CALIFORNIA TRAVEL DISCOUNT PACKAGE AND
COMPLETE TOURIST INFORMATION
 

EXPLORE SAN FRANCISCO

Its 24 square blocks smack in the middle of San Francisco make up the second-largest Chinese community outside Asia. Almost entirely autonomous, with its own schools, banks and newspapers, it has its roots in the migration of Chinese laborers to the city after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the arrival of Chinese sailors keen to benefit from the Gold Rush. The city didn't extend much of a welcome: they were met by a tide of vicious racial attacks and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Nowadays they have been joined by Vietnamese, Koreans, Thais and Laotians: by day the area seethes with activity, by night it's a blaze of neon. Overcrowding is compounded by a brisk tourist trade - sadly, however, Chinatown boasts some of the tackiest stores and facades in the city, making it more similar to shopping in a bad part of Hong Kong than in Beijing. Indeed, Chinese tourists are often disappointed in the neighborhood's disorder, and the new, some say true, Chinese neighborhood is in the Richmond district along Clement Street.

Gold ornamented portals and brightly painted balconies sit above the souvenir shops and restaurants of narrow Grant Avenue ; pass under the entrance arch at Bush Street to be met by an assault of plastic Buddhas, cloisonné"health balls," noisemakers and chirping mechanical crickets in every doorway. Old St Mary's Church , on Grant and California, was one of the few San Francisco buildings to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire, and they have a good photo display of the damage to the city in the entranceway of the beautiful church.

Parallel to Grant Avenue, Stockton Street is crammed with exotic fish and produce markets, bakeries and herbalists. Inside the Ellison Herb Shop at no. 805 Stockton St, Chinatown's best-stocked herbal pharmacy, you'll find clerks filling orders the ancient Chinese way - with hand-held scales and abacuses - from drug cases filled with dried bark, roots, sharks' fins, cicadas, ginseng and other staples. Here, between Grant and Stockton, jumbled alleys hold the most worthwhile stops in the area. The best of these is Waverly Place, a two-block corridor of brightly painted balconies that was lined with brothels before the 1906 catastrophe and now home to three opulent but skillfully hidden temples (nos. 109, 125 and 146), their interiors a riot of black, gold and vermilion, still in use and open to visitors. North of Waverly Place, between Jackson and Washington streets, Ross Alley features the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company , no. 56, specializing in X-rated fortunes, and, next door, a barber who will cut your hair to resemble that of any Hollywood star's.

Some of the hundred-plus restaurants are historical landmarks in themselves. Sam Wo , at 813 Washington St, is a cheap and churlish ex-haunt of the Beats where Gary Snyder taught Jack Kerouac to eat with chopsticks and had them both thrown out with his loud and passionate interpretation of Zen poetry.

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

Once cut off from the rest of San Francisco by the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway - damaged in the 1989 earthquake and finally torn down in 1991 - the Ferry Building , at the foot of Market Street, was modeled on the cathedral tower in Seville, Spain. Before the bridges were built in the 1930s it was the arrival point for fifty thousand cross-bay commuters daily. A few ferries still dock here, but the characterless office units inside do little to suggest its former importance. The area in front of the Ferry Building is the site of the much-loved Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market (Tues 11am-3pm, Sat 8am-1.30pm), a great place to buy or merely gawk at the colorful local produce.

Since the freeway was pulled down, the area around it, known as The Embarcadero , has experienced a dramatic renaissance - from an area of charmless office blocks into a swanky waterfront district with the city's most fashionable restaurants and hotels springing up beside palm trees and views of the bay.

From the vast and unimaginative Embarcadero Center shopping mall and the fountains of Justin Herman Plaza at the foot of Market it's a few blocks down to Montgomery Street , where the grand pillared entrances and banking halls of the post-1906 earthquake buildings era jostle for attention with a mixed bag of modern towers. For a hands-on grasp of modern finance, the World of Economics Gallery in the Federal Reserve Bank , 101 Market St (Mon-Fri 9am-6pm), is unbeatable: computer games allow you to engineer your own inflationary disasters, while exhibits detail recent scandals and triumphs. The Wells Fargo History Museum , 420 Montgomery St (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm; free), traces the far-from-slick origins of San Francisco's big money, right from the days of the Gold Rush, with mining equipment, gold nuggets, photographs, and a genuine retired stagecoach. Tucked discreetly in a nondescript building at 121 Steuart St is the little-known Jewish Museum San Francisco ($5, free first Mon of month and Thurs 6-8pm; Sun-Wed 11am-5pm, Thurs 11am-8pm), which, far from being the somber trudge through history its name suggests, has an impressive collection of contemporary work by Jewish artists. The museum will be moving to a new building in Yerba Buena Gardens in 2003.

