Sights in San Francisco
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Union Square
Louis Vuitton is more top-of-mind than the Emancipation Proclamation, but this plaza, bordered by brand-name retailers, was named after pro-Union Civil War rallies held here 150 years ago. A misguided renovation paved the place and installed benches narrow enough to keep junkies from nodding off, turning this once-lovely park into a prison exercise yard. Redeeming features include Emporio Rulli Caffè, the half-price theater-ticket booth and stellar people-watching.
reviewed
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Alcatraz
Alcatraz: for almost 150 years, the name has given the innocent chills and the guilty cold sweats. Over the years it’s been the nation’s first military prison, a forbidding maximum-security penitentiary and disputed territory between Native American activists and the FBI. No wonder that first step you take off the ferry and onto ‘the Rock’ seems to cue ominous music: dunh-dunh-dunnnnh! It all started innocently enough back in 1775, when Spanish lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala sailed the San Carlos past the 12-acre island he called Isla de Alcatraces (Isle of the Pelicans). In 1859 a new post on Alcatraz became the first US West Coast fort, and soon proved handy as…
reviewed
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Golden Gate Park
Kid heaven: buffalo, a carousel, playgrounds, miniature trees and paddle boats.
reviewed
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Buena Vista Park
True to its name, this park founded in 1867 offers sweeping views of the city beyond century-old cypresses to the bay and even Marin County, depending how far you’re prepared to hike up the steep hill. When SF went up in flames in 1906, this was the safe spot where San Franciscans found refuge, and watched the town smolder; on your way downhill, take Buena Vista Ave West to spot Victorian mansions that date from that era. Technically the park closes at sunset, but the romantic views sometimes inspire after-hours cruising.
reviewed
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Coit Tower
Up the Filbert Street steps at Coit Tower, you'll find 360-degree views of downtown and wrap-around 1930s murals glorifying SF workers - once denounced as Communist, but now a landmark.
reviewed
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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) was destined from the start in 1935 to be an eclectic, unconventional museum. But when it moved into architect Mario Botta’s light-filled brick box in 1995, it became clear just how far this museum was prepared to push the art world. The new museum showed its backside to New York and leaned full-tilt towards the western horizon, taking risks on then-unknowns like Matthew Barney and his poetic videos involving industrial quantities of Vaseline, and Olafur Eliasson’s outer-space installations that distort all sense of reality. Finally SFMOMA had room to launch international traveling shows by squeegee-wielding German painter Gerha…
reviewed
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California Academy of Sciences
Finally the California Academy of Sciences has a museum suited to its fascinating collection of 38,000 natural wonders and the occasional freak of nature. Under the wildflower-covered ‘living roof’ of Renzo Piano’s LEED-certified green building, butterflies flutter through a four-storey glass rainforest dome, a rare white alligator stalks a swamp, and Pierre the Penguin paddles his massive new tank in the African Hall. In the basement aquarium, kids duck inside a glass bubble to enter an eel forest, find Nemos in the tropical-fish tanks and squeal to pet starfish in an aquatic petting zoo. The views here are sublime: you can glimpse into infinity in the Planetarium or rid…
reviewed
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Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Pride Parade
Hands down, the year's biggest party. Pirates in pink and giant-winged fairies toss candy and condoms from overflowing fanny packs, while pit bulls in rainbow-hued tutus trot alongside. Stilt-walkers in glitter, trannies on unicycles, queens on roller skates – anything goes. Crowds pour from BART and Muni, climbing streetlight posts for better views, and float-dancers strut atop moving stages. Growing almost every year since 1971, Pride draws about a million participants and sidewalk supporters, running the gamut from sweater queens to granola dykes, bondage masters to GLBT seniors. Afterwards there's an all-afternoon festival at Civic Center. Hotels fill; book early. The…
