparison to Sputnik, because both were “far out.”)

6. Cudworth House (2040 Union Street) – this Victorian was built in the 1850s by James Cudworth as part of his dairy farm. By 1897, when he died, he owned at least 15 homes in Cow Hollow.

7. Octagon House (2645 Gough Street) – this is the last of more than 700 octagonal houses built in SF in the mid-1800s, when it was believed that eight-sided houses were cheaper to build, more energy efficient & provided a healthier environment for residents. The neighboring city park was the southern half of an estate owned by the Allyne sisters, with the northern half being donated as the new location for the Octagon House on its 100th birthday (moved here from Gough & Union Streets in 1961). The house is available for tours & is maintained in the original mid-1800s décor.

8. Golden Gate Valley Library (1801 Green Street) – one of the original libraries funded by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, it was built in 1917 in what was then known as Golden Gate Valley.

9. The First Cow Hollow House (SW corner of Green & Laguna Streets) – this was the site in 1846 of the first house in Cow Hollow, built by the ex-communicated Mormon Elijiah Pell.

10. Sherman House (2160 Green Street) – Leander Sherman, future owner of Sherman & Clay piano & organ comapny, built this house in 1876. He added the three-story recital hall in 1901, and hosted many musicians of the time, including Enrico Caruso, Lotta Crabtree & Luisa Tetrazzini. After Sherman’s death in the 1930s, the house was turned into an elegant restaurant, then a ballet school in the 1950s, a luxury hotel in the 1980s, and then once-again a single-family home.

11. Casebolt Mansion (2727 Pierce Street) – Henry Casebolt arrived in SF in 1851 and built this home in 1866 for his wife & 11 children. The blacksmith prospered in the 1870s, after inventing the lever- operated cable car grip that is used even today.

12. James Leary Flood Mansion (2222 Broadway) – erected in 1913, it is clad in pale pink marble and has been called “the stateliest house ever erected in San Francisco.” If the gate to the children’s playground next door is open, walk back toward the courtyard for a view of the back of the home.

13. (1 Yacht Road) – this is a “wave-activated acoustic sculpture” built in 1986 by the Exploratorium folks. It has 25 intermingling large pipes that make various sounds using tide & wind movement, It is surrounded by oversized stone pieces salvaged from the demolition of the Laurel Hill Cemetery, and includes stone benches for enjoying the panoramic view of the city and bay.

14. A legacy of the Pan-Pacific Expo (NE corner of Fillmore & Vallejo streets) – look at the top step of these sidewalk-stairs down toward Green Street: “Presented to the People, 1915, Fillmore Street Improvement Association”. Such neighborhood improvements were built into the original master plan of the Pan-Pacific Expo.

15. Exploratorium (3601 Lyon Street) – since 1969, this museum of science & discovery has entertained kids & adults of all ages. In 2015, it will move to new facility, on Piers 15 & 17.

16. Billionaire’s Row (between Broadway & Vallejo streets, between Divisidero & the Presidio) – since the late 1890s, this is where the richest of the rich have had their homes. The steepness of the hills creates a 3-block-long enclave with no cross streets. You can’t go inside these amazing digs but the gorgeous views from outside are free!

 2950 Broadway – colorful attorney to the stars Melvin Belli lived here.

 2945 Broadway – this 1922 Tudor house has 6 bedrooms & 7 bathrooms, 4 car garage & 3000 bottle wine cellar. It sold in 2011 for $34 million.

 2901 Broadway – in 1912, future US President & then-engineer Herbert Hoover sold an empty lot to a fellow Stanford classmate, Milton Ray, who then hired Hoover & Joseph Strauss (designer of the Golden Gate Bridge) and architect Henry Clay Smith to create this 10,000 sq. ft. home with a six-car garage, elevator, private gardens & tennis court, views of both bridges, three bedrooms & maid’s quarters on 4 levels. In 2010, it was on sale for $45 million.

 2870-80 Broadway – home of Gordon Getty, heir of Getty Oil.

 2850 Broadway – Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s home. His boat won the 2010 America’s Cup, which allowed him to pick the location for the next Cup: he picked San Francisco in 2013, initiating reconstruction & modernization of many piers & wharves in the city.

 2845 Broadway – the unfinished mansion of the son of the founder of University of Phoenix was once listed for $65 million, but it is now “on sale” for $47 million.

 Broadway Steps (Broadway at Broderick, Baker & Lyon streets) – amazing public views from beautifully terraced parks & steep pedestrian-only streets. These are the steepest navigable streets in the Western Hemisphere, at just under 35% grade (Lombard is about half that).

17. Chestnut Street (near Steiner) – the main shopping drag of the neighborhood, this was a land of retirees, Woolworths & pharmacies before the 1989 quake severely damaged the area & drove down rents. Nearby college grads could now afford the area, and a yuppie influx drove the area upscale again shortly afterward.

18. Wormser – Coleman House (1834 California Street) – this house is actually a melding of two houses. The eastern portion was built in 1876 by Isaac Wormser (the W in S&W Foods), and bought in 1895 by John Coleman. The west half was added – in a different design style – as additional living space for Coleman’s wife & 10 children.

19. Arthur Conan Doyle House (2151 Sacramento Street) – in his only visit to SF ever, the Sherlock Holmes author spent a morning here in 1923, during a one-day stop on a lecture tour. The building was constructed in 1921 at a cost of $35,000 ($416,000 today).

20. Lafayette Park (Washington, Sacramento, Laguna & Gough Streets) – this four-block, 12.7 acre park is at the highest point in Pacific Heights (378 feet). It has gorgeous views of the bay now, but had some trouble getting to this point:

 When the city expanded the street grid into the Western Addition in 1855, it designated (but didn’t develop) a series of four-block-square parks scattered about the area, like this one. Samuel Holladay decided he wanted to build a house & gardens at the summit on the western end of the undeveloped Lafayette Park.

 The city didn’t sue to remove the squatter until the late-1870s, so the 1896 US Supreme Court ruled against The City, saying they’d taken too long to act. “Holladay Heights” survived until 1936, when his heirs swapped the house for land in Oakland. The park was finally landscaped, with an asphalt oval at the summit to mark the site of the original house.

 Barred from further litigation against any park squatters by the 1896 court decision, The City was forced to negotiate with them. A compromise agreement resulted in all park squatters giving up their various lots in exchange for a piece of the St. Regis Apartments (1925 Gough Street), one of the only apartment buildings located inside of a public city park.

21. Spreckels Mansion (2080 Washington Street) – heir of the sugar magnate, Alma Spreckels bought up the 8 connected lots to create a mansion (she insisted the existing houses not be destroyed but picked up & moved to another location & given to a needy family). The 1913 completion party was attended by author Jack London & other celebrities. The 1915 Pan-Pacific Expo was visible from the north windows. (Spreckels also donated the building & was the model for the figure of Victory that tops the in Union Square – see chapter 3, item 8.) Years later, to slow & quiet the passing vehicles, Alma had the block of Octavia between Washington & Jackson repaved in brick, allowing her husband, who was suffering from syphilis, to sleep. The building was subdivided in the 1930s into 3 apartments to accommodate various family members & guests, but later recombined into one house, now owned by author Danielle Steele.

22. 2006 Washington Street – this building is a rarity in SF: a co-op. Unlike condos, in which each unit is owned separately, a co-op is a corporation of homeowners as shareholders. Original tenants include Dean Witter (founder of the stock brokerage) and members of the Schilling spice family.

23. Haas-Lilienthal House (2007 Franklin Street) – this 4-floor, 24-room, 11,000 sq. ft. house was owned by the same family from creation in 1886 until 1972, when it was donated to an architectural heritage non-profit. This classic late 19th century upper-middle class home cost $18,000 to build ($425,000 today), well below the million-dollar range of most Nob Hill Mansions then, but still well above the $2000 average cost of a regular house ($47,000 today). Note that the window in the tower is decorative; it’s really 8 feet off the floor. The tour is worth taking to experience 1880s life.

24. Whittier Mansion (2090 Jackson Street) – built in 1894 by a partner in the company that eventually became the Fuller Paint Company, it became the Nazi Government Consulate in 1941 before being closed by the US government a few months later. For 40 years, it was the headquarters of the California Historical Society, but it is now privately owned.

25. 2405 to 2461 Washington Street – these 8 houses were built in 1888 and were once virtually identical. 2447 still looks much like it did originally, with a front yard & no garage, but the neighbor at 2445 looks like a modern addition, with a new front structure reaching out to the lot line. 2407 has lost all its gingerbread decoration and been turned into a church.

26. 2301-2303 Jackson Street – this 1880s structure was originally a stable (look at the large frame around 2303 for the horse entrance). It was later a restaurant, a grocery store, and finally the present-day apartments.

27. Park (entrance at Clay & Pierce streets) – this 12-acre rock quarry was purchased by The City in 1877, but the “top of the world” park wasn’t brought to life until 20 years later, when the land was mapped & graded for future residential development. The grand staircase at Clay & Pierce was used in the 1971 film “What’s Up Doc?” when several cars careened over the steps (without the city’s permission); you can still see some chips & nicks caused by the cars.

28. “Mrs. Doubtfire” house (2640 Steiner at Broadway) – this was the house the fictional family lived in during the movie.

29. “Party of Five” house (2311 Broadway between Steiner & Fillmore) – this is where the family lived, as well as being where Arnold Schwarzennegger lived in the pregnant-man movie “Junior”.

30. “Full House” house (1709 Broderick Street) – the owners painted the red door after the show because they were tired of people knocking, asking to take pictures. With the new color, fewer people do it. Don’t be one of them.

31. Sacramento Street (either side of Presidio Avenue) – this is some of The City’s most exclusive & affluent shopping areas.

32. (near Van Ness & Bay streets) –

 This area has served as a military compound since Spanish soldiers from The Presidio built this battery in 1779. By 1850, it was called Black Point and part of the US Army reservations in the city. But the Army didn’t immediately occupy it, so squatters did; they were removed in 1863.

 The US Civil War prompted construction of temporary coastal defense batteries all around SF coasts, including these breast-high walls of brick and mounts for six 10-inch cannons and six 42-pounder guns. (Work in the early 1980s restored it to its original Civil War condition.)

 The fort was renamed Fort Mason in 1882, after the military governor of the California territory from 1847 to 1849.

 The piers and sheds were originally built in 1915 to warehouse army supplies & provide docking space for army transport ships. A railroad tunnel was driven under Fort Mason to connect with the SF Belt Line Railroad network along the Embarcadero (see #36).

 During WWII, this was the SF Port of Embarkation, sending troops & cargo to the Pacific Theatre. Eventually 2/3 of all troops & 1/2 of all cargo & supplies for WWII bases & troops in the Pacific were shipped through San Francisco. The Korean War in the 1950s also kept the post busy, but by 1965 operations were transferred to the Oakland Army Terminal and most of Fort Mason's embarkation facilities fell into disuse.

 The base was decommissioned in 1995 and is now the renovated headquarters for the GGNRA (Golden Gate National Recreation Area) and many other non-profits, and has free museums, a bookstore & gallery, two pavilions & a pier with spectacular views.

 A proposal exists to extend the F Market streetcar line from the existing terminus at Fisherman’s Wharf, westward along Beach Street & through the existing but unused Belt Line Railroad tunnel under Fort Mason, to a new terminus in the Marina District.

33. Youth Hostel (north side of Fort Mason) – the hostel is in a former Civil-War barracks; behind it is a scooped-out earthworks that once held a gun battery.

34. Black Point Battery (north side of Fort Mason) – rather well hidden, this was originally a Spanish cannon emplacement dating to 1797. It was later adapted as a Civil War fortification, and an original 1860s cannon is still in place.

35. The Galilee – near Building E are the remains of the 1891 trading ship Galilee that carried mail and freight between SF and Tahiti.

36. Belt Line Railroad tunnel – this tunnel was used for the Belt Line Railroad that opened in 1896 to move goods along the Embarcadero and waterfront.

37. Buddhist Church of SF (1881 Pine Street) – founded in 1898, the Church built & has occupied this building since 1914. Notice the cornerstone near the Pine Street entrance – those are not swastikas, but four Ls, representing the 4 Buddhist Loves: parents, community, country & teachings. The cornerstone has a box containing 20,000 paper lotus petals, each inscribed with the name of a member who gave 15 cents (about $4 now) or more to the church’s construction fund.

38. Octavia Street (at Pine Street) –

 St. Francis Xavier Church (1801 Octavia Street) – once a 1870s Victorian mansion, the front ½ was removed in 1939 & the current church building put in its place. When the Asian congregants were sent to “relocation camps” in the 1940s, a Catholic congregation moved in & maintained the buildings until the Asians returned. Now, it is also St. Benedict’s, which caters to the deaf of all races; the aging, original Xavier congregants now get together only once a month.

