Market sights in San Francisco
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A
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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B
Spofford Alley
Sun Yat-sen once plotted the overthrow of China’s Manchu dynasty here at number 36, and during Prohibition, this was the site of turf battles over local bootlegging and protection rackets. Spofford has mellowed with age; it’s now lined with senior community centers. But the action still starts around sundown, when a Chinese orchestra strikes up a tune, the clicking of a mah-jong game begins, and beauty parlor owners and florists use the pretense of sweeping their doorsteps to gossip.
reviewed
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C
Ikenobo Ikebana Society
Even shoppers hell-bent on iron teapots and maneki neko (waving kitty) figurines stop and stare at the arrangements in the windows here. This is the oldest and largest society outside Japan for ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, and has the displays to prove it: a curly willow branch tickling a narcissus under its chin in an abstract jiyubana (freestyle) arrangement, and a traditional seven-part rikka landscape featuring pine and iris.
reviewed
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D
Ferry Building
Other towns have their gourmet ghettos, but San Francisco puts its love of food front and center at the Ferry Building. The once-grand port was overshadowed by a 1950s freeway overpass until 1989, when the freeway turned out to be less than earthquake-proof. The overpass was torn down, and the Ferry Building emerged as the symbol of San Francisco’s pride and joy – not the ferries, but the food.
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