reviewed
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Lombard Street
You’ve seen its eight switchbacks in a thousand photographs. The tourist board has dubbed this ‘the world’s crookedest street, ’ which is factually incorrect. Vermont St in Potrero Hill deserves this street cred, but Lombard is (much) more scenic, with its red-brick pavement and lovingly tended flowerbeds. It wasn’t always so bent; before the automobile it lunged straight down the hill. Don’t try anything funny. The recent clampdown on renegade skaters means that the Lombard St thrills featured in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game will remain strictly virtual, at least until the cops get slack. Until 2008, every Easter Sunday for seven years adults had arrived at the cres…
reviewed
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77 Geary
The most intriguing art usually appears in what looks like the wrong place, and 77 Geary’s unmarked entryway is no exception. Get seduced on the mezzanine by the minimalism of Patricia Sweetow Gallery (www.patriciasweetowgallery.com) and shaken up on the 2nd floor by the political art of Togonon Gallery (www.togonongallery.com). For beauty with brains, see Marx & Zavattero (www.marxzav.com) next door for David Hevel’s neo-baroque, middle-America-meets-Hollywood taxidermy sculptures and Paul Mullins’ tragic-comic exploration of rural contentment. Sensitive meets sensational at Rena Bransten Gallery (www.renabranstengallery.com), featuring shows such as Hung Liu’s mir…
reviewed
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Alamo Square
The finest restaurants in town can’t provide views as spectacular as the picnic tables atop Alamo Square Park facing Steiner St’s Postcard Row, a row of pastel Victorian ‘Painted Lady’ houses with gingerbread detailing and frosting flourishes that may leave you craving dessert. The city skyline looms in the background, and from the corner of Steiner and Fulton Sts you can glimpse City Hall. On the crest of the hill, check out the old shoes creatively reused as planters. On foggy days, you may want to wear a parka – as you can guess from the wind-sculpted pines, it can get a tad blustery up here.
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Crissy Field
The Presidio's coastal airstrip has been stripped of asphalt and reinvented as Crissy Field, a haven for coastal birds, kitefliers and urban beachgoers. Take a hike for spectacular views of Golden Gate Bridge: see it from below like Alfred Hitchcock for a thrilling case of Vertigo at Fort Point, or see it au naturel on the Presidio's west side at clothing-optional Baker Beach. When the fog rolls in, the Warming Hut serves Fair Trade coffee and organic pastries within walls insulated with old denim.
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Sea Lions at Pier 39
Beach bums took over San Francisco’s most coveted waterfront real estate in 1990 and have been making a public display of themselves ever since, canoodling, belching, scratching their naked backsides and gleefully shoving one another off the docks. Naturally these unkempt squatters became San Francisco’s favorite mascots, and since California law requires boats to make way for marine mammals, yacht owners have to relinquish valuable slips to accommodate as many as 1300 sea lions who ‘haul out’ onto the docks between January and July, and whenever else they feel like sunbathing.
reviewed
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Clarion Alley
Trial by fire is nothing compared to Clarion Alley’s street-art test: unless a piece is truly inspired, it’s going to get peed on or painted over. Very few pieces survive for years – Andrew Schoultz’s mural of gentrifying elephants displacing scraggly birds, a silhouette of kung-fu-fighting female anarchists that makes Charlie’s Angels look like chumps, and a trompe l’oeil escalator. Incontinent art critics seem to have taken over the east end of the alley – pee-eew! – so the less aromatic, more intricate murals are on the west.
reviewed
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Golden Gate Bridge
Imagine a squat concrete bridge striped black and caution yellow spanning the San Francisco Bay - that's what the US Navy initially had in mind. Luckily, engineer Joseph B Strauss and architects Gertrude and Irving Murrow insisted on a soaring art-deco design and International Orange paint that harmonized with the natural environment. The result is the 1937 Golden Gate Bridge. Cars pay a $6 toll to cross from Marin to San Francisco; pedestrians and cyclists stroll the east sidewalk for free.