 Queen Anne Hotel (1715 Octavia Street) – this 1890s Victorian originally was the private School for Young Ladies, before turning into a hotel to cater to the rich movers & shakers that were the fathers of the former students. By the 1910s, this had became a boarding house, then the similar-function Girls’ Friendly Society Lodge, “a home for working women” (PC talk then for

“single mothers”). It became a guest house called The Lodge in the 1950s, and then the Queen Anne Hotel in the 1980s.

39. Bush Street (near Laguna Street) –

 Ohabai Shalom Synagogue (1881 Bush Street) – built in 1895 for a Jewish congregation with roots back to 1863, when they split off from the orthodox Temple Emanu-El synagogue for being too liberal. The second floor arcade is modeled after the Doge’s palace in Venice. The building was sold in 1934, when it became a Buddhist mission. It was abandoned in 1975 and claimed by the SF Redevelopment Agency. It is now the dining hall, library & offices for the assisted- living senior housing on the corner.

 Konko Church of San Francisco (1909 Bush Street) – practicers of Shintoism (the Japanese state religion), this Konko congregation started in 1930, moving into a Victorian house formerly on this site. It was torn down in 1973 and replaced with the current traditional Japanese design.

 1740 Laguna – this house was built in the 1980s, while the building to the right was built in the 1880s. This house shows how architecture finally moved away from the bland, stuccoed buildings of the 1950s-1970s and back to designs that are cohesive with the City history.

 1800 block of Laguna Street – both sides represent classic Victorian tract homes aimed at middle-class buyers of the late 1800s. Note they are not shoulder-to-shoulder like most SF Victorians, but have space between them; this “fresh air” element was considered a selling point at the time. The plaque at 1825-29 Laguna gives an interesting & brief history of that house.

40. Kinmon Gakuen (2031 Bush Street) – Japanese for “Golden Gate School”, this structure was built in 1911 for a Japanese-language school. It was closed in 1942 and, ironically, became the collection point of Japanese residents being shipped off by bus & train to the Topaz relocation camp at Delta, Utah (3 hours south of & 700 miles east of SF). During WWII this building was the Booker T. Washington Center serving the black community that had moved into the area. It is now a Japanese preschool.

41. Franklin Hall (SW corner of Bush & Fillmore Streets) – originally a four-story wooden building, auditorium, and Gay 90s dance hall. When City Hall collapsed in the 1906 quake, the female impersonators here had to vacate for the mayor and police chief, who occupied it for another 18 months. It later became a meeting hall, then was torn down in 1941 to become a gas station; it’s now a Walgreen’s.

42. Nichiren Buddhist Church (2016 Pine Street) – each floor of this building was built in a different style. It started as a one-story cottage in the 1860s, which became the second floor when the current first floor was inserted under it in the 1880s; the third floor was added in 1893; it added the current Buddhist flourishes in 1928. In order to add the non-descript building & basement on the east side, the church was moved a little to the left, which is why the stairs no longer match up with the entrance to the house.

43. Bush & Buchanan streets – these two spots are around the corner from each other.

 1907 Buchanan Street – this one-story frame cottage was moved here in 1877 when the St. Francis Hospital took over its previous location at Bush & Hyde streets (1 mile east).

 Charles Stanyan House (2006 Bush Street) – this 1852 home was owned by one of the first city supervisors & a champion of Golden Gate Park, and shows how simple the first wave of Victorian architecture really was. The apartment building to the right was built as an income property for his family.

44. 1737 Webster Street – in the 1950s, when the Redevelopment Agency decided to restore rather than destroy old Victorians, this house was moved here from Turk Street near Franklin, where the Opera Plaza now is. The building was virtually shoehorned into this space between its neighbors. The innermost capital on the north side of the portico was shaved in order for it to fit.

45. Cottage Row – these 6 small two-story frame cottages share common walls and measure only 20’ x 23’ in size (each with a 5’ deep backyard). They were originally designed for those on a budget; today they are highly valued because of their location off the major streets & next to a mini-park.

46. Jimbo’s Bop City (1690 Post Street) – in the 1950s heyday of , when the district was packed with jazz clubs, this was the site of a Victorian converted into a restaurant & jazz club that hosted Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker etc. It moved 2 blocks down to 1712 Fillmore but closed by 1965.

47. Japan Center & Japantown Peace Plaza – despite having to tear down many Victorian-era houses to do it, this mall was built in the 1960s as a kind of apology to the Japanese community for the forced relocations during WWII. The original architect of the mall also designed NYC’s original World Trade Center; the mall was remodeled in 2000.

48. People’s Temple (1859 Geary Street) – this was the headquarters of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, infamous for the Kool-aid mass-death at the cult’s compound in Guyana in 1978.

49. Pan-Pacific International Expo (purple square in the Marina District) – with pavilions from 29 states and 25 countries, there were 11 major buildings done in a Beaux-Arts style and tinted in pastels & earth-tones, all surrounding a central plaza. The entire expo was bathed in indirect lighting (a novelty at the time), often mingling with the coastal fog to give it an ethereal ambiance. Everything except the Palace of Fine Arts was demolished after the expo closed, as developers had already bought the reclaimed land, which in turn was used to pay for the Expo.

 The Zone (east end) – the arcade, eating & entertainment section of the expo. It included a scale model of the newly finished Panama Canal, ostensibly the reason for the fair.

 Machinery Hall (east end) – a building so vast, a plane flew through it during the expo.

 Palace of Fine Arts (3301 Lyon Street) – originally created out of burlap, wood & plaster, this “temporary” building was later rebuilt in concrete in the 1960s, and renovated again in 2010.

The original building was much more colorful, with red, blue & dark green columns, and red lips & blue eyes on the statues.

 Tower of Jewels (middle) – a glittery forty-three-story high tower that literally shimmered because attached to it were 100,000 cut-glass beads suspended on wires so they’d flutter with the breeze. One side of each bead was also a mirror so it tinted the reflected light.

50. Tommy’s Joynt (1101 Geary at Van Ness) – opened in 1947, when there used to be dozens of hofbraus in the City, this is one of only two old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes buffets & bars for the working man (other is Lefty O’Douls near Union Square).

51. Moscone Recreation Center (1800 Chestnut Street) – built in 1920 as Funston Park, it was renamed for the former mayor. Popular with locals, Joe Dimaggio took Marilyn Monroe on a stroll at the park in the hours prior to their marriage at City Hall, and Robin Williams, Danielle Steele and Sharon Stone were known to take their small children to the park without fear of paparazzi.

52. “Princess Diaries” house (2601 Lyon Street at Green Street) – this house doubled as Grove High School in the “Princess Diaries” movie. These six houses were built in 1924 & are actually just inside the Presidio border; all are on the Register of Historic Places so the facades can’t be altered.

53. Geary Expressway (from Franklin to Broderick streets) – this street always had a streetcar line on it, but the 1950s redevelopment dictated clearing out a wide swath for additional automobile traffic. That required demolition of the surrounding blighted area & erecting the residential buildings flanking Geary between Franklin & Broderick. The cold, featureless look of the area is typical of design mentality of the time.

54. First Unitarian Church (1187 Franklin Street at Geary) – the original church (closest to Geary) dates from 1887. The southern buildings were added in the 1960s, when redevelopment re-routed eastbound Geary traffic onto O’Farrell, creating a traffic island that the church bought.

55. Van Ness Avenue (roughly between Broadway & California streets) –

 This road on the eastern edge of Pacific Heights was laid out in 1854 not as a highway but as a spacious quiet boulevard. At 125 feet, it is the widest street in The City yet it never had street cars or cable cars running down it; it was lined with dozens of gingerbread mansions.

 By the 1890s, hotels, retail & doctors started to move in, which was followed by calls for paving the street. The street was later used as a fire-break in the 1906 fires, by dynamiting all the grand mansions. It did the job & saved the western half of the city.

 After the fire, retail folks skipped over to the new Union Square, and the buildings were replaced with stately automobile dealerships in the 1920s, to sell a luxury that only the rich nearby could afford. On side streets, small service & repair garages opened up in the old horse stables.

 Recent decades have seen the dealerships move off the pricey land and gentrification return to the area in the form of large apartment & condo buildings with street-level retail.

PRESIDIO, RICHMOND, LAND’S END, OCEAN BEACH & GOLDEN GATE PARK

12 13 6

7 29 11 6 14 2 9 10 31 35 1 6 3 8 5

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18 32 15 17 37 28 34 6 20 24 22 23 19

27 6 25 26

39 30 36

21 38

33

The Presidio area was the home of the Ohlone Indians for nearly 1000 years before it became a Spanish military base within their Mexican colony in 1776 (presidio means “fortified camp” in Spanish). It was the 3rd of 4 forts they established in Alta California, mostly to prevent the Russian or British empires from gaining a foothold in Spain’s North American empire. The Presidio base was taken over by the US in 1850 after winning California in the Spanish-American War. It was eventually expanded to the current 1500 acres, and served as headquarters for the Pacific Theatre in WWII, before being decommissioned in 1994 and turned over to the National Park Service. It has numerous trails for biking & hiking, as well as gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge & beyond.

West of the Presidio, Land’s End & the surrounding Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) roughly covers an area once owned entirely by German immigrant , who made his fortune during the Gold Rush through devices to de-water and de-gas the mines. He used his fortunes to buy up “worthless” land throughout The City & greatly increased their value by paying young boys to plant fast-growing Eucalyptus trees, to reduce erosion as well as improve appearances.

Ocean Beach grew along with Sutro’s resorts in the 1870s, benefiting from train service Sutro built out here. This was the day-trip resort destination in the late 1800s, whether to wade into Sutro’s baths or lounge on the beach, to eat at a restaurant or walk the boardwalk, or enjoy one of many amusements & concerts – all for a 10 cent train fare. The beach itself is noteworthy, not only for the unimaginative & redundant name, but for its strong currents and fierce waves, which make it popular among many serious surfers but dangerous for most casual swimmers. (Not that you’d really want to go in, since this is typically the coldest part of The City, if it isn’t actually enveloped in the ubiquitous fog.)

Golden Gate Park came into being around the same time as the cable cars, in the 1870s. At the time, the city had few public parks & plazas to break up the monotony of the strict street grid, so it became clear that a major park would be needed as refuge from the predicted future “urban density” (oh if they only knew!). A three-mile long by ½ mile wide “woodland park” was approved in 1868 and begun in 1870, starting on the east end & slowly growing west.

1. National Military Cemetery (1 Lincoln Blvd) – the 1884 cemetery was originally 10 acres but now covers 28 acres, and is one of the only cemeteries remaining within City limits. This park offers fantastic views of the bridges & bay & the Marin Headlands.

2. Presidio Main Post Chapel (Fisher Loop) – this building sits on the site of the original Spanish fort that was established in 1776, but was built in the 1930s & had non-denominational services until 1995 when the base was closed. The 11 stained-glass windows depict military virtues, and bronze plaques on the walls (and outside) memorialize soldiers who served in the Presidio.

3. El Polin Springs (El Polin Loop) – this natural spring was the source for fresh water for the 193 Presidio dwellers in 1776. With the Gold Rush population explosion, an ambitious project was started in 1853 to bring this water to the burgeoning city. A 3500-foot tunnel was built running from El Polin under the Presidio, to the vicinity of Larkin and Pacific streets (about 3 miles away), where the water was pumped to a reservoir atop Telegraph Hill. But the owners could not raise the full amount needed and the project was abandoned after just a few years. The brick & stone tunnel was then buried under 42 feet of landfill & rubble, until it was rediscovered recently. The springs are being restored to their natural & original state, which in turn has revealed the foundations of several homes dating back to 1810.

4. Mountain Lake – this was a much larger lake originally but so many early water companies tapped this supposedly spring-fed lake that, when the water level dropped by 11 feet, the tap was turned off to everyone.

5. 1000 Steps Trail – originally an informal hiker’s trail, the city put in wooden steps in 2009 (despite the name, there’s only 741 of them).

 Immigrant Point Overlook – for decades, SF was the western gateway to America for many immigrants. Immigrant Point was created in 2005 to symbolize & commemorate their arrival.

(west from the overlook) – this half-mile long beach begins just south of Golden Gate Point (at the Bridge anchorage), extending southward toward Sea Cliff and the . Because of riptides & shallow rocks, there’s no swimming allowed, but there is lots of sunbathing including a nude section (ironically, north of the “dangerous surf” sign). This was also the site of the first five Burning Man festivals. In 1990, park police allowed participants to raise the traditional large statue but not to set it on fire, since the beach enforces a limit on the size of campfires. The festival has since moved 500 miles east to Black Rock, Nevada.

 Battery Crosby is a little further north on the trail, but you’ll want to use your camera for the stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands and Land’s End.

