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New Langton Arts
Strange is the norm at New Langton, where artists have done odd and occasionally unprintable things since 1975. This nonprofit is where Tony Labat stepped into the boxing ring with his critics and Harrell Fletcher distributed newspapers by teen reporters he'd commissioned to collect good news from their neighbors. Don't miss the Musée d'Honneur Minuscule, a window box in the entryway featuring small, ambitious works, such as Jill Sylvia's tiny cityscape made from accountants' ledger paper.
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Ocean Beach
Bikinis, Elvis sing-alongs and clambakes are not the scene here – think more along the lines of wetsuits, pagan rituals and s'mores (toasted marshmallow treats). Bonfires are permitted in the artist-designed fire pits, but be sure to follow park rules about fire maintenance and alcohol (not allowed) or you could get fined. On rare sunny days the waters may beckon, but only hardcore surfers and sea lions should brave these riptides.
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Octagon House
Crafty architects are always trying to cut corners on their clients, and here architect William C McElroy succeeded. This is one of the last examples of a brief San Franciscan vogue for octagonal houses in the 1860s, when it was believed that houses catching direct sunlight from eight angles were good for your health. Three afternoons a month you can peruse the collection of colonial antiques and peek inside a time capsule McElroy hid under the stairs.
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Old St Mary's Cathedral
Many thought it a lost cause, but California's first cathedral, inaugurated in 1854, tried for decades to give San Francisco some religion – despite its location in brothel central. Hence the stern admonition on the church's brick clock tower: ‘Son, observe the time and fly from evil.' Eventually the archdiocese abandoned attempts to convert Dupont St whoremongers and handed the church over to a Chinese community mission run by the activism-oriented Paulists.
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Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Building
Cinemas like the Castro made the reputation of architect Timothy Pflueger, who took that theatrical flair to a whole new level in this striking 1925 art deco skyscraper dolled up in terra-cotta. Step inside the black marble lobby to check out the bronze elevator doors and ceiling with Chinese mythic figures.
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Pacific-Union Club
The only Nob Hill mansion to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire is a squat neoclassical brownstone, which despite its grandeur lacks architectural imagination. Today it's a private men's club. The exclusive membership roster lists newspaper magnates, both Hewlett and Packard of Hewlett-Packard, several US secretaries of defense and government contractors (insert conspiracy theory here). Democrats, people of color and anyone under 45 are scarce on the published list, but little else is known about the 800-odd, all-male membership: members can be expelled for leaking information. Cheeky cross-dressing protesters have pointed out that there's no specific ban on transgender/transvestite visitors supping in its main dining room or walking through the front door – privileges denied women. Give it a try and report back, won't you?
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Palace Of Fine Arts
Like a fossilized party favor, this romantic, fake Greco-Roman ruin is the memento San Francisco decided to keep from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The original was built in wood, burlap and plaster by celebrated Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck as a picturesque backdrop, and by the 1960s was beginning to crumble. The structure was recast in concrete, so that future generations could gaze up at the rotunda relief to glimpse ‘Art Under Attack by Materialists, with Idealists Leaping to her Rescue.'
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Peace Pagoda
When San Francisco's sister city of Osaka, Japan, made a gift of Yoshiro Taniguchi's five-tiered concrete stupa to the people of San Francisco in 1968, the city seemed stupa-fied what to do with the minimalist monument, and kept clustering boxed shrubs around its stark nakedness. But with some well-placed cherry trees and low, hewn-rock benches in the plaza, the pagoda is finally in its element au naturel.
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Portsmouth Square
Since apartments in Chinatown's old brick buildings are small, Portsmouth Sq is the neighborhood's living room. The square is named after John B Montgomery's sloop, which pulled up near here in 1846 to stake the US claim on San Francisco, but the presiding deity at this park is the Goddess of Democracy, a bronze replica of the statue made by Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989. First light is met with outstretched arms by tai-chi practitioners. By afternoon toddlers rush the playground slides, and tea crowds collect at the kiosk under the pedestrian bridge to joke and dissect the day's news. The checkers and chess played on concrete tables in gazebos late into the evening aren't mere games, but 365-day obsessions, come rain or shine. Chinese New Year brings a night market to the square, featuring Chinese opera, calligraphy demonstrations and cell-phone charms of the goddess Guan Yin for better reception. Bronze plaques dot the perimeter of the historic square, noting the site of San Francisco's first bookshop and elementary school and the bawdy Jenny Lind Theater, which with a few modifications became San Francisco's first City Hall.