San Francisco rarely tries to pass off pure, unabashed commercialism as a worthy tourist attraction, but with Fisherman's Wharf and the nearby waterfront district, it makes an exception.

An inventive use of statistics allows the area to proclaim itself the most-visited tourist attraction in the entire country; in fact, this crowded and hideous ensemble of waterfront kitsch and fast-food stands makes a sad and rather misleading introduction to the city. It may be hard to believe, but this was once a genuine fishing port; the few fishing vessels that can still afford the exorbitant mooring charges are usually finished by early morning and get out before the tourists arrive. The shops and bars here are among the most overpriced in the city, and crowd-weary families do little to add to the ambience.

If you wish to get out on the water, 60-minute bay cruises depart several times a day from piers 39 and 41. Better instead to head to the museums of Fort Mason and on to the expanse of green parkland along the Marina district , affording excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge , perhaps the best-loved symbol of San Francisco, are visible from almost every high point in the city. The bridge, which spans 4200ft, had taken only 52 months to design and build when it was opened in 1937. Some quarter of a million people turned up for a sunrise party to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 1987; the winds were strong and the bridge buckled, but fortunately did not break. Driving across is a real thrill, racing under the towers, while the half-hour walk across allows you to take in its enormous size and absorb the views. It's also a favorite with the suicidal - in a typical year dozens jump to their deaths. Those jumping are said to hit the water at a speedy 80mph - few have survived the leap.

The Fort Point National Historic Site beneath the bridge gives a good sense of the place as the westernmost outpost of the nation. This brick fortress, built in the 1850s, has a dramatic site, the surf pounding away beneath the great span of the bridge high above - a view made famous by Kim Novak's suicide attempt in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo . A small museum (Thurs-Mon 10am-5pm; free) inside the fort displays some rusty old cannons and artillery.

San Francisco's best waters are to be found at the beaches at the tip of the peninsula, but beach culture doesn't exist here the way it does in southern California. Dangerous riptides and excruciatingly cold water make it impossible to swim with any confidence, and nude sunbathing is about as adventurous as things get.

Inland, Lincoln Park , at 34th Avenue and Clement Street, primarily an unusually dramatic golf course, offers striking views of the Marin headlands and is home to the remote, white-pillared California Palace of the Legion of Honor ($8, $2.50 off with Muni transfer, free every Tues, surcharge for special exhibitions; daily except Mon 9.30am-5pm; ). Re-opened in late 1995 after extensive renovation, the museum is arguably San Francisco's best and most staggeringly majestic building. Its isolated, windswept location, high on a bluff overlooking the ocean, is unsurpassably romantic, and deters the hordes that swarm the MoMA and the museums in the park. The emphasis is on fine art, with the Renaissance represented by the works of Titian and El Greco, hung in spacious, high-ceilinged, well-lit marble halls. Some great canvases by Rembrandt and Hals, as well as Rubens' magnificent Tribute Money , are highlights of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish collection. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist galleries contain works by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne. Several galleries are devoted to Rodin sculptures - bronze, porcelain and stone pieces including The Athlete, Fugit Amor and a small cast of The Kiss . A highlight of the museum, The Thinker , greets visitors in the museum's front courtyard.

In a city with an abundance of green space, Golden Gate Park stands out as not just the largest, but also the most beautiful, and safest, of its parks. Spreading three miles or so west from the Haight as far as the Pacific, it was constructed on what was then an area of wild sand dunes, buffeted by the spray from the ocean. Despite the throngs of joggers, polo players, roller-skaters, cyclists and strollers, it never seems to get overcrowded and you can always find a spot to be alone.