6. Battery Chamberlin (near Baker Beach) – dating from 1904, this is one of many military batteries scattered around the NW corner of the peninsula to protect the city during wartime. The 6-inch guns had a range of 7 miles & could fire two rounds per minute. They were covered with camouflage netting & protected by underwater minefields laid outside the Golden Gate. The original guns were removed in 1917 for use in World War I, with one being replaced in 1978.

7. Crissy Field – this area was originally a marshland before being converted into a racetrack for the 1915 Pan-Pacific Expo; afterward, it became the first SF airport. In 1936, San Francisco Municipal Airport moved to Mills Field (the site of the current SFO), and this land became a landing strip for the Presidio for another 2 decades. Now it is decommissioned & part of the GGNRA.

8. Lover’s Lane (Presidio & Pacific avenues) – the dirt path to the left of the entrance dates from 1776 and was used by Spanish soldiers leaving base to visit family near Mission Delores (3 miles SE). The path is lined with officer’s housing dating from the 1930s.

9. Presidio Main Camp –

 Presidio Museum (1 Funston Avenue at Lincoln Blvd) – the building with the octagonal tower was the original base hospital from 1864-1899, then a medial building until 1973. The structure originally faced west toward the parade ground, but was turned around in 1878 to face east at the same time as the officer’s quarters to the south were being built. (Castillo’s Cannons from 1693 are located out front – see #13 below.) The building now houses the Presidio Museum, with exhibits & dioramas of various key moments of SF history. It includes two “refugee cottages” out back, 5300 of which were built after the 1906 disaster for the newly homeless in city. The homes were rented out at $2 per month ($50 today), and though some were later purchased & moved to new lots, most were demolished.

 Officer’s Quarters (Funston Avenue) – these large Victorian buildings were erected in 1862 for officers of the 9th Infantry Regiment. Plumbing was added about 20 years later, and electricity 30 years after that. The single-family homes were converted to duplexes with carports in 1947, and had new concrete foundations inserted in 1965.

 Spanish Chapel (Funston & Moraga avenues) – a plaque marks the location of the foundation of the former Spanish colonial chapel built here in the 1780s.

 Officer’s Club – the left wing contains historic photos & displays. It also has two of Castillo’s Cannons (see #13 below).

 Parade Grounds (104 Montgomery Avenue) – the 5 large brick infantry barracks date from 1895. Three of them were renovated in 2009 to become the Walt Disney Family Museum. The eastern edge of Pershing Square has a stone marker showing where the original Spanish fort stood (the walls were 14 feet high & 5-foot thick adobe). An ancient native burial ground was also once located under this area.

 Presidio Bowl (33 Moraga Street) – this 100 year old bowling alley has been improved over the years, but you can still see its history throughout.

10. National Military Cemetery (Infantry Terrace off Moraga) – built in 1884, 30,000 soldiers & their families are buried in the only human cemetery remaining within the city limits of San Francisco.

11. Pet Cemetery (Crissy Field Avenue, under the freeway) – this cemetery houses the pets of military families that have lived here. Cats, dogs, a few goldfish, iguanas & parakeets...

12. Golden Gate Bridge –

 The name “Golden Gate” comes not from the Gold Rush but from John Fremont in 1848. He named SF bay’s strait after Chrysoloplae, the Golden Horn harbor near Istanbul. And the bridge’s trademarked color is actually called “International Orange”. Workers paint the bridge continuously, to prevent corrosion from the sea air.

 The bridges weren’t built until the 1930s because they simply weren’t needed until then; ferry service had thrived for decades but explosive growth of personal automobiles in the 1920s quickly overwhelmed the system. But the GG bridge was not the first bridge in the Bay Area – the Carquinez, San Mateo & Dumbarton bridges all preceded the GG by a decade.

 The bridge was opposed by the railroads (who ran the ferries) as well as some of the area’s first conservationists. The military also opposed the GG bridge – they owned the land on each landing point – but they relented as long as (a) they were granted the right to take over the bridge in event of war, and (b) military vehicles are never charged a toll to cross the bridge.

 The bridge project was unfortunately started just as the Depression began, and it faced collapse almost immediately, if not for the sale of the first $6 million ($76 million today) in construction bonds to A.P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of America. His confidence in the project helped sell an additional $30 million ($380 million today) soon after.

 The bridge opened on May 27, 1937, after only 4 years of construction, using 100k tons of steel and 80k miles of steel cable wire. The main cables are 7650 feet long and 3 feet thick, weighing

more than 25k tons each. Each tower stands 746 feet above the water & has 600k rivets. The single span between the towers is 4200 feet long.

13. Fort Point – originally an 1794 Spanish fort called Castillo de San Joaquin, it featured cannons made in 1684 in Peru and shipped to the fort. Fort Castillo was replaced by the US’s Fort Point in 1861 to protect from Confederate attacks during Civil War, but the fort never saw battle or fired any of their 120 cannons. Modeled after Fort Sumter, the NC fort where the Civil War started, the 7-foot thick walls were the state-of-the art at the time, and it is currently kept in the period look, with officer’s quarters, armaments & other areas available to view. (The Golden Gate Bridge was redesigned to be built around the fort, rather than demolish it as originally planned. This is also where Jimmy Stewart saved Kim Novak from drowning in 1958’s Vertigo.)

14. Presidio Museum (Lincoln Blvd at Funston) – you’ll find lots of pictures & artifacts from the 1906 Quake & the 1915 Pan-Pacific Expo, and all wars since the Spanish-American War.

15. Fire Department Museum (655 Presidio Avenue) – historic fire-fighting equipment, from uniforms, badges, photos, and restored trucks, including an 1810 hand-pump fire truck.

16. Sea Cliff – this luxurious subdivision was started in 1904, with most building occurring during the 1920s. It is worth a drive or walk through the neighborhood for its unique architectural foreignness relative to the rest of the city. These houses were originally occupied by 3rd generation wealthy families (“new money”) who wanted a change from their more ostentatious origins in Pacific Heights. Between some houses, you can see the million dollar views each house has of the bridge & north bay.

 China Beach (Sea Cliff Avenue at El Camino Del Mar) – this small cove lies between Baker Beach and Lands End, and was named for Chinese fishermen who built shacks at the beach during the Gold Rush. A stairway allows access to the beach below & the 1950s era beach house. (Look for the plaque mentioning that the Pacific Tectonic Plate juts to the west from here, placing this rich, cliffside neighborhood right over a major earthquake fault line.

17. Lincoln Park – (near 43rd & Clement streets) – built as a pauper cemetery in 1868, the first burials here were relocations from the pioneer cemetery in Civic Center plaza (where the current library stands) as well as Chinese immigrants (before they were dug up & shipped back to their homeland). The land was appropriated by the federal government in 1891, the graves were moved & it was turned into Fort Miley, part of the original system of defensive batteries. By 1900, there were 3 guns, a barracks & parade grounds By 1914, it was a small golf course & the planned western terminus of the Lincoln Highway, the first cross-country road in the US. It is now home to a VA hospital & an expanded golf course. A Victorian Chinese funerary monument remains, in the middle of the golf course.

18. California Palace of the Legion of Honor (34th Avenue at El Camino Del Mar) – built by Alma Spreckels to replicate the eponymous French building, it was built in 1924 to honor those who died in World War I. It displays ancient & European art spanning 4000 years. Also look for one of only 13 original casts of Rodin’s “” and Eagles Point, with excellent views of the ocean & Golden Gate Bridge. There is also a Holocaust Memorial on the west end of the parking lot.

19. (near 48th Avenue & Anza Avenue) – Adolph Sutro’s engineering ideas earned him a royalty of $1 to $2 per ton of ore mined, making him filthy rich. He bought this corner of the SF peninsula in 1881 & quickly added a house, flower beds, stables, water towers, gallery, conservatory & an observatory. He also commissioned replicas of 200 European statues & scattered them throughout the 18-acre park, even on the cliff’s edge. He converted the estate to public use in 1885 via many “diversion” venues, including the Sutro Baths, the Victorian-ornate version of the Cliff House, an aquarium, zoo, museum, concert hall, skating rink and more. To get people out there, he also built a steam rail line from the city, traveling over what was then a vast wasteland of sand dunes and little else. (The original train route is still visible via The Lands End Trail, which also gives some of the most incredible views in the entire City.) Sutro died in 1898, and this property was donated to the city in the 1920s; most of the then-decaying structures were demolished during the Depression.

20. Cliff House (end of Point Lobos Avenue) –

 1859 – reportedly a haven of loose women & other denizens, the first version was built as a simple one-story building using lumber from a ship wrecked at the cliff base below.

 1887 – the first building is destroyed by a ship full of kerosene & dynamite that crashed & exploded on the rocks below. Opening of nearby Golden Gate Park & the new Point Lobos toll road (now Geary Blvd.) make this a popular location to the carriage trade & day-visitors.

 1896 – as a complement to the new Sutro Baths on the beach below & the Sutro Gardens on the cliff above, Adolf Sutro built a replacement Cliff House – a large, loud, six-story Victorian Gingerbread Castle (but no vice allowed). It famously burned down in 1907.

 1909 – the current building goes up. It has opened, burned, closed, been remodeled & opened again numerous times in the last 100 years, but has yet to completely burn down again.

 1937 – complex is purchased by the Whitney Brothers, to complement their Playland-by-the- Beach amusement park next door.

 1977 – purchased by the Park Service & now part of the NGGRA.

21. Carville (, near Golden Gate Park) – in 1880s, when cable cars and electric streetcars spelled the end of the horse-drawn carriages, many of those vehicles were just dumped out on the then-unsettled sand dunes near Ocean Beach. Some people arranged the cars along the empty Great Highway and turned them into homes & businesses. Some were single cars, others assembled into multi-story structures, U-shaped buildings with courtyards, and even St. Andrews by the Sea Episcopal Church. Because of their unusual building composition, the area became known as "Carville” with a peak of fifty families in 1901. But by the 1930s and 1940s, as development increased and property became more valuable, the cars were razed & the land engulfed by other structures.

22. The Columbarium (on Lorraine Court near Geary & Arguello) – this airy, three-story domed Greco- Roman style building contains urns & niches for more than 10,000 San Franciscans. It opened in

1898 in what was then the 37-acre Odd Fellows Cemetery. A 1930s edict requiring disinterment & removal of all cemeteries from within city limits reduced the Odd Fellows down to the current 3 acres, and leaving the Columbarium as the sole “burial” property available within The City. Still, it fell into disrepair between 1934 and 1979, until The Neptune Society took over.

23. Lone Mountain (Turk Street & Parker Street at USF) – one of the last & highest hills before hitting the vast western flat expanse called the Richmond District, the Kansas of San Francisco.

24. Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Cathedral (6210 Geary Blvd. at 26th Avenue) – in the heart of the Russian neighborhood of SF, this cathedral has 5 onion domes covered with 24k gold leaf.

25. Playland at the Beach (Great Highway, between Balboa & Fulton streets) – once the Great Highway was built in the 1920s, more people could easily reach this area by car, as well as public transport. But car access also helped make Playland a day-trip destination, diminishing its earlier successes. It closed in 1972 & was replaced by a Safeway.

26. The Chutes Amusement Park #2 (Tenth Avenue & Fulton Street) – this was the second of 3 locations for The Chutes, from 1902 to 1907. It moved to Turk & Eddy Streets.

27. The Airplane House 2 (2411 Fulton Street) – this 17 room mansion was built in 1904 amongst endless sand dunes, and the owner provided refuge for Enrico Caruso during the 1906 Quake. In 1968, the band Jefferson Airplane bought the home with their “Summer of Love” earnings for $70K ($450K today; its currently valued at just over $1M).

28. Clement Street (west of Arguello Street) – this area is home to Asians, young families and old Russians. There are numerous shops from each group along this street.

29. Doyle Drive –

 The 1.5 mile long Doyle Drive was named after Frank Doyle, an early director of the California State Automobile Association & major roadway advocate. (In the early days, there were no gas stations, so gas was sold in drug stores for 60 cents a gallon ($14 today), and it was customary to carry two 5-gallon cans in the vehicle.)

 This Golden Gate Bridge approach-road was constructed along with the bridge, overlaid onto the Presidio grounds. Original construction required the destruction or burial of several obsolete military batteries on the north coast. Doyle Drive was originally envisioned to be part of the long-abandoned Master Freeway Plan, so it was designed as more of a freeway.

 The road is currently being replaced, to improve seismic stability, ease congestion, and improve capacity & access. The replacement will be a parkway – each direction separated by a landscaped median – and will more naturally follow & be part of the contours of the land, using tunnels & construction techniques to improve the views and reduce noise.

30. MidWinter Expo (Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park) – after this 1894 expo opened, more than 2 million people attended the fair during its 6-month life, seeing expositions from 37 countries,

almost all of the US states, and every California county. The focus was on the exotic: major buildings were Indian or Egyptian in design, trained animals performed, and the Tower of Electricity showed off this latest invention with a beam of light that could be seen for miles. The , Japanese Tea Garden & the DeYoung Museum are the only buildings that remain from that expo.

