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Cathedral Of St Mary Of The Assumption
You might assume from afar that this 1971 concrete cathedral is a ship's prow or witch's hat. This behemoth started out as a modest proposal by a local architecture firm - but the archbishop read architectural criticism in his spare time, and hired MIT guru Pietro Belluschi and Italian engineer Pier-Luigi Nervi to build this sci-fi landmark. Say what you will about the exterior, but the honeycomb ceiling has great acoustics for organ recitals.
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Chinese Culture Center
Forget digging a tunnel to China: now you can reach the mainland by taking the elevator to the 3rd floor of the Hilton. The center features two to three Chinese art exhibits a year, and recently ramped up its public programming, which now includes beginner Mandarin classes, poetry readings, a genealogy service to trace Cantonese ancestry and Chinese Culture Center Cinema, featuring independent Chinese documentaries.
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Chinese Historical Society Of America Museum
Picture what it was like to be Chinese in America during the Gold Rush, transcontinental railroad construction, or the Beat heyday at the nation's largest Chinese American historical institute. Intimate vintage photos, an 1880 temple altar and personal artifacts are seen in the context of popular advertisements and movie clips promoting Chinese stereotypes.
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Church Of St Mary The Virgin
You might expect to see this rustic, gabled Arts and Crafts building on the slopes of Tahoe instead of Pacific Heights, but this Episcopal church is full of surprises. The structure dates from 1891, but the church has kept pace with its progressive-minded parish with homeless community outreach and 'Unplugged' all-acoustic Sunday services led by hip young Reverend Jennifer Hornbeck.
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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 cap 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.
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Clarion Alley
Trial by fire is nothing compared to Clarion Alley's street-art test. Only if your piece is truly inspired is it left intact and not peed on. Very few pieces survive for years - Andrew Schoultz's mural of gentrifying elephants displacing scraggly birds, a silhouette of kung-fu-fighting women anarchists that makes Charlie's Angels look like chumps, and a trompe l'oeil escalator.
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Cliff House
Populist millionaire Adolph Sutro imagined this place as a workingman's paradise, and by 1869 Sutro's dream had expanded the Cliff House to an elegant eight-story resort with art galleries, dining rooms and an observation deck. The latest attempt to reclaim former glory was in 2004, when a US$19 million facelift turned the Cliff House into an upscale (and quite expensive) restaurant.
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Coastal Trail
Suit up and hit your stride on this nine-mile Coastal Trail, starting at Fort Funston and wrapping around the Presidio paralleling Lincoln Blvd to end at Fort Mason. The four miles of sandy Ocean Beach will definitely work those calves and numb your toes. Casual strollers will prefer to pick up the trail near Sutro Baths, head around Land's End for a peek at Golden Gate Bridge, and then duck into the Legion of Honor at Lincoln Park.
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Coit Tower & Telegraph Hill
Go ahead and snicker at the wacky hose-shaped concrete projectile eccentric Ms Lillie Hancock Coit left a third of her considerable fortune to build - everyone does - but the climb here is no joke, the tower's dedication to firefighters is heartfelt and the views inside the tower will win you over to Lillie's point of view.
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Columbarium
The ancient Roman innovation of memorial buildings for cremated remains came in handy in San Francisco in 1898, when real estate was already hitting a premium in the seven by seven peninsula. The restored, resplendent domed Columbarium is lined with art nouveau stained-glass windows and over five thousand niches, honoring dearly beloved friends, dogs and rabbits.
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Columbus Tower
Like most SF landmarks worthy of the title, this one has a seriously checkered career. Built by shady political boss Abe Ruef in 1905, the building was finished just in time to be reduced to its steel skeleton in the 1906 earthquake and fire. The new copper cladding was still shiny in 1907 when not-so-honest Abe was convicted of bribing city supervisors, and by the time he emerged bankrupt from San Quentin the cupola was already oxidizing green.
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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?'