Of the park's several museums, two are under construction at the time of writing. The M.H. de Young Museum , with its large and diverse range of painting and sculpture, is in the midst of a massive rehaul and not due to reopen until 2005. The similarly under-construction Asian Art Museum is moving locations entirely, within the old Main Library space, next to the new Main Library in the Civic Center district. It is considered one of the largest and most impressive museums devoted only to Asian art in the Western Hemisphere. (You can check on the status of its development at ) The California Academy of Sciences ($8.50, $2.50 discount with Muni transfer, free first Wed of month; summer daily 9am-6pm; rest of year daily 10am-5pm; ) opposite is a good place to amuse restless children, with its 30ft dinosaur skeleton, life-size replicas of elephant seals and other California wildlife, and live colony of black-footed penguins. Over 6,000 specimens of aquatic life can be viewed in its Steinhart Aquarium (admission included in museum ticket; daily 10am-5pm), the best are the alligators and other reptiles lurking in a simulated swamp. Sky shows in its Morrison Planetarium cost $2.50 more. Slightly to the west is the Japanese Tea Garden ($3.50; daily 9am-6.30pm), dominated by a massive bronze Buddha. Bridges, footpaths, pools filled with carp, bonsai and cherry trees lend a peaceful feel. Busloads of tourists pour in; by far the best idea is to get here early for a breakfast of tea and fortune cookies in the tea house ($3.50 anytime).

The beautiful National AIDS Memorial Grove is in the eastern end of the park, near the tennis courts. Inaugurated in 1991, it is a pleasant and thought-provoking place to stroll. Tours take place Thursdays from 9.30am to 12.30pm (tel 415/750-8340, ).

The fame of Haight-Ashbury , two miles west of downtown San Francisco, far outstrips its size. No more than eight blocks in length, centered around the junction of Haight and Ashbury streets, "The Haight" was a run-down Victorian neighborhood until it transmogrified into the epitome of cool during the 1960s. Since then the area has become gentrified, but it retains a collection of radical bookstores, laid-back cafés, record stores and secondhand clothing emporia, not to mention a collection of characters still flying the counterculture's rather worn flag.

All there is to do in the Haight today is to stroll around what is one of the best areas in town to shop . It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to update your record collection, dress yourself up and blow money on books and beer. The eastern end of Haight Street, around the crossing with Fillmore Street, is the funkiest corner of the district. Known as the Lower Haight , and for decades a primarily black neighborhood, it was reborn a few years ago - thanks to low rents - as a stomping ground for young hipsters. Though its trend appeal has since been surpassed by the Mission, it remains home to a small glut of DJ shops and a boisterous Brit-heavy population of club kids.

A century or so ago, the eastern flank of the Financial District formed part of the Barbary Coast , an area of land that grew due to the hundreds of ships that lay abandoned by sailors heading for the Gold Rush. Enterprising San Franciscans used the dry ships as hotels, bars and stores. This then-rough-and-tumble waterfront district gave The City an unsavory reputation as Baghdad by the Bay , packed as it was with saloons and brothels where hapless young males were given Mickey Finns and shanghaied into involuntary servitude on merchant ships. William Randolph Hearst's Examiner lobbied frantically to shut down the quarter, resulting in a 1917 California law prohibiting prostitution. Remains of the cradle of San Francisco can be seen in the Jackson Square Historic District , not an actual square but an area bordered by Washington, Columbus, Sansome and Pacific streets.

The landmark Transamerica Pyramid , at the foot of diagonal Columbus Avenue and Washington, serves as a useful dividing point between the various downtown areas. The 48-story structure, capped by a colossal 212ft hollow spire, arose amid a city-planning furor that earned it the name of "Pereira's Prick," after its LA-based architect William Pereira. Since then it's been indisputably the signature of San Francisco's skyline, in these days of plump speculative buildings, a rare example of architecture that sacrifices the pragmatic for the symbolic. From a real-estate perspective, the building is a nightmare - as the structure tapers upward, the floors that fetch the highest rents diminish in area - the pyramid would be far more valuable upside down. Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and William Randolph Hearst all rented office space in the Montgomery Block that originally stood on this site, and regularly hung around the notorious Bank Exchange bar within. Legend also has it that Sun Yat-sen - whose statue is in Chinatown, three blocks away - wrote the Chinese constitution and orchestrated the successful overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty from his second-floor office here. Next door is the pleasant Transamerica Redwood Park with fountains perfect for an outdoor lunch. Across the street from the park, Hotaling Place 's winding brickwork and antique lamps recall the past, and some original redbrick buildings can be seen, now serving as office space for upscale design firms. Heading west on Jackson or Pacific streets from the area leads you back to Columbus and the green-copper siding of the Columbus Tower , 906 Kearney, the de facto beginning of North Beach. Director and San Francisco native Francis Ford Coppola owns the building, and his Neibaum-Coppola Café on the ground floor serves sandwiches, pasta and his wine from the nearby vineyards.