31. Main Entrance & Letterman Hospital (west of Lombard & Lyon streets) – the original 1899 military hospital is located near the main Presidio entrance, which even had a cable car line running through it. The hospital was demolished in 1975 & replaced by the Letterman Medical Center. When The Presidio was decommissioned in 1996, the buildings were renovated for multi-purpose use. It is now the home of George Lucas’ LucasArts and Industrial Light & Magic (though Lucas still maintains his main headquarters at Skywalker Ranch across the bay in Marin).

32. Camp Richmond (between 11th & 15th Avenues, between the Presidio & Golden Gate Park) – during the 1906 aftermath, this 24-block area was a refugee camp, with many one-room cabins that were the temporary housing created after the fires misplaced tens of thousands of people. More than 5300 of these buildings were erected around the city; fewer than 20 of them are known to remain or are still in use.

33. Wreck of the SS King Philip – one of the fastest clipper ships of the time, she moved cargo from SF to the east coast by going around Cape Horn. In 1878, 22 years after being built, it ran aground on Ocean Beach in heavy surf, causing it to break apart. In 1910, the deteriorating remains were finally buried, when building of The Great Highway required bulldozing of sand dunes & pushing large amounts of sand back onto the beach. The ship stayed buried for another 100 years, until shifting sand caused the ship’s timbers to occasionally reemerge during low tides. It is one of 200 shipwrecks scattered around the Bay Area.

34. Sutro Baths (end of Point Lobos Avenue) –

 Started in 1887 as an private, oversized fish tank (you can still see the circular foundation in the ruins), Adolph Sutro opened the facility to the public in 1896, after a cost of $1 million ($25 million today) to convert it to the largest baths in the world – a 3-acre complex of 7 swimming pools (1 fresh, 6 salt-water), a diving pool, theatre, ice skating rink and museum of oddities.

 The massive structure could accommodate 25,000 people at once, with 500 dressing rooms & 40,000 towels for rent. The hillside had hundreds of bleacher-style benches built on the slope, and the 2-acre building was covered by 100,000 panes in a continuous glass roof that would have been at about eye-level if seated in Louis’ Restaurant (you can also see the location of the original Grecian temple-style entrance just below Louis’.)

 Using no pumps, 1.7 million gallons of sea water an hour was heated & circulated by a clever system of pools & using the ocean wave motion to keep it from stagnating. The baths reached its peak popularity in the early 1900s and was in decline by the 1950s & 60s. It was scheduled to be demolished before an “unexpected” fire did the job first in 1963, burning it down to the cement foundations we see today. (Be sure to explore the nearby tunnel in the cliff, which leads to a large rocky outcropping with amazing views for watching the surf explode.)

35. Presidio Wine Bunkers (1430 Compton Road) – originally built as an armory & ammo storage in the late 1800s, this is now the ideal wine storage facility. Located under 25 feet of dirt & cooled by the near-perpetual fog, the air inside is 59 degrees and 73 percent humidity year round. All 220 lockers, holding between 6 and 1000 cases each, are occupied, at $35 to $800 a month.

36. Golden Gate Park – this 1000-acre park is larger than NYC’s Central Park & is the world’s largest landscaped park. While the whole park has lots of grass for resting, picnicking, sports, sunbathing or walking, the eastern end has more of the museums and other “things to do” and the western half is more about “places to relax”.

 History –

o 1871 to 1882 – originally, only those wealthy enough to own horses & carriages had access to the park. The park had plantings of simple grasses, barley & flowers to hold down the shifting sands, was studded with rustic squatter shelters made of logs & branches, and the wealthy simply came to show off their wealth along the eastern end & the panhandle (called “The Avenue” then).

o 1883 to 1920 – the cable car line ran from downtown to Haight & Stanyan streets, making the park accessible to the middle-class. (You could transfer to the Park & Ocean railroad, which travelled along the southern border of GG Park to Ocean Beach.) The park became the domain of walkers with lots of exotic horticulture, and development of early features like the Music Shell & Children’s Playground.

o 1920 to 1960 – the larger facilities were constructed, and the Masonic & Cross-Over Drive streets cut through the park to improve access for the now-dominant automobiles that had replaced the street car line.

 JFK Drive – this is the best street to follow to get a quick overview of the park. The east end of this street is closed on Sundays, making it a pedestrian mall for walking, biking, rollerblading, picnicking, etc.

 Conservatory of Flowers (JFK Drive, east side of Golden Gate Park) – Millionaire James Lick brought this all-wood building in pieces from Ireland, but let it languish on the grounds of his mansion before bequeathing it to the city in 1875. Four years later it was installed in the park's eastern end. (A casino, dining hall & hotel rooms briefly operated nearby). The building is painted with whitewash every summer, to protect the plants from sunlight. A $25 million restoration completed in 2003 snuck in seismic bracing and freshened the Victorian frills.

 Children’s Playground & Carousel – built in 1887, it is the oldest children’s playground in the US. The carousel dates from 1913, but it was moved here in 1943 after the close of the Treasure Island Expo where it previously sat. The park also includes jungle-gyms, slides, swings, a treehouse, and occasionally a small petting zoo.

– in the 1960s, this stadium was home to the SF 49ers & Oakland Raiders in their first few years, before moving to their current homes. In the 70s, it was a music venue for Led Zepplin, The Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, and other big name bands. It was heavily damaged in the ’89 quake, and was demolished & rebuilt on a smaller scale. It is now home to the professional lacrosse team, the SF Dragons.

 Planetarium & Aquarium

 AIDS memorial grove – in 1991, on the 10th anniversary of the start of the AIDS epidemic, Mayor planted a single redwood sapling (now 40 feet tall) to start what volunteers have made into a serene place for people to hold memorial services & reflect on loved ones lost. In 1996, it was designated as the only National AIDS Memorial in the country.

 The Music Concourse –

o Originally excavated for the Midwinter Exposition of 1894, it was repurposed as a venue for general music performances. It has served as a stage for performers from Luciano Pavarotti to the Grateful Dead.

o Numerous statuary dot the area, including representations of a Roman gladiator, Ulysses S. Grant, Ludwig von Beethoven, Guiseppe Verdi, and Junipero Serra. At the opposite end of the Music Concourse from the Bandshell is a monument dedicated to Francis Scott Key, though this was not its original location, having been moved to this spot in 1967.

o The focal point of the plaza, the "Bandshell", severely damaged in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, got an extensive renovation in 2000 along with the construction of two new museum buildings & an underground parking garage.

 DeYoung Museum

o Hamon Observation Tower (deck level 9 at deYoung Museum) – get floor-to-ceiling 360- degree views of neighboring areas in this free observation deck.

 Japanese Tea Garden – created for the 1894 MidWinter Expo, this calm oasis features a pagoda from the fair, plus gardens galore to stroll. The fortune cookie was invented in the Tea House by the proprietor, Makoto Hagiwara, who tended the tea gardens from 1895 to 1925. He lived in the location until 1942, when he was sent to an internment camp.

 Prayerbook Cross – the artificial Rainbow Falls were created in 1930, and the 57-foot high Celtic cross was put atop it; the cross was built in 1894 as part of the MidWinter Fair. It commemorates the first religious service held on these shores, by Sir Francis Drake’s chaplain during Drake’s stopover in 1579.

 Portals of the Past (Lloyd Lake) – these six Ionic columns are all that is left of a Nob Hill mansion that burned down in the 1906 fire. After a photographer took a picture through the

columns to the city’s ruins, the columns were moved here in 1909 to recreate it as a set-piece, the only architectural monument to the 1906 disasters.

 Golden Gate Stables – available for guided trail rides.

 Polo Field – used in the early 1900s by aristocrats, today it is used for rugby/soccer/football and track. On January 14, 1967, it was the site of the first “Be-In” of the hippie era, when Ken Kesey brought people together to drop acid & space out to psychedelic rock.

 Stow Lake & Strawberry Hill – the man-made lake & the island in the middle of it are fun to explore. In the center of the open area are the ruined foundations of the Sweeney Observatory, built in 1891 as a public viewpoint and destroyed by the 1906 earthquake.

 Bison Paddock – the bison (not buffalo) were brought here in 1891 but were slowly dying out because of an aging female population. The current group was acquired from Ted Turner’s Montana ranch in 1984.

 Golden Gate Golf Course – this 9-hole par-3 course is open daily to the public.

 Dutch Windmills (Great Highway, west end of Golden Gate Park) – built in 1902, these two windmills used strong ocean winds to pump 30,000 gallons of fresh water an hour from an underground river & into the irrigation system of Golden Gate Park. The south mill is called the Murphy Windmill, named after a then-prominent banker who contributed $20,000 ($500,000 today) to the construction; the north one is just called the Dutch Windmill.

 Beach Chalet (1000 Great Highway) – the murals on the ground floor were created by the WPA in 1936, showing the Sunset District before its evolution & build out.

 Ocean Beach bonfire (between Fulton Street and Lincoln Way) – on the west side of the city, right on the beach, fire rings are available on a first-come first-served basis for use by anyone until 10pm each night.

37. Richmond House (12th Avenue & Clement) – this was the approximate site of the home of George Marsh. He named it The Richmond, after his birthplace in a suburb of Melbourne Australia, and it eventually became the name of the surrounding district. Marsh was the Asian Art dealer that created the Japanese Tea Garden for the 1894 MidWinter Fair in Golden Gate Park.

38. Old Speedway Meadow (Golden Gate Park near 41st Avenue) – this track was built for Victorian horse & carriage racing.

39. Old SF Police Academy (37th Avenue & Fulton) – this small building inside the park is now a senior center, but was the original police academy building. Nearby is where model yacht enthusiasts test out their toys. Look for the concrete turtle at the west end, usually covered with real turtles basking in the sun.

40. West soccer field (west end of JFK Drive) – this field was originally a large tidal lake before in-fill & improvements at Ocean Beach.

HAIGHT, HAYES VALLEY, JAPANTOWN, FILLMORE & WESTERN ADDITION

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In the 1850s, the area west of the city border (present day Divisidero Street) was considered the “outside lands” – an area of mostly dairy farmers & ranchers, and squatters. Interest in the area grew after the building of Golden Gate Park and then the cable car lines in the 1870s. Many families built “second homes” in the Haight as the area became a popular weekend resort destination, especially with the addition of a baseball stadium & amusement park near Golden Gate Park’s eastern border in the 1890s. Growth picked up into the new century, and exploded as a refugee destination after the area was virtually undamaged by the 1906 quake. But the area fell on hard times during the Great Depression when many owners walked away from mortgages they could no longer afford (many buildings were later subdivided into flats & apartments). And post-WWII, transit tunnels & the growing car culture opened up the western suburbs, inviting richer whites to vacate to the newer Richmond & Sunset districts, as blacks moved in to this depressed area.

By the 1960s, the now dirt-cheap rents attracted some of the younger Beat generation. The older Beatniks derided these new Haight dwellers as not being hip enough for them – thus they became the Hippies. This counter-culture of the counter-culture took to the name & evolved away from the beret & turtleneck wearing Beat Generation that was dying out. Along with college students from nearby USF & UCSF, the Haight area catalyzed the counter-culture revolution, peaking with the Summer of Love in 1967. But the chronically-poor hippies & the growing drug culture attracted crime & other dangerous types, turning the area into a dangerous slum by the early 1970s. Eventually, rising real-estate prices elsewhere in The City in the early 1980s stirred notice of the cheap area & lead to a gentrification that continues today, while remaining deeply infused with it’s egalitarian / hippie roots, creating an eclectic hybrid of million-dollar Victorians and grungy street life in an evolving modern world.

Hayes Valley started out as mostly produce farms, settled by Italian immigrants after the 1849 gold rush, but was soon built out with many grand Victorian residences, as well as smaller residences to house the craftspeople working on them. Most of the area was spared the 1906 fires, but the elevated Central Freeway 50 years later cut through the neighborhood, bringing blight and decay. When the freeway was damaged during the 1989 quake, it was eventually demolished & a park now covers the former footprint, providing seating, green space, kid’s play structure, urban farms & public art. The area is now being re-gentrified into one of the trendier & eclectic sections of town.

The nearby Japantown & Fillmore districts were also considered to be far from the core population area in the 1850s & 1860s, when this area was little more than shifting sand & sparse vegetation. A kind of “suburban” movement in the 1870s finally saw the start of Victorian tract homes, and the area’s growth lasted for the rest of the century. And because this area was unaffected by the 1906 quake, it grew even faster then, as displaced residents looked for new places to live. By 1940, it was filled predominantly with Japanese residents, giving it the current name. But the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in these residents being moved virtually overnight to relocation camps in Nevada, even though 2/3 of them were actually American-born citizens.

