Architecture sights in San Francisco
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A
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.
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B
Swedenborgian Church
Radical ideals in the form of distinctive buildings make beloved SF landmarks; this standout 1894 example is the collaborative effort of 19th-century Bay Area progressive thinkers, such as naturalist John Muir, California Arts and Crafts leader Bernard Maybeck and architect Arthur Page Brown. Church founder Emanuel Swedenborg was an 18th-century Swedish theologian, a scientist and an occasional conversationalist with angels, who believed that humans are spirits in a material world unified by nature, love and luminous intelligence – a lovely concept, embodied in an even lovelier building. Enter the church through a modest brick archway, and pass into a garden sheltered by …
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C
Bob Kaufman Alley
What, you mean your hometown doesn’t have a street named after an African American Catholic-Jewish-voodoo anarchist Beat poet who refused to speak for 12 years? The man revered in France as the ‘American Rimbaud’ was a major poet who helped found the legendary Beatitudes magazine in 1959 and a spoken-word bebop jazz artist who was never at a loss for words, yet he felt compelled to take a Buddhist vow of silence after John F Kennedy’s assassination that he kept until the end of the Vietnam War. Kaufman’s life was hardly pure poetry: he was a teenage runaway, periodically found himself homeless, was occasionally jailed for picking fights in poetry with police, battle…
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D
Dragon’s Gate
Enter the Dragon archway and you’ll find yourself on the once-notorious street known as Dupont in its red-light heyday. Sixty years before the family-friendly overhaul of the Las Vegas Strip, Look Tin Eli and a group of forward-thinking Chinatown businessmen pioneered the approach here in Chinatown, replacing seedy attractions with more tourist-friendly ones. After consultation with architects and community groups, Dupont was transformed into Grant Ave, with Deco-Chinoiserie dragon lamps and tiled pagoda rooftops, and police were reluctantly persuaded to enforce the 1914 Red Light Abatement Act in Chinatown. By the time this gate was donated by Taiwan in 1970 grandly proc…
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E
Palace Hotel
The city’s most storied hotel opened in 1875, and was gutted during the 1906 earthquake and fire. Opera star Enrico Caruso was staying here that day, and reportedly ran into the street, swearing he’d never return to San Francisco. The current building opened in 1909. Ten years later, Woodrow Wilson gave his League of Nations speech here, and in 1923 US President Warren G Harding died upstairs. Visit the lobby by day to see the opulent Garden Court and its luminous stained-glass domed ceiling, then pop into the Pied Piper Bar to see Maxfield Parrish’s mural of the Pied Piper.
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F
Commercial Street
Back when the red lights of Commercial St could be seen down by the waterfront, this strip provided many provocative answers to the age-old question: what do you do with a drunken sailor? Conveniently located across Portsmouth Sq from San Francisco’s City Hall, this hot spot caught fire in 1906. The city banned its 25¢ Chinese brothels in favor of white-run ‘parlor houses, ’ where basic services were raised to $3 – watching cost $10 at the faux-French Parisian Mansion. Today that much gets you a couple of hot dishes – of dumplings, that is, at City View.
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G
Filbert Street Steps
Somewhere in the middle of the steep climb up Filbert Street Steps to Coit Tower, you might begin to wonder if it’s worth the trouble. Well, take a breather and look around. Already you’re passing hidden cottages along a wooden boardwalk called Napier Lane, sculpture tucked in among gardens flowering year-round, and sweeping vistas of the Bay Bridge. If you need a few words of encouragement, the wild parrots in the trees have been known to interject a few choice words that your gym instructor would probably get sued for using.
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H
Cottage Row
Take a detour to days of yore when San Francisco was a sleepy seaside fishing village, before houses got all uptight, upright and Victorian. Easygoing 19th-century California clapboard cottages hang back along a brick-paved pedestrian promenade and let plum trees and bonsai take center stage. The homes are private, but the mini-park is public and ideal for a sushi picnic.
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