From Nob Hill, looking down upon the business wards of the city, we can decry a building with a little belfry, and that is the stock exchange, the heart of San Francisco; a great pump we might call it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarter to the pockets of the millionaires on the hill .
- Robert Louis Stevenson

If the Financial District is representative of new money in the city, the posh hotels and masonic institutions of Nob Hill exemplify San Francisco's old wealth; it is, as Joan Didion wrote, "the symbolic nexus of all old California money and power." Once you've made the stiff climb up (or taken the California cable car), there are very few real sights as such, but nosing around is pleasant enough, taking in the aura of luxury and enjoying the views over the city and beyond.

The area became known as Nob Hill after the robber-baron industrialists who came to live here while running the Central Pacific Railroad. Grace Cathedral here is one of the biggest hunks of sham-Gothic architecture in the US. Construction began soon after the 1906 earthquake, but most of it was built, of faintly disguised reinforced concrete, in the early Sixties. The entrance is adorned with faithful replicas of the fifteenth-century Ghiberti doors of the Florence Baptistry. A block east, be sure to go inside the Fairmont Hotel , 950 Mason St, to get a sense of the opulence that once ruled the hill. Take its elevators up for a great view of the city. Across from the Fairmont , the brownstone of the Pacific Union Club was the only original Nob Hill structure left standing after the 1906 fire.

Resting in the hollow between Russian and Telegraph hills, and split by Columbus Avenue, North Beach likes to think of itself as the happening district of San Francisco. It has been a focal point for anyone vaguely alternative ever since the City Lights Bookstore opened in 1953. The first paperback bookstore in the US stands amid the flashing neon and sleazy clubs of Columbus Avenue at Broadway, open until midnight seven days a week, and is still owned by poet and novelist Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The Beat Generation made this the literary capital of America, achieving overnight notoriety when charges of obscenity were leveled at Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl in 1957, which he first performed over in Cow Hollow at 3119 Fillmore St. It was the hedonistic antics of the Beats, as much as their literary merits, that struck a chord, and North Beach came to symbolize a wild and subversive lifestyle. The roadtrips and riotous partying, the drug-taking and embrace of eastern religions were emulated nationwide; tourists poured into North Beach for "Beatnik Tours."

Next to the bookstore, Vesuvio's , an old North Beach bar where the likes of Dylan Thomas and Kerouac would get loaded, remains a haven for the lesser-knowns to pontificate on the state of the arts. At the crossroads of Columbus and Broadway , poetry meets porn in a raucous assembly of strip joints, coffee houses and drag queens. Most famous, the Condor Club was where Carol Doda's revealing of her silicone-implanted breasts started the topless waitress phenomenon. Now reincarnated as the (fully-clothed) Condor Sports Bar , the landmark site still preserves her nipples, once immortalized in neon above the door, in its museum, along with photos and clippings from the Condor Club 's heyday.

As you continue north on Columbus Avenue, you enter the heart of the old Italian neighborhood , an enclave of narrow streets and leafy enclosures. Explorations lead to small landmarks like the Café Trieste , where the jukebox blasts out opera classics to a heavy-duty art crowd, toying with cappuccinos and browsing slim volumes of poetry. From Columbus's Washington Square , head up the very steep steps on Filbert Street to reach Telegraph Hill and the Coit Tower , featuring grand views of the city and beyond.

To the west of Columbus, Russian Hill was named for Russian sailors who died here in the early 1800s. In the summer, there's always a long line of cars waiting to drive down the tight curves of Lombard Street . Surrounded by palatial dwellings and herbaceous borders, Lombard is an especially thrilling drive at night, when the tourists leave and the city lights twinkle below. Even if you're without a car, the journey up here is worth it for a visit to the San Francisco Art Institute , 800 Chestnut St (free; daily 8am-9pm), the oldest art school in the west, where the Diego Rivera Gallery has an outstanding mural created by the painter in 1931. Walking south from the institute for four blocks on Jones Street, you'll find Macondray Lane , a pedestrian-only "street" thought to be one of the inspirations for Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City .

While parts of San Francisco can almost seem to be an urban utopia, the adjoining districts of the Tenderloin and Civic Center reveal harsher realities and are a gritty reminder that not everybody has it so easy. However, South of Market (aka SoMa) has, like the Embarcadero, taken a previously unimaginable upswing. A new entertainment complex surrounding Yerba Buena Gardens - anchored by the high and low culture appeals of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Sony's Metreon mall - has transformed it from a bleak post-industrial wasteland into a thriving extension of the crowded downtown area.