The vacated homes & businesses were quickly & gladly bought by African-Americans, who were being recruited in the Deep South to come work in Henry Kaiser’s steelyards to make ships for the war. Though not welcome in many other parts of The City, the tight & centralized community created a thriving culture & jazz scene well into the 1950s. When the end of the war diminished the economic opportunities for the working-class, the area was in deep decline. In the 1960s, a “slum clearance” movement forced many black residents from these homes, as whole blocks of Victorian houses were condemned, destroyed and replaced by the newer “public housing” we still see today.

The Western Addition was a sandy void until 1875, when city leaders realized cable cars & electric trolleys could carry people to downtown from farther away, thus greatly expanding the city. They passed the Van Ness Ordinance which created a 500-block parcel called the “Western Addition” – the first planned “suburb” of the city. The first cable car line in the area came in 1880, and by 1900 most of the larger east-west streets had a cable car line on them. The 1906 quake & fire created a building boom in this area, but it was rebuilt focused less on single-family Victorians and more on apartment buildings, though of a higher quality & elegance than found elsewhere.

1. Oak Street –

 Engine Company 21 Firehouse (1152 Oak Street) – one of the oldest firehouses in The City, it was built in 1893 and housed horses until as late as 1915. It was built with circular stairways because horses are able to climb straight staircases.

 Abner Phelps House (1111 Oak Street) – one of the oldest houses in the city, it was built in 1851 by a local lawyer on a 160 acre plot what was then the outskirts of town. He built stables, a barn, a windmill & a house for his wife & 7 children (6 of which lived to adulthood, 5 of which never married, and 4 of which lived here until the last one died in 1940). The house has been moved within the lot four times to accommodate street realignments, commercial development, and zoning changes.

2. Golden Gate Panhandle (between Fell & Oak Streets) –

 This originally treeless park was supposed to be as wide as Golden Gate Park, but being on the outskirts of The City in 1870, there were a lot of squatters in the area. Legal eviction had minimal success so they all eventually compromised – clear title to all squatters in exchange for any on this narrow strip moving off so it could be turned into the panhandle of the park.

 Originally, the panhandle was enclosed by a fence that closed at 9pm each day, and it had a thoroughfare called The Avenue running down the middle of it. Envisioned as a modern-day Champs Elysees, the late 19th Century elite showed off their wealth in elaborate horse-drawn carriages. Later, the road was removed & the entire panhandle covered with grass & trees to be a pedestrian park.

 The park served as a haven for the displaced of the 1906 quake & fire – 11 babies were born here the first night. Tents & wood cottages eventually housed 30,000 refugees. 60 years later, the panhandle was a hippie hangout, with the likes of Jimi Hendrix & the Grateful Dead performing free concerts here in 1967 during the “Summer of Love”.

 Fell & Oak Streets were part of the 1947 “Freeway Master Plan”, which would have created freeways throughout The City to expedite car travel (despite the obvious visual & economic blight they created). One direction of the freeway would have gone down either side of the Panhandle before splitting at Golden Gate Park and traveling along Lincoln & Fulton Avenues.

3. 142 Central Avenue – in the 1960s & 70s, the basement here served as a recording studio for many local bands, including The Steve Miller Band, who recorded “Fly Like an Eagle” in 1976.

4. – rising to 569 feet, this is the oldest park in the City. It was called Hill Park in 1867 but renamed in 1894, and renovated into its current state during the Depression by the Works Progress Administration. Many of the retaining walls & drainage ditches were composed of marble & granite headstones from the nearby Long Mountain Cemetery, when the bodies were moved to Colma. From the 1960s to the 1980s, this park was a site for drug use & dealing and casual sex, due to its proximity to the counterculture crowd in Haight-Ashbury. Now cleaned up, it has only a Peace Symbol flowerbed remaining from the era, but some gorgeous & unobstructed views of the western part of The City.

5. 737 Buena Vista West – this house was built in 1897 by sugar magnate Claus Spreckels, and has been home to writers Ambrose Bierce & Jack London, who wrote “White Fang” while living here. In

the 1970s, it also housed a recording studio used by The Steve Miller Band and Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash, who also lived upstairs at the time.

6. Janis Joplin’s home (122 Lyon Street) – apartment #1 was home to the rocker for about a year in the late 1960s, as she first gained fame. She was evicted when the landlord discovered she had a dog, which she regularly walked in the nearby panhandle.

7. The Airplane House 1 (130 Delmar Street) – this cottage was home to “Jefferson Airplane” during the Summer of Love in 1967. (Take a walk on the north side of Waller to view a fine row of large Queen Anne style Victorian houses.)

8. Haight –

 Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic (558 Clayton Street) – founded in 1967, this is one of the only survivors of the Summer of Love. Though vastly under funded initially (how many hippies had money to give?), it was supported early on by benefit concerts produced by Bill Graham and later by government grants & private donations; the HAFC became the model for hundreds of free clinics around the US.

 The Red Vic (1665 Haight Street) – originally the Jefferson Hotel, it was a flower-child hotel in the 60s and is now a B&B with themed rooms.

 The Red Vic Movie House (1727 Haight Street) – once owned by The Red Vic hotel, it showed independent films, documentaries & revivals in a cozy, non-commercial seating & selling organic snacks. It closed in 2011.

 I-Beam Disco (1738 Haight Street) – starting out as a Masonic Lodge in 1914, it became a gay disco in the 1970s during the “Saturday Night Fever” craze. In the 1990s, it switched to a New Wave venue, hosting bands such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers & Counting Crows before closing & being demolished. A multi-story apartment building is now on the site.

 1779 Haight Street – the 2 story building near the corner of Shrader is the oldest intact building on this strip, built in 1893 as the Brooklyn Planning Mill.

9. Ashbury –

 Grateful Dead House (710 Ashbury Street) – from 1966 to 1968, this 13-room building was the headquarters of the famous band.

 Hell’s Angels House (715 Ashbury Street) – built in 1895, this house was most famous as SF HQ for the motorcycle gang in the late 1960s. It was later the Haight-Ashbury Legal Clinic.

10. Charles Manson House (636 Cole Street) – after being released from a prison sentence for petty theft, Charles Manson lived here for a few months in 1967, building his “family” before moving to Southern California in 1969 & committing the Tate-LaBianca murders in Beverly Hills.

11. The Chutes Amusement Park #1 (Clayton, Haight, Cole & Waller Streets) – in the 1890s, this was the first location of a popular water park that had boats flying down at 60 miles an hour (faster than most cars of the time), and included a zoo, merry-go-round, bandstand, shooting gallery & “Darwinian Temple” where the new theory of evolution was popularized. It moved out in 1902, to Tenth & Fulton (near the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park).

12. Drake Apartment (1995 Oak Street) – as you look at this building, the right-hand apartment on the top floor was the home to Christopher Drake from 1988 to 1990; it was then occupied by his brother John & his wife Rebecca for the next 11 years. Total strangers now occupy it, and they apparently don’t like you showing up unannounced.

13. Stanyan Park Hotel (750 Stanyan Street) – located on the eastern border of Golden Gate Park, Stanyan Street became a premier commercial street in the early 1900s. The hotel sits on the former site of the California League Baseball Grounds – home plate was located on the corner of Stanyan & Waller. Built in 1887, it was abandoned in 1897 when the team moved to a new stadium at Eighth & Harrison.

14. Engine Company #30 Firehouse (1757 Waller Street) – the emblem of this 1896 firehouse is still visible on the façade. The station was decommissioned in the 1950s and is now a private home.

15. (Roosevelt Way & Museum Way) – this hill used to extend to Buena Vista Park to the north & Market Street to the south, but the shape was determined by the Gray Brothers quarry that was here from 1899 until 1915 when a disgruntled worker shot & killed the owner. (The brothers had similar quarries on Telegraph Hill & Billy Goat Hill, which also created their current appearances.) The top of this park has gorgeous 360-degree views.

16. Narrowest street in SF (DeForest Way at Beaver Street) – this stairway is actually a legal city street, and it is the narrowest at just 4.5 feet wide.

17. Alamo Square – this is one of many 4-block local parks built into the street grid of the Western Addition, but it has the advantage of having been largely untouched by the urban renewal projects in other parts of the city. The surrounding Victorian-era buildings are the 2nd largest concentration of homes over 10,000 square feet, after the Pacific Heights neighborhood.

18. The (Steiner between Hayes & Grove) – though there are plenty of other similar designed & painted homes throughout the city, there aren’t as many together and with such an iconic backdrop.

 These 7 famous Victorian houses are seen in numerous pictures & movie, including TV’s “Full House” (though their “house with the red door” is actually about 10 blocks away).

 The largest & least photographed house, on the far right at Steiner & Grove, has 4600 square feet – about 1000 feet more than each of the other sisters. It sold in 2010 for $4 million.

 Author Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”) once lived in the house 2nd from the right. She sold it in 1995 for $600,000; it was sold again in 2000 for twice that.

19. The Chutes Amusement Park #3 (between Turk & Webster and Eddy & Fillmore streets) – this was the third & last location of The Chutes. It moved here in 1907 but was closed & demolished in 1919.

20. The Fillmore (1805 Geary Boulevard) – originally built in 1912, it was the Majestic Ball Room until its present name came in 1957 and it featured many prominent African American performers, like Billie Holliday, Ray Charles, James Brown, and Little Richard. In the 1960s, Bill Graham made it the center of the rock music scene, hosting the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Santana, The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. The building was shuttered by the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, until it was retrofitted & reopened a few years later as the headquarters for “Bill Graham Presents.”

21. Mission Dolores (16th & Dolores Streets) – Mision San Francisco de Asis was founded in 1776, and this building was built between 1783 & 1795, making this the oldest existing building in San Francisco. The Mission was formally dedicated by Father Junipero Serra in 1791 as the sixth of the 21-mission chain created during Spanish Imperial rule, each mission located no more than a day’s horse ride away from another. This was the center of commerce & industry for the area until 1835, when the priests abandoned the site. Yankee squatters used it as a hotel, gambling den & until the Catholic Church reclaimed it in 1857. It survived both the 1868 and 1906 quakes & fires.

 The Mission – the four-foot thick walls are made up of 36,000 adobe bricks, the roof beams are original, and the hand-carved altar was brought in from Mexico in 1800.

 The Basilica – when the neighboring church collapsed in the 1906 quake, Mission Dolores erected the current building on the site in 1913, and it was designated a basilica in 1952.

 The Museum – displays in the back shows sacred artifacts & secular objects of the early days, with a cutaway section showing the original adobe bricks.

 The Cemetery – in the back is SF’s oldest cemetery, though now only ¼ of its original size. It was used from the 1780s to the 1890s, but most here died during the Gold Rush.

 Chula Lane – this street & neighboring playground are built over the site of hundreds of unmarked Indian graves from hundreds of years ago. Note how many of the buildings are at a slight angle in their lots, as the street is to the overall grid. This reflects the ad hoc way some distant subdivisions were built prior to stricter street grid regulations & codes. (Alfred Hitchcock filmed part of “Vertigo” here in 1958.)

 Notre Dame Plaza (347 Dolores Street) – in the 1840s, this was the site of a bloody bull ring that featured fights between a bull and a bear – or sometimes Indians that had been made drunk for the occasion. By 1866, the Notre Dame convent & girl’s school was here, until it was dynamited in the 1906 quake & fire to create a firebreak (it worked). The new school was rebuilt on its original foundations, serving as Notre Dame High School until 1981, when it was converted into a senior housing facility (ironically housing some of the same people who had also gone to high school here).

 Valencia Adobe (16th Street between Dolores & Guerrero Streets) – built by Candelario Valencia, a soldier stationed at the Presidio from 1823 & 1833, he lived here with his wife & six children in a 200’ long by 20’ wide (4,000 sq ft.) adobe structure that extended part way into present day 16th Street and was. The building survived in some form until the late 1890s, when it was leveled for street realignments. Nearby Valencia Street is named for Candelario.

 Dolores & 17th Street – Dolores was the firebreak line during the firestorm of 1906. The buildings at the NW and NE corners of this intersection show the result: most of the west side of Dolores is unburned Victorian homes, and the east side is post-fire new flats & apartments.

22. Original Mission Dolores location (Camp & Albion Streets) – this intersection was the NW shore of the Laguna de los Dolores, and the encampment of people who founded Mission Dolores on June 29, 1776 (one week before the US Declaration of Independence was signed). The original makeshift shelter was replaced with a sturdy wood structure a few months later but, to free up the waterfront land for agriculture, the Mission moved to the final site in 1791, 1500 feet away (that’s .28 miles in today’s measurements). The Mission’s first location is marked at this intersection by a monument to the Rammaytush, the first native people of the area more than 1000 years ago.