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Conservatory Of Flowers
Flower power is alive and well inside this grand Victorian greenhouse, where orchids sprawl out like Bohemian divas, lilies float contemplatively in ponds and carnivorous plants give off odors that smell exactly like you'd imagine insect belches would (you've never wondered?) The original 1878 structure is newly restored and the plants are thriving as never before.
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Contemporary Jewish Museum
That upended brushed-steel box balancing improbably on one corner isn't a sculpture, but a special events gallery for the Contemporary Jewish Museum, a major new San Francisco landmark that has been in the works since 1998. The redesign of the old power station took around a decade.
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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 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 minipark is public and ideal for a sushi picnic.
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Creativity Explored
This is an extraordinary nonprofit celebrating art without limits, where 100 developmentally disabled artists create alongside other professional artists. Recent themed group shows have covered art inspired by jazz, superheroes and super-villains, and mail art. Don't miss the art openings, which are joyous events.
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Crissy Field
War is definitely for the birds in this military-airstrip-turned-nature-preserve. Where military aircraft once zoomed in for a landing, bird-watchers now huddle in the silent rushes of a reclaimed tidal marsh. Joggers pound beachside trails that were once oil-stained asphalt, and the only security alerts are raised by puppies suspiciously sniffing surfers. On foggy days, stop by the Crissy Field Center to thaw-out over fair-trade coffee.
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Crown Point Press
Bet you didn't think anyone could capture Chuck Close's giant portraits, Wayne Thiebaud's Pop Art pastries, or Australian Aboriginal artist Dorothy Napangardi's dreamings on paper. Yet here they are: color woodcut portraits produced by carving and printing 51 separate blocks of wood; cream pie tinged pale blue by glass pastry cases captured in a color gravure; and salt tracings of Mina Mina in mesmerizing sugar-lift etchings.
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Diego Rivera Mural
No, you're not seeing double: Diego Rivera's 1931 The Making of a Fresco Showing a Building of a City is a trompe l'oeil fresco within a fresco, showing the back of the artist himself as he pauses to admire his own work, as well as the work in constant progress that is San Francisco. This fresco takes up an entire wall in the Diego Rivera Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute, on your left through the entryway courtyard.
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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 Ely and a group of forward-thinking Chinatown businessmen pioneered the approach here in Chinatown, replacing seedy attractions with more tourist-friendly ones.
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Eleanor Harwood Gallery
Hidden on a residential Mission side street is this treasure-box showcase for Bay Area talents, from those still toiling in inexplicable relative obscurity like myth master Paul Ulrich to breakthrough stars like 2007 Venice Biennale artist Emily Prince, who responded to limited military acknowledgement of US casualties in Iraq by making hand drawings of every US soldier killed there.
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Electric Works
In the gallery/printmaking studio that calls itself 'The Land of Yes,' anything is possible - including Marcel Dzama's gangs of vampire toddlers and Sandow Birk's modern take on Dante's Inferno starring traffic-jammed LA as hell and San Francisco as a foggy purgatory. Also, its an affordable alternative to museum stores and sales from print editions benefit nonprofits.
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Embarcadero Center
If this really is San Francisco's answer to Lincoln Center, that's one round for New York. These skyscrapers joined by an overhead walkway form an urban sprawl of a mall, and the upper office floors have nothing to recommend them beyond the crowd-pleasing Embarcadero Center Cinema, the indie movie multiplex whose concessions counter is consistently rated the city's best.
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Exploratorium
Is there a science to skateboarding, do robots have feelings, too, and do toilets really flush counter-clockwise in Australia? Head to the Exploratorium to get fascinating scientific answers to all those questions you always wanted to ask in science class. Try out a punk hairdo courtesy of the static electricity station and feel your way through the maze of the Tactile Dome; patrons must be over seven years old and reservations are required.
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Federal Building
See American tax dollars at work, and for once in a good way. The revolutionary green design of this new government office building by 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Thomas Mayne means huge savings in energy consumption, not to mention taxpayer dollars. The ingenious layout eliminates internal political battles over corner offices, providing direct sunlight, natural ventilation and views for 90% of work stations.