The majestic federal and municipal buildings of Civic Center , squashed between the Tenderloin and SoMa, can't help but look strangely out of sync, both with their immediate neighbors and with San Francisco as a whole. Their grand Beaux Arts style is at odds with the quirky wooden architecture of the rest of the city. At night, when the ritzy War Memorial Opera House , 301 Van Ness Ave, and the aquarium-like Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall , Grove Street at Van Ness Avenue, swarm with well-heeled patrons of the ballet, opera and symphony, it all looks distinctly more impressive than by day.

It was at the huge, green-domed City Hall , on the northern edge of the dismal United Nations Plaza , that Mayor George Moscone and gay Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated in 1978. The recently restored gold plate dome is an impressive relic of Gold Rush-era largess.

Formerly one of San Francisco's least desirable neighborhoods, SoMa , the district South of Market, has been enjoying a renaissance since the 1980s. It's reminiscent in a way of New York's SoHo several years ago: many of its abandoned warehouses have been converted into studio spaces and art galleries, and the neighborhood is now home to artists, musicians, hep-cat entertainers and trendy restaurants. This may well be short-lived however: SoMa is a prime piece of central real estate, and during the dot.com heyday, the bulldozers moved in and many artists were squeezed out. It remains to be seen which direction the district will go as the dot.com revolution grinds to a halt. Still, the new home of the SF Museum of Modern Art , 151 Third St ($10, free first Tues of month; Mon, Tues & Fri-Sun 11am-6pm, Thurs 11am-9pm, open an hour earlier May-Sept), opened here in January 1995. Major works include paintings by Jackson Pollock, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The temporary exhibitions are the museum's strongest suit; with newly acquired financial muscle it can snap up the better touring works. However, the allegation that the building, designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, is far more beautiful than anything inside, is pretty hard to dispute - flooded with natural light from a soaring, truncated, cylindrical skylight, it's a sight to behold.

Opposite the museum is the other totem of civic pride, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ($6, free first Tues of month; daily except Mon 11am-6pm, Thurs-Fri 11am-8pm), bounded by Third and Fourth streets, Mission and Folsom. A spectacular $44 million project featuring a theater and three galleries, the center's best feature is its parklike setting - five and a half acres of lovely gardens with a 50ft Sierra granite waterfall memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. Dominating the Gardens' south side is the Sony Metreon , a combination movie theater and multimedia entertainment mall.

An incredible addition to the city's waterfront is Pac Bell Park , down Third Street at King, home to the San Francisco Giants . The faux-old brick building offers superb views of the bay beyond the outfield fences, some of the finest food to ever grace a ballpark, as well as the chance to see the odd home run splash into the bay.

Above all, SoMa is the nucleus of clubland , where the city's wildlife is at its best. Folsom Street was until recently a major gay strip, the center for much lewder goings-on than the Castro; in recent years the mix has become pretty diverse, though never tame.

Progressive and celebratory, but also increasingly comfortable and wealthy, the Castro is the city's gay capital, providing a barometer for the state of the grown-up and sobered gay scene. Some people insist that this is still the wildest place in town, others reckon it's a shadow of its former self; all agree that things are not the same as ten or even five years ago, when a walk down the Castro would have had you gaping at the revelry. Most of the same bars and hangouts still stand, but these days they're host to an altogether different and more conservative breed. Cute shops and restaurants lend a young professional feel to the place. A visit to the district is a must if you're to get any idea of just what San Francisco is all about, though in terms of visible street life, the few blocks around Castro and Market streets contain about all there is to see.

Harvey Milk Plaza , by the Castro Muni station, is dedicated to the assassinated gay supervisor (or councilor), who owned a camera store in the Castro. The man who shot Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Dan White, was a disgruntled ex-supervisor who resigned in protest at their liberal policies. At the trial, his plea of temporary insanity caused by harmful additives in his fast food - the "Twinkie defense" - won him a sentence of five years' imprisonment for manslaughter. The gay community reacted angrily; the riots that followed were among the most violent San Francisco has ever witnessed, with protesters marching into City Hall, burning police cars as they went.