23. The Armory (1800 Mission Street at 14th Street) – Mission Creek once flowed through San Francisco before it was diverted into the sewer system in the 1800s, and the Armory's basement is the only place where Mission Creek can still be seen today. Built in 1914, this castle-like armory and arsenal was a replacement for the old armory in the Western Addition, which had been destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. It also served as a venue for occasional prizefights, before being closed as an armory in 1976 when the National Guard moved its facilities to . Despite being added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, the building was rarely used during the next 30 years (one exception: filming some interior spaceship scenes for the first “Star Wars” film). The building was finally bought by an internet porn company in 2008 & has been used ever since for producing online-content, especially for the BDSM community.

24. St. Mary’s of the Assumption (1111 Gough Street) – known as New St. Mary’s Cathedral, this 1970 building replaced the original Old St. Mary’s and the original New St. Mary’s buildings that were here until 1962, when they burned down. Despite its resemblance to a washing machine agitator (thus the nickname “Mother Mary Maytag”), the design is actually based on a similar St. Mary’s Church built in Tokyo a few years earlier.

25. St. Joseph’s Hospital (355 Buena Vista Ave East) – built in 1928, this building appeared briefly in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). It has since been converted to condominiums.

26. Interior Greenbelt Trailhead (west of 17th & Stanyan streets) – in the early years, this was the start of a popular horse-riding route from Yerba Buena to the “outside lands” in the west. The Trailhead was purchased by The City in 1957 but the only entrance was blocked for decades to prevent homeless encampments; it was recently reopened again.

27. Alvord Lake Bridge (west of Haight & Stanyan Streets) – this was the first reinforced concrete bridge built in America, built in 1889 by Ernest L. Ransome. The cement face of the bridge was

scored and hammered to resemble sandstone, and the interior features concrete "stalactites" (some of which have actually grown, due to limestone leaching from the concrete).

28. Victoria Theatre (2961 16th Street) – this 480-seat theatre presents locally-produced original plays, live concerts, films, musicals, & other events. Originally built in 1908 as Brown's Opera House & showing vaudeville and motion pictures, it was owned by ancestors of the future California governors Pat Brown and Jerry Brown. In the 1940s and 1950s, the theater was named El Teatro Victoria and showed Spanish language movies. From 1963 to 1978, the theater was a burlesque house called the New Follies Burlesk. It was renovated again & reopened in March 1979 as the Victoria Theatre, and is the oldest operational theatre in San Francisco.

29. Roxie Theatre (3117 16th Street) – built in 1909, it had several names before being permanently named The Roxie (after the one in NYC), and is the oldest continuously operating movie theater in San Francisco. It received the non-marquee neon sign in 1933, but neighborhood decline turned it into a porno house by the 1970s. It was bought & converted to an independent film center in 1976, hosting Frameline and several other local film festivals.

TWIN PEAKS, CASTRO, MISSION, NOE VALLEY & BERNAL HEIGHTS

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In the 1840s, a single 4400-acre rancho covered the Castro, Twin Peaks & Noe Valley areas, gifted to Jose Noe, the last Mexican alcalde (mayor) of SF before it became part of the US. Most of the undeveloped property was sold in 1854 for $90,000 (about $2M today) and plotted out to match the rest of the street grid. The city slowly sold off the land as residential sites, but real growth didn’t start until a cable car line in 1887 connected the Ferry Building to 26th Street, eventually even climbing over the 18% grade of Castro Street at 22nd. This area’s design – a grid of residential streets with one commercial & transit strip running through it – was typical to many later neighborhoods in the city. For almost 70 years, this working-class Irish & German community was known as Eureka Valley.

When WWII ended, the loss of blue-collar industrial jobs in The City & cheaper suburbs outside of it drew families, driving prices here down to bargain levels by the late 1960s. Gay male baby-boomers soon moved in – drawn by the city’s reputation for tolerance & the growing number of white-collar jobs downtown – and restored the run-down Victorian homes, turning the area into the prosperous enclave it is today.

The nearby Bernal Heights area was undeveloped until the 1906 quake when structures on the all- bedrock-hill survived the temblor, and the sparseness of development saved it from the firestorm. Pastureland was quickly developed into workers' homes, to fuel the rebuilding of the city. During World War II, the area’s proximity to the naval shipyards at Hunter’s Point created another population surge, this time mostly African American families. During the Vietnam War, the neighborhood was known as "Red Hill" for the anti-war activists in shared households and collectives who moved in among the working class families. By the 1990s, it was known as “Lesbian Hill” for the high census concentration of lesbian marriages with children in the area, a kind of counterpoint to the gay-male predominance of the Castro district. The north slope is one of SF’s "banana belts", with warmer temperatures coming off the bay & less marine fog.

The Mission district is based around Mission Dolores, one of the original missions in the California chain. The mission was founded in 1791 in this area, chosen for its better weather & soil than elsewhere on the peninsula. But Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821 cut off the Mission’s funding & it fell into disuse, until the Mormons took it over briefly in the 1840s. A wood-planked toll road leading to Yerba Buena Cove (the Financial District now) was built in 1851 & opened the Mission area up for populating during the Gold Rush. It became the area of choice for middle-class professionals in the late 1800s – the original “suburbs” of The City, complete with set-back homes and front & rear gardens. Though the area was seriously damaged during the 1906 quake, Italian & Irish settlers moved in from the far-worse-hit North Beach & South of Market areas. In the 1930s, Latinos moved in as agricultural workers, and then en masse from Mexico & Central America in the 1950s & 1960s; it remains a lively, predominantly Latino area today.

1. Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy (4235 19th Street) – known as Douglass Elementary after 1954, the school was renamed to honor Harvey Milk, a gay rights advocate, local resident and city council member who fought for its survival in the 1970s. It was renamed for him after he was assassinated in 1978.

2. Castro Street –

 Fernando Nelson house (701 Castro Street) – this house was built in 1897 by the most prolific home developer in SF history. He built more than 4000 houses in the Castro, Noe Valley & Mission districts in his lifetime, most of them single-family blue-collar homes, selling from $500 to $2000 each at the time ($12,000 to $51,000 today). This house originally was at the back of the lot but was moved to the front in 1909, with brick garages replacing the stables underneath. Many of the other houses on the surrounding blocks were built by Nelson in the early 1900s.

 Castro Camera (575 Castro Street) – in the 70s, this was Harvey Milk’s camera store, campaign headquarters & home (above the shop). Though he moved away in 1977 – before

being assassinated in 1978 – the building’s historical status is commemorated with a plaque in the sidewalk, with some of his ashes buried underneath.

 Elephant Walk / Harvey’s (18th & Castro Streets) – on May 22, 1979, the morning of what would have been Harvey Milk’s 49th birthday, gays & police clashed here after a verdict of manslaughter was handed down on Dan White, assassin of Milk & then-mayor the year before. The outrage at the lesser verdict led to a march, rally & eventually protests, vandalism & fires at City Hall later that night, in what is now called the “White Night Riots”.

 Castro Theatre (429 Castro Street) – the original theatre opened in 1910 at 479 Castro Street (occupied by Cliff’s Variety Store since 1971) before moving next door in 1922; it was declared a SF historic landmark in 1977. It has an original “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ that accompanied silent films and still works today for special events. The theatre shows movie revivals, film festivals & special live events. In addition to modern digital projection, it can also accurately replicate the silent-movie experience with its customizable frame-rate projector.

 Castro Commons (Castro & 17th streets) – this triangular pinch-point has been formally closed off into a pedestrian area (with the start of the F-line train route cutting through it). It has quickly become the neighborhood’s newest meeting point. Also look for the Pink Triangle Memorial to the 15,000 gay men who died in Nazi concentration camps (lesbians didn’t exist in the minds of the Nazis & thus weren’t rounded up).

 Cable-car turnaround (Market & Castro streets) – the Castro Street cable car line used to run from the Ferry Building, up Market Street, and continued down Castro to 23rd Street. The line was shortened to end at a turntable at this intersection.

 Twin-Peaks Bar (17th, Market & Castro streets) – this was the first gay bar to use floor-to- ceiling glass windows. Prior to this, most gay bars had no windows or signs, and usually used a hidden back entrance to avoid detection.

3. Public space parks –

 Kite Hill Park (Corwin, Seward, Yukon & 19th streets) – built in 1966, this lot was supposed to be a 105-unit apartment building but neighborhood protests & sit-ins kept it open space, leaving this huge park with gorgeous views.

 Seward Street Mini-Park (Seward Street at Acme Alley) – the two concrete slides, inspired by Playland at the Beach and set into the hill, were built in 1973. Slide on a piece of cardboard or plastic – or waxed paper for some super thrills – but wear long pants & keep your arms folded in front of you; concrete friction can burn. (Also visit the Corwin Street community gardens nearby, up Acme Alley.)

4. Iron Alley (Market & Clayton streets) – this steep 2-block street is a walking shortcut through a hilly area that is otherwise only accessible only by car.

5. Twin Peaks (Market Street south to Twin Peaks Blvd.) – a 360 view of The City, from downtown to the outer ‘burbs to the Bay & the coast. Taking Market to Twin Peaks Blvd approaches from the “backside” of the peaks, offering the incredible views more suddenly & impressively. Come back at night for an even better view, especially on a work night – more lights are on in the downtown buildings and it makes for a beautiful scene. But wear a coat; even on the warmest day or night, this can be a very windy, cold place.

6. (1 La Avanzada Drive) – this 981-foot-tall red & white monstrosity was erected in 1973 for $12 million ($60m today) to improve television & radio transmissions in this very hilly city by consolidating all transmission towers into one. For earthquake safety, the center of gravity for the tower is actually 16 feet below ground; there is a maintenance elevator in the western leg. Unlike the Embarcadero Freeway before it, numerous attempts have failed to remove this eyesore, but it is hoped that improved technology will eventually remove the need for this tower.

7. 21st & Guerrero –

 John Daly Home (900 Guerrero Street) – 15 year old John Daly lived in this SF house while he became a successful dairy farmer in San Mateo County, setting up his farm just south of SF’s present-day border. After the 1906 quake, he subdivided his 250 acre farm & sold it off to refugees. In 1911, the area was incorporated & named in his honor: Daly City.

 34 Hill Street – a successful surgeon built the stables, carriage house & servant’s quarters on this lot in 1905. With a house set back from the street & a yard in front, this was one of the few houses that had a private stable (most neighbors parked in commercial stables on Valencia).

8. 22nd & San Jose – San Jose Street is unusual in that it moves south at a slight angle, migrating from the established street grid. It was laid along the former eastern border of the 4443-acre rancho of Jose Noe (namesake of Noe Avenue & Noe Valley). From here, his ranch extended west about 3 miles, encompassing present day Mt. Sutro, Twin Peaks, Diamond Heights and Mt. Davidson.

 Lucca Ravioli Company (1100 Valencia Street) – the business was founded in 1917 in this building and continues today with descendants of the original owners. The well-stocked deli counter easily takes you back to the look of a North Beach store during the late 19th century.

9. Bernal Heights Park (1 Andover Street) – this 433-foot tall hill was once going to be leveled & turned into an airfield. But growth in the undamaged area after the 1906 quake plus shipbuilding at nearby Hunters Point killed that plan, and by the 1970s it was turned over to the Parks Department & preserved as open space with amazing views. Bernal Heights has the most stairway street- blocks in The City – 50 of the more than 670 blocks in The City.

10. Dolores Park (Dolores Street, between 18th & 20th Streets) – these two blocks were originally purchased in 1861 as a cemetery of the nearby Emanu-El congregation. The city bought the land in 1905 to create open space in the crowded Mission district; the cemetery was moved to Colma in 1907, when the rest of the city cemeteries were moved.

 Golden Fire Hydrant (20th & Church Streets) – because it was one of the few that worked during the 1906 catastrophe, this hydrant is ceremoniously repainted every April 18th, the anniversary of the 1906 Quake.

 Hidalgo y Castillo statue (southwest corner) – this statue honors a Mexican priest who is considered the George Washington of Mexico.

 J-train tracks (west side) – the J-train stops at the northwest corner of the park, then follows a passage way carved into the hillside & through the next few blocks of the neighborhood, to permit the original trains to avoid & ascend the steeper parts of the hill.

 Dolores Street landscaping – the palms & landscaping on this street are a result of a 1904 movement by the Outdoor Art League to “adorn” barren major streets. The palms were donated in 1910, and houses were built from 1907 to 1929, with large Victorian buildings with bay windows, giving the street a human-sized feel.

11. Mission Street – this is the longest street in The City at 7.3 miles (followed by Geary, Third & California streets at 5.5 miles each).

12. 19th century planned community – in the 1860s, development had spread beyond downtown as companies bought land & built homes on spec. Originally single-family homes, most of those remaining have been converted into flats.