reviewed
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Mission Dolores Park
The site of quasi-professional Castro tanning contests, free performances by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a small kids’ playground, free movies on summer nights and a Hunky Jesus Contest every Easter, this sloping park is also beloved for its year-round political protests and other favorite local sports. Flat patches are generally reserved for soccer games, candlelight vigils and ultimate Frisbee, and the tennis courts and basketball hoops are open to all.
reviewed
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49 Geary
Pity collectors silently nibbling endive in austere Chelsea galleries – at 49 Geary, openings mean unexpected art, goldfish-shaped crackers and outspoken crowds. Four floors of galleries feature standout international and local works including eclectic, eye-popping photography ranging from the 19th to 21st centuries at Fraenkel Gallery to sculptor Seth Koen’s crocheted minimalist pieces at Gregory Lind. Beat the crowds on weekdays for quieter contemplation.
reviewed
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Japan Center
Entering this oddly charming mall is like walking onto a 1960s Japanese movie set – the fake-rock waterfall, indoor wooden pedestrian bridges, rock gardens and curtained wooden restaurant entryways have hardly aged a day since the mall’s grand opening in 1968. If not for the anachronistic Tare Panda cell-phone charms and Harajuku fashion mags displayed at Kinokuniya Books & Stationery, Japan Center would be a total time warp.
reviewed
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Beat Museum
Parrots and poetry make the air of North Beach seem rarified - or maybe that's just the heady aroma of espresso brewing and pizza baking. Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti made this Italian neighborhood the proving ground for free spirits and free speech in the 1950s, as chronicled in the Beat Museum, and the escaped parrots who flock here make it an actual urban jungle.
reviewed
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Lotta’s Fountain
Lotta Crabtree made a killing as San Francisco’s diminutive opera diva, and never forgot the city that paid for her trademark cigars. At the age of 28, the already-wealthy performer commissioned this cast-metal pillar thrice her size with a spigot fountain as a present to the people of San Francisco – a useful gift indeed during the 1906 fire, when it became the sole source of water Downtown.
reviewed
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Cliff House
At the north end of Ocean Beach, the recently rebuilt and sadly soulless Cliff House overlooks the splendid ruin of Sutro Baths, where Victorian dandies once converged for bracing baths and workouts.
reviewed
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Cartoon Art Museum
Comics earn serious consideration at the Cartoon Art Museum with shows of original Watchmen covers, too-hot-to-print political cartoons and hands-on workshops with comics legends.
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Exploratorium
Geeks and freaks flock to the Exploratorium to learn the scientific secrets to cuteness and grope through the Tactile Dome.
reviewed
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City Hall
That mighty beaux-arts dome pretty much covers San Francisco’s grandest ambitions and fundamental flaws. Designed by John Bakewell and Arthur Brown Jr in 1915 to top Paris for flair and outsize the capitol building dome in Washington, DC, the dome was a little unsteady until its retrofit after the 1989 earthquake, when ingenious technology enabled the dome to swing on its base without raising alarm. The gold leafing on the dome’s exterior is a reminder of dot-com-era excess. But from the inside, the splendid rotunda has ringing acoustics, and if that dome could talk, it would tell of triumph and tragedy. Anti-McCarthy sit-in protesters were hosed off the grand staircase i…
reviewed
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Sterling Park
‘Homeward into the sunset/Still unwearied we go, /Till the northern hills are misty/With the amber of afterglow.’ Poet George Sterling’s ‘City by the Sea’ is almost maudlin – that is, until you watch the sunset over the Golden Gate from the hilltop park named in his honor. Sterling was a great romancer of all San Francisco had to offer, including nature, idealism, free love and occasionally opium, and was frequently broke. But as the toast of the secretive, elite Bohemian Club, San Francisco’s high society indulged the poet in all his eccentricities, including carrying a lethal dose of cyanide as a reminder of life’s transience. Broken by his ex-wife’s suicide and the …
reviewed