Before heading down Castro Street into the heart of the neighborhood, take a short walk to the former location of the Names Project at 2363A Market St, which sponsored the creation of " The Quilt " - a gargantuan blanket in which each panel measures six feet by three feet (the size of a grave site) and bears the name of a person lost to AIDS. Made by lovers, friends and families, the panels are stitched together and regularly tour the country and the world; it has been spread on the Mall in Washington, DC several times to dramatize the epidemic. The 54-ton Quilt and Names Project Foundation moved to a permanent home in Atlanta in 2001; San Francisco will continue to be recognized as the birthplace of the Quilt and efforts are underway to come up with the best way to mark the project's local history.

The junction of Castro and 18th Street , known as the "gayest four corners of the earth," marks the Castro's center, cluttered with bookstores, clothing stores, cafés and bars. The side streets offer a slightly more exclusive fare of exotic delicatessens, fine wines and fancy florists, and enticingly leafy residential territory.

Vibrant, hip and ethnically mixed, the Mission is easily San Francisco's funkiest neighborhood. A mile or so south of downtown, it is also the warmest, eluding the summer fogs. As the traditional first stop for immigrants, the Mission serves as a microcosm of the city's history and, for the time being, ensures that the neighborhood never transcends the "transitional" stage it has been in for years.

The area takes its name from the old Mission Dolores , at 16th and Dolores ($3 suggested donation; daily 9am-4pm, until 4.30pm May-Oct), the oldest building to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire. Founded in 1776, it was the sixth in a series of missions built along the Pacific coast as Spain staked its claim to California; the graves of the Native Americans it tried to "civilize" can be seen in the cemetery next door, along with those of white pioneers. Go early in the morning to avoid the tour buses.

The heart of the Mission lies east of Mission Street between 16th and 24th streets. Here you'll absorb the district's original Latin flavor, with Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Costa Rican and Mexican stores and restaurants, along with markets selling tropical fruits and panaderias baking traditional pastries.

In the last few years, however, the "in" crowd has descended on a strip of Valencia south of 16th, site of a new crop of hip bars, cafés and restaurants. The profusion of independent bookstores and thrift stores around here makes for heavenly browsing and the vicinity of 22nd Street has become a new gourmet-dining ghetto. Worth a visit is the Levi Strauss & Co factory , at 250 Valencia St, built after the original factories were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Though tours have been discontinued, you can admire the yellow brick facade of where the world's most famous jeans are made.

What really sets the Mission apart from other neighborhoods, though, are its murals - there are over two hundred in all. A brilliant tribute to local hero Carlos Santana adorns three buildings where 22nd Street meets South Van Ness, while every possible surface on Balmy Alley , between Folsom and Harrison off 24th Street, has been covered with murals depicting the political agonies of Central America. The mural organization, Precita Eyes, hosts weekend mural tours by foot, bike or bus ($10 to $50; tel 415/285-2287, ). A visitor's center is also located at 2981 24th St.

The city's heart can be found around Union Square , located north of Market Street and bordered by Powell and Stockton streets. Cable cars clank past bustling shoppers and theater-goers who gravitate to the district's many upscale hotels, department stores and boutiques. The statue in the center commemorates Admiral Dewey's success in the Spanish-American War, though the square takes its name from its role as gathering place for stumping speechmakers during the US Civil War. (The woman who posed for the monument became a local celebrity, marrying into the wealthy Spreckels family.) The square witnessed the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford outside the (now Westin) St Francis Hotel in 1975, and was also the location of Francis Ford Coppola's film The Conversation , where Gene Hackman spied on strolling lovers. Many of Dashiell Hammett's detective stories, such as The Maltese Falcon , are set partly in the St Francis , in which he worked as a Pinkerton detective during the Twenties. Hammett fans should check out John's Grill , 63 Ellis St, for Sam Spade's favorite eating spot (though it probably won't be yours), and Burritt Alley , two blocks north of the square on Bush Street, near Stockton Street. Here's where Spade's partner, Miles Archer, met his end, shot by Brigid O'Shaughnessy. A plaque marks the spot.

On Geary Street, on the south side of the square, the Theater District is a pint-sized Broadway of restaurants, tourist hotels and serious and "adult" theaters. On the eastern side of the square, Maiden Lane is a chic urban walkway that before the 1906 earthquake and fire was one of the city's roughest areas, where homicides averaged around ten a month. Nowadays, aside from some prohibitively expensive boutiques, its main feature is San Francisco's only Frank Lloyd Wright building (now occupied by the Xanadu Tribal Art Gallery), an intriguing circular space which was a try-out for the Guggenheim in New York.











 

Contact Us - Site Map - Add Url

Copyrigth 2000 - 2007
All rights Reserve