 The area bounded by Mission, Valencia & 21st & 20th Streets was one of these deliberate developments. The size of the house was dictated by its location relative to the major streets:

o Mission – this street got large lots & Italianate villas selling to upper-middle class families for about $7400 ($145,000 today). None of the buildings have survived.

o Valencia – this was the middle-class housing, with smaller, bay-windowed row houses selling for about $5800 ($114,000 today).

o Lexington & San Carlos – the “interior” streets had the smallest lots & houses, going for about $3500 ($68,000 today). These were often sold to shopkeepers, laborers, tradesmen & teachers. Lexington Street is one of the best-preserved areas of this time & style.

 3243 21st Street – this 1883 two-story home & the two similar homes next door give a good idea of what this entire neighborhood looked like in the late 1800s. It was a middle-class area populated by moderately prosperous shopkeepers, laborers & tradesmen.

 3701 20th Street – a grocery store has been on the ground floor of this building continuously since it was constructed in 1868. In the 1920s, the residential units were used as a dance hall.

13. Mural Project (Clarion Alley, between Valencia & Missions streets) – started in 1992, the collective creates and facilitates other artists creating murals on Clarion Alley and surrounding areas, to reflect the local history & culture.

14. Ohlone Way – the last unpaved street in San Francisco, it is left that way to symbolize the original Native Americans that used to live here 1000 years before the white man.

15. Tank Hill Park (Clayton Street and Twin Peaks Blvd.) – a rocky outcropping defines the north side, which falls in cliffs to houses below. From the south, along Twin Peaks Boulevard, steps and a path lead to the top, offering wonderful views of downtown and the Golden Gate (especially on 4th of July). The top of the hill offers flat and paved areas that date back to a civic waterworks tank that existed on the top of the eponymous hill.

16. (O’Shaughnessy Blvd.) – the park and hollow offer a glimpse of how San Francisco's diverse terrain looked before the intense development in the 19th & 20th centuries.

 In the 1850s, Adolph Sutro purchased 76 acres of the 101-acre canyon. He sold it in 1889 to the Crocker Real Estate Company, who developed the surrounding neighborhoods.

 In 1868, the Giant Powder Company got exclusive license from Alfred Nobel to be the first commercial manufacturer in the US of his new explosive. They built their first manufacturing plant on the south end of the park (near the present-day recreation center). 18 months later, an explosion completely destroyed the entire facility.

 O’Shaughnessy Blvd. was built in 1935 as part of the WPA projects. In 1958, the plan was to widen the street as part of the “Crosstown Freeway”, but protests & opposition luckily killed the “freeways to everywhere” master plan.

17. Jose Noe’s ranch house (24th & Noe streets) – this intersection is approximately where Noe built his ranch house in the mid-1840s. 40 years later he had sold the ranch & it was developed into residential neighborhoods.

18. Noe Valley Public Library (451 Jersey Street) – this 1916 library is one of many funded in the US by steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. From 1893 to 1919, his foundation paid for construction of 1700 libraries in the US (and another 800 in the rest of the world), as long as the town requesting the building agreed to fill it with books & staff it. By 1919, half of all US libraries were Carnegie-funded.

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DOGPATCH, POTRERO HILL, HUNTER’S POINT & BAYVIEW

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The word “portrero” is a Spanish word for pasture, a reference to the area's former use as cattle- grazing land. By the standards of the mid-1800s, Potrero Hill & Dogpatch were not convenient locations to get to. Between the 1860s and 1880s, the marshes at the edge of the bay were slowly drained or filled, and the area was connected to the main part of the city by means of bridges. This permitted development of housing & waterfront-oriented industry, including shipbuilding & repairs, drydocks, warehouses, and steel mills.

Nearby Bayview – Hunters Point had slaughterhouses and their associated industries in the 1800s and shipbuilding in the 1900s to drive drive urbanization of this area. It became home to many piers & factories, also flourishing during WWII as a military shipyard, mostly building Liberty Ships (cheap and quick-to-build cargo ships often torpedoed by German U-boats).

With every able-bodied man having been called up for war, women & minorities were actively recruited nationwide for the essential home-front manufacturing and service jobs. Mexicans and other Latinos came north, blacks came from the racist Deep South, and many Chinese women joined up from Chinatown. So many people came to work there, that the government had to build many of the nearby neighborhoods to house them all (private construction was restricted by the war).

After WWII, heavy industry slowly moved out leaving behind extensive toxic pollution, and leading to economic decline & racial segregation in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1980s continued with urban decay, high unemployment, poverty, crime and disease. In the 1990s, the city built the Muni T-line was built down the center of the district and gentrification began. AT&T Park spurred development of the northern area into lofts, condo farms & artist live-work spaces, helped by growth in Mission Bay, which is filling with bio-tech industries & the newest branch of UCSF.

1. Vermont Avenue at 20th Street – at the top of Potrero Hill, there are some great views….

 Be Steve McQueen – go east on 20th from this intersection to follow Steve McQueen’s airborne race in “Bullitt.”

 The real crookedest street (Vermont Avenue south from 20th) – Lombard Street is crooked, to compensate for the 21% grade of the hill, and it has 8 turns to cover that ground. But the less glamorous Vermont Street is steeper (35% grade) and more crooked (7 turns in less distance than on Lombard).

2. Anchor Company (Mariposa Street at DeHaro Street, east of 101 fwy) – originally founded in 1854 on Pacific between Larkin & Hyde, it relocates to 18th & Hampshire after the 1906 fire. It moves again to 13th & Harrison in 1933, burns down, reopens at 17th & Kansas in 1934, moves to 8th & Brannan in 1960, and finally to its current location in 1979 (the longest period in one place, after the initial location).

3. Murals – Florida Avenue & (both at 25th Street) have the best of the fantastic murals all over this neighborhood.

4. India Basin – now a curious combination of industry, business, and open space, the name India Basin first appeared on a map in 1868, named for the ships from the India Rice Mill Company, which docked there in the 19th century.

5. Candlestick Point –

 It is said the name comes from ship salvaging in the 1850s – ships were set on fire at shore to retrieve the brass fittings & other metals. The flaming masts sinking into the water were said to look like candlesticks.

 There are some city streets that are “underwater” in the bay are at Candlestick Point. Some parcels & streets were mapped out long ago for the shallow parts of the bay that are yet to be filled in. They exist only on the maps at this point.

 Candlestick Park –

o Former home of the Giants, current home of the 49ers.

o It was also the sight of the last live Beatles concert, on August 29, 1966.

o The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (7.1 on the Richter Scale) struck San Francisco minutes before Game 3 of the World Series was to begin at Candlestick between the Giants & the cross-town rival Oakland A’s. The game was delayed for 10 days to check for structural damages.

o For Candlestick's first 10 seasons, the wind blew in from left-center and out toward right- center. When the park was expanded to accommodate the 49ers in 1971, it was thought fully enclosing the park would cut down on the wind. Instead, the wind just swirled from all directions, and was as strong and cold as ever. Though a radiant-heat system was built into the stadium, it never worked properly. As a result, the Giants played more day games than any other team besides the Cubs (who didn’t have stadium lights until 1988).

o The visiting team’s dugout was on the 3rd base (west) side, thus getting more of the cold wind than the Giants, and has no tunnel to their clubhouse (though the Giants dugout does).

SUNSET, WEST PORTAL, EXCELSIOR & VISITACION VALLEY

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These suburbs were part of the post-WWII building boom that lasted into the 1970s. The Sunset district became a cookie-cutter clone of the Richmond district, while West Portal, Excelsior and other southern suburbs were a little more creative with their cookie-cutters. The building apex / nadir came with the “planned community” of Park Merced in the 1950s.

The Forest Hill neighborhood began in 1912 when land originally owned by Adolph Sutro was purchased from his heirs by a private firm to be a private, planned community. The streets in Forest Hill were not built to the city’s specific standards regarding width, grade, etc. – many of the streets are extravagantly landscaped curving lanes – and were not accepted nor maintained by The City until 1978. The homeowners' association still governs remodeling and new construction, and requires membership of all property owners and an annual fee for maintenance of the planted common areas still owned by the association.

1. Grand View Park (14th Avenue & Moraga Street) – the name says it all. You get a grand view of the western part of the city & all of Golden Gate Park. Enter from either 15th Street or 14th Street. This rocky outcropping is part of an ancient seabed & is composed of once-celled organisms. The sand surrounding the rocky knob is Sierra Nevada granite that was eroded by glaciers & washed into the then-ocean, settling here.

2. Mount Davidson (Dalewood & Myra ways) – at 938 feet, this is the highest peak in SF.

 Adolph Sutro bought the mountain in 1881 & named it after George Davidson, charter member of the Sierra Club & his appraiser who mapped the area in 1852. Davidson later bought this land from Sutro and started building the surrounding upscale neighborhoods of Forest Hill, St. Francis Wood, Westwood Park, and Balboa Terrace.

 There is a 103-foot permanent cross at the crest, first erected in 1923 (the concrete version came in 1934 after previous wooden ones kept being burned down). The cross is lit for annual Easter Sunrise Services (which were broadcast nationwide from the 1940s to 1970s).

 In 1991, the ACLU and other organizations sued the City over its ownership of the cross-bearing land, via “separation of church & state” laws. After years of legal battles, the city sold the .38 acres of land the cross occupies to the highest bidder – $26,000 from Council of Armenian America Organizations of Northern California.

3. SF State University – founded in 1899 on Nob Hill as The Normal College, it was forced to move to Buchanan & Haight Streets after the 1906 quake. Being named SF State College in 1935, it moved to its present location near Lake Merced in 1953. 20 years later, it joined the Cal State University system, becoming CSU San Francisco, then renamed SFSU a few years later.

4. SF Zoo – originally called the Fleishhacker Zoo after the creator, it cost $3.5 million ($44 million today) when it opened in 1929 with animals transferred from Golden Gate Park. It was built adjacent to the Fleishhacker Pool, once the largest swimming pool in the United States (1000’ by 350’), a monster holding 6.5 million gallons of filtered & heated sea water, and accommodating 10,000 bathers. The pool was filled in & paved over in 1971 as a parking lot for the zoo. The pool house still stands & is owned by the Zoological Society, but is currently unoccupied. In 2006, the SF Zoo named a soon-to-hatch American bald eagle after comedian Stephen Colbert, generating a publicity and financial windfall for the zoo and the city.

5. Park Merced – started in 1939, this planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low- rise garden apartments was designed for middle-income tenants. Containing 3,221 residences and over 9,000 residents, it was completed in the early 1950s and was first home to many military families returning from WWII and the Korean War. Built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company after success with similar communities in NY & Virginia, Metlife owned and carefully maintained the property until the early 1970s, when Leona Helmsley bought it and the property began to deteriorate. A succession of new owners and management companies since the 1990s have sold off the commercial areas, and sold land to the California State University system, leaving it with only 116 of the original 150 acres. The current owners are doing a major renovation, replacing elevators & mailboxes, remodeling all units, re-landscaping and re-painting everything. In 2011, City supervisors approved the phased demolishing of the low-rise garden apartment buildings in favor of higher density, mid-rise replacements, and reconfiguring some streets.

6. Broderick –Terry Duel (1100 Lake Merced Drive) – on September 13, 1859, corrupt US David Broderick faced off against California Supreme Court Chief Justice David Terry in a duel over an alleged slander. Broderick’s gun had premature discharge, then he was then hit by Terry’s bullet and died 3 days later. There are signs & markers at the site to show where each man stood.

7. Mt. Sutro – originally called Blue Mountain, this is the highest point in the City & it was part of a Mexican Land Grant to Jose de Jesus Noe in 1846. The property was acquired by Adolph Sutro in 1879 & he planted thousands of trees on the relatively bare slopes, hollows or sand dunes & had trails built throughout the property for all the public to enjoy. In 1895, Sutro donated a 13-acre portion of the site overlooking Golden Gate Park, to serve as a campus site for the Affiliated Colleges of the University of California (now the UCSF). Sutro had planned to develop residential neighborhoods on this hill but after his 1898 death, settlement of the estate took almost twenty years before development could start, ending in the 1960s.

8. Cayuga Playground (Cayuga & Naglee Avenues) – city parks worker Demetrio Braceros was assigned this 4-acre park in 1986 with the mission to "change the atmosphere". Despite initially being filled with prostitutes, drug dealers and crime, for 25 years he has created lush vegetation, trails and themed gardens, several observation decks, and over 100 figurines, totem poles and statues, all carved from wood by Braceros himself.

9. Fort Funston (Skyline Blvd. west of Lake Merced) – the federal government acquired this land in 1900 to establish a military facility for coastal land defense. Construction of parade grounds, barracks, and batteries began before WWI but the batteries were declared obsolete shortly after World War II. The Fort was a Nike missile launch site during the 50s, the National Guard moved here in the 70s, and then the fort was deactivated in 1993 & is now part of the GGNRA.

10. El Rey Theater (1970 Ocean Avenue) – built in 1931, this was one of the original “destination theaters” built to anchor a local retail district. In 1969, one of the theatre’s storefronts housed the first Gap clothing store, and the theatre hosted the 1977 Hookers Film Festival before being converted for The Voice of Pentecost Church, which has been here ever since.

11. – meant to complement the nearby apartment development that could house 3,500 people, Stonestown Shopping Center was built as a neighborhood mall in 1952 by the Stoneson brothers & included a grocery store, a bakery, and movie theaters. In 1987, the mall was sold & renovated, enclosing it with a second story of stores & a food court, a glass ceiling and marble floors, plus 350 new underground parking spaces; it was renamed Stonestown Galleria.

12. Laguna Honda Reservoir – in 1865, the Spring Valley Water Works built a 13-mile long pipeline (made of redwood) to transport drinking water from Pilarcitos Canyon (south, near San Mateo) to this reservoir. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed the pipeline; the lake & surrounding land are now managed by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

13. McCoppin Square – named after Frank McCoppin, the first Irish-born (and son-in-law of former mayor James Van Ness). After emigrating to SF in 1853, he served as supervisor of the Market Street Railway, on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was elected mayor in 1867, and helped approve the master plan for Golden Gate Park. The overachiever later served 2 terms in the California Senate, and as Postmaster of San Francisco until his death 1897.

14. Lake Merced – once owned by first Alcalde (mayor) of Yerba Buena & flowing directly into the ocean, Lake Merced served as the city's main reservoir & originally planned to expand into land that is now the San Francisco State University campus. By 1868, the Spring Valley Water Company had bought the water rights for the Lake and surrounding watershed, creating a monopoly on San

Francisco's fresh water (until the City authorized the 1908 construction of the Hetch Hetchy dam). Spring Valley eventually sold off some of the land around Lake Merced, making way for the public & private golf courses that exist today. In 1940, Metropolitan Life bought the last of Spring Valley's land to build the Park Merced apartment complex (see #5 above).

15. Laguna Honda Hospital – this city-owned hospital has been a civic icon since 1866, when it opened as an alms house to care for people in need. It provided important care during a smallpox epidemic in 1868, served as a place of refuge for people displaced by the 1906 earthquake and fire, and now provides one of the only skilled nursing services in the US for people with HIV and AIDS. It is being completely overhauled, with the original building being converted to administrative offices, and several new earthquake-safe buildings being added.

THE OUTSIDE LANDS OF SAN FRANCISCO

ALCATRAZ ISLAND

Alcatraz was once the largest of a chain of 5 islands that arced southeast toward the peninsula; the other 4 were long-ago destroyed as part of several shipping channel expansions. This remaining island has served as a lighthouse, military fortification, military prison & federal prison, before becoming today’s national park & national historic site.

A commander from the Spanish Navy named this rock Isla de los Alcatraces or “Pelican Island”, referring to the inhabitants that were here when he arrived. Later, the island was part of the California territory controlled by the Americans, after the Mexican-American War in 1846. The start of the Gold Rush in 1849 prompted President Millard Fillmore to designate the island a US military site, building a fort & lighthouse on the island in 1851. Guns were added in 1859, in anticipation of the coming Civil War, creating the Union Army’s first military prison. By 1866, it was part of a major western armory made up of fortifications ringing the bay entrance, and had 105 cannons pointing out from the stone fortress that covered the island.

The first war prisoners arrived during the Civil War, and the island was eventually repurposed from defense to detention in the 1870s, expanding again during the Spanish-American War in the late 1890s. Designation as a federal military prison in 1907 created further building through 1912. In 1933, it was changed from a military to civilian maximum-security prison & became home to such criminals as Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, and the famous “Birdman of Alcatraz.” It was closed in 1963, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy discovered the cost of maintaining prisoners there equaled that of staying at NYC’s Waldorf Astoria. The island finally became a national recreation area in 1972, receiving landmark designation in 1976.

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ANGEL ISLAND

Located north of The City and east of Marin / Sausalito, Angel Island is a protected state park. Accessible only by ferry from SF, Sausalito or Tiburon, the 1.2 square mile island has a 5 mile perimeter road, and lots of unpaved walking, biking & hiking trails. Bike, Segway & tram tours are offered, and there are excellent camping & picnicking sites.

The island’s past residents include the Coastal Miwok Indians who hunted & fished from here, and then the Spanish and the Mexicans, when the Bay Area was still the northern tip of Mexico. Then called “Wood Island” & covered with oak & other trees, the island was stripped bare during Gold Rush-era construction. The US Navy took possession of the Island in the mid-1800s, building several camps & using the island as a depot for discharging troops to & from the Civil War, Spanish-American War, and both World Wars (it was also a POW camp for Germans & Japanese during WWII).

In 1946, after more than 100 years of service, the military bases were decommissioned and the entire island was turned into a state park in 1954.

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1. Ayala Cove – this cove is named after the commander of the first Spanish vessel to reach this area in 1775. The cove was once a quarantine station where foreign ships were fumigated & diseased sailors isolated.

2. Immigration Station (North Garrison) – often called “Ellis Island of the West”, from 1910 to 1940 most of the 175,000 Chinese immigrants that entered the US came through here. Discriminatory laws of the time often subjected them to medical exams, interrogations, and even internment for up to 2 years before they were allowed to move to the mainland. A 1940 fire permanently moved the immigration processing to SF. The facilities have recently been renovated & offer guided tours.

3. Fort McDowell (East Garrison) – a military garrison from 1898 until 1946, Ft. McDowell was the biggest induction center in the US during WWII for shipping soldiers off to the Pacific Theatre. The deserted buildings – barracks, hospital & officers’ quarters – still stand & can be explored. (Nearby Quarry Beach is the most wind-protected swimming spot on the island.)

4. Nike Missile Site – from the mid-1950s to 1962, this location held a Nike missile pointed at Russia.

5. Camp Reynolds (West Garrison) – one of the best preservations of Civil War-era buildings, the brick hospital, chapel, mule barn & parade grounds were built by the Army in 1863 & still stand.

6. Mt. Livermore – at 788 feet above sea level, this is the highest point on the island & most wind- swept. It has spectacular 360-degree views of the entire bay & several of the bridges.

YERBA BUENA ISLAND & TREASURE ISLAND

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A. Yerba Buena Island – the rocky outcropping in the middle of the bay, now the center anchor of the Bay Bridge, has been known as Sea Bird Island, Goat Island, and finally Yerba Buena Island.

 The island was first proposed as a US military base during the Civil War, but Camp Yerba Buena Island wasn’t completed until 1875, 10 years after the war ended. The camp consisted primarily of the fog signal & lighthouse which remain today.

 In 1898, the first US Naval Training Station on the Pacific Coast was added on the northeast side of the island. The white Classic Revival officers’ residences were built around 1900.

 The training station closed in the 1920s, in preparation for the island becoming the anchor for the new Bay Bridge in the 1930s.

B. Treasure Island – conspicuously attached to Yerba Buena Island is a huge, flat, and entirely man- made island that was created for the 1939 World’s Fair (officially called The Golden Gate International Exposition, since NYC wanted the official 1939 “World’s Fair” name).

 Architects studied various places to hold the expo but excluded Golden Gate Park, China Basin, Lake Merced & Candlestick Point because they were too far away, disgusting and/or fragile. They settled on the 735 acre underwater reef lying just north of Yerba Buena Island, which they would raise above sea-level with in-fill

 The new island was named “Treasure Island” after the story by Robert Louis Stevenson, who had lived in SF from 1879-80. It was the winning suggestion in a “name the island” contest, based on the thought that the land being reclaimed was all washed down from the treasure-filled gold & silver mines of the Sierras.

 300,000 tons of boulders were brought in to create the 3-mile-diameter rim of the island, and it took another 19 months to reclaim the 535 acres from the bay. The shoal was only 2 to 5 feet below sea level, and dredging other nearby shoals helped lower those dangerous sand bars and provide the 25 million cubic yards of fill needed. Because the dirt was too salty to sustain plant life, they drilled 300 holes 25-feet deep & pumped out the brine. They then covered the island with tons of rich Sacramento delta topsoil & planted tens of thousands of trees & plants.

 The north end was expected to subside more than the rest of the island, so no buildings were put up there; it was used as a parking lot for up to 12,000 vehicles. Except for the Administration Building & hangars, all other buildings were deliberately temporary, made of wood covered with burlap & stucco, and to be torn down after the fair.

 Because of the strong west winds that blow daily through the Golden Gate, the west end was constructed with 80-foot-high buildings to block the cold winds from the rest of the island. PanAm’s “flying boats” (call Clipper Service) had started in 1935, based out of San Francisco, and when the expo opened in 1939, five additional planes were put into service at air-docks in the southern cove, near Yerba Buena Island.

 Though 17 million people visited the Expo during its 18-month lifespan, by 1940, WWII had started & European countries were falling quickly to the Nazis. Suddenly the fair was out of step with reality as attendance fell, prices were cut, employees fired, and exhibits & entertainment scaled back. Having never made a profit or came close to its attendance expectations, it closed in September 1940 with more than $4 million in debt ($63 million today).

 After the Expo, the flat expanse was supposed to be scraped clean & converted to a public airport. But the Navy liked the strategic location so much they decided in 1942 to build a base there instead. In exchange, they gave the City the 5,000 acres under the current SFO international airport (even though it’s technically outside the San Francisco city limits).

 After 55 years of use, the TI naval base was decommissioned and sold to the city for $55 million; the land is now being redeveloped as San Francisco’s newest residential neighborhood. By 2025, Treasure Island will have 8000 housing units in 3 tall towers & many smaller buildings, plus a new ferry terminal, all on the south & west sides of the island. The rest of the island will be turned into public open space, wetlands & a working farm. In the meantime, the island is a curious expanse of occupied & unoccupied homes, businesses & barren no-man’s lands.

1. Administration Building (1 Avenue of the Palms) – this crescent-shaped Art Deco building was the administrative building for the Golden Gate International Expo in 1939-40. Note the glass control tower on the top of the building – a reminder that this island was intended to be an airport after the expo was over. The complex has doubled for Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport in “Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade”, as well as being in many other movie & TV shows, including Nash Bridges, Copycat, Rent & The Parent Trap.

2. Clipper Cove – the marina was the original home for the PanAm “China Clipper” service – flying boats / floating airplanes – starting during the Golden Gate Expo in 1939.

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THE WORLD NORTH OF SAN FRANCISCO

 Sausalito – cute for brunch & great views of SF.

 Mill Valley – Dr. BJ Hunicutt from M*A*S*H lived here. Really.

 Muir Woods – get a great Great Redwoods experience without going too far north to where most of the redwoods actually are.

 Muir Beach –

 Stinson Beach –

 SF-88 (Marin Headlands across GG bridge) – this is a former Nike Missile launch site at Fort Barry that opened in 1954 and closed 20 years later but was not demolished. It is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and is open to visitors.

 Mount Tamalpais –

THE WORLD SOUTH OF SAN FRANCISCO

 South San Francisco – the Industrial City, or so they claim.

 Daly City – In post-WWII, many SF residents were moving further from the crowded city core & out toward the popular new fad called “the suburbs”. In 1945, Henry Doelger bought up 1350 acres south of The City that had sand dunes, cabbage fields & hog farms. He very quickly built a tract- home community of Westlake; it was later incorporated with other areas south of it into Daly City (named after the former SF mayor). The city was later the inspiration for the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds (“ticky-tacky little boxes, all the same.”)

 San Bruno – this is a…um…city below South SF

 Brisbane – the rich city

 Fairmont / Pacifica – the scenic town

o Sam’s Castle (Sharp Park, just off Highway 1) – built in the aftermath of the 1906 quake, this four-story, 24-room Gothic monolith has alternately been a private home, an abortion clinic run by a thief, a speakeasy & brothel, a Red Cross fundraising location, a Coast Guard outpost, and eventually an abandoned mess. And that was just over the first 50 years. Since 1959, it has been privately owned by a foundation that is finishing restoring it to its full odd glory, full of bric- a-brac that the strange owner Sam Mazza collected, mostly from SF’s old theatres, where he worked as a painter.

 Colma – In 1902, SF cemeteries were closed to new burials and in 1907 they were ordered to be moved outside city limits. The city of Colma grew up around all these cemeteries, ending up with only 1,500 living residents but about 1.5 million dead ones spread across 17 graveyards (including one for pets). Numerous famous people are buried amongst them:

 Etienne Guittard – chocolate maker  Levi Strauss – jeans-maker  William Randolph Hearst – newspaper publisher  Andrew Hallidie – cable car inventor  Lefty O’Doul – baseball great  Joe DiMaggio – baseball great  A.P. Giannini – founder of Bank of America  George Moscone – assassinated mayor of SF  Vince Guaraldi – composer of the “Peanuts” theme  – see the Tombstone gunslinger’s tombstone

THE REFERENCES

 Wikipedia   Rand Richards 