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Powell St Cable Car Turnaround
'Wire-rope railway' was a name that didn't exactly inspire confidence in Andrew Hallidie's invention in the 1870s, when crowds steered well clear of his rickety wooden trolleys on their early downhill runs. More than a century later, the two cable-car lines that take off from this central hub still seem like more like carnival rides than commuter transport - and therein lies the appeal.
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Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum
San Francisco's already high freak factor gets dialed up to 11 with Ripley's bizarro artifacts and tales of vampires, mutants, and human sacrifices. The cable car made of a quarter of a million matchsticks adds a nice and highly flammable local touch to the Ripley's franchise.
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Ross Alley
The colorful murals lining Ross Alley hint at the colorful characters that once roamed SF's oldest alleyway, which has been known variously as Mexico, Spanish and Manila St after the ladies who once staffed its notorious back-parlor brothels. More recently, Ross Alley has been occasionally pimped out to Hollywood production companies as the picturesque backdrop for sequels like Karate Kid II and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
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Ruth Asawa Fountains
Sit inside the fountain, splash around and stay awhile: celebrated sculptor and former WWII internee Ruth Asawa designed these fountains to be lived in, not observed from a polite distance. Bronze origami dandelions sprout from polished-pebble pools, with benches built right in for bento-box picnics. On rare warm days along this wind-tunnel pedestrian block, kids frolic and weary shoppers enjoy footbaths under the dandelions.
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Saints Peter & Paul Church
Wedding cake was the apparent inspiration for this 1924 triple-decker cathedral with its lacy white towers, and in its downtime between masses in Italian and Chinese, the church pulls a triple wedding shift on Saturdays. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe had their wedding photos taken here, though they weren't permitted to marry in the church because both had been divorced (they got hitched at City Hall instead). True to North Beach literary form, there's poetry by Dante in a glittering mosaic inscription over the grand triple entryway: ‘The glory of Him who moves all things/penetrates and glows throughout the universe.' How very Ginsberg-meets-the-Beatles.
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San Francisco Botanical Garden & Strybing Arboretum
There's always something blooming in these 70-acre gardens, which cover a world of vegetation from South African savannah to New Zealand cloud forest. The Garden of Fragrance is designed for appeal to the visually impaired, and the California native-plant section explodes with color when the wildflowers bloom in early spring, right off the redwood trail. Free arboretum tours take place daily; for details, stop by the bookstore inside the entrance.
Read more about San Francisco Botanical Garden & Strybing Arboretum
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San Francisco Center For The Book
Anyone who can't get enough of the sound and smell of a freshly cracked book will achieve a whole new level of obsession with these displays of elaborate Coptic binding and wooden typesetting machines. One recent exhibit showcased the creative process of acclaimed book illustrators, from David Macaulay (The Way Things Work) to Caldecott Medal winner Chris Raschka (Hello, Goodbye Window). The center offers classes, so you can learn to make your own books that fit into matchboxes, pop up into cityscapes and unfold into prison guard towers.
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San Francisco Main Library
The spoken word – and sometimes the shouted word – get top billing in literary-minded San Francisco, especially during the annual Litquake Festival. The San Francisco Main Library hosts near-daily readings; we particularly love Michelle Tea's gay-focused Radar series – she's hysterical. For a literary throw down that's somewhere between American Idol and American Gladiators, look for the occasional appearance of Literary Death Match .
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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.
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San Francisco National Maritime Museum
This quirky museum shaped like a streamlined art deco luxury liner was initially a casino and public bathhouse when built by the Depression-era Works Project Administration (WPA) in 1939. The museum is currently closed while its interior is restored to ship-shape, but you can still appreciate the exterior decor: entryway slate carvings by celebrated African American artist Sargent Johnson, and toad and seal sculptures glimpsed on the back veranda by SF's own Beniamino Bufano.
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San Francisco Zoo
Even those who object to zoos in theory have been known to break down and take kids here after being begged for, oh, the thousandth time - only to discover that, actually, there are some well-kept habitats here, including a Savannah featuring giraffes, zebras, ostriches and other African wildlife.
On Christmas day 2007 the zoo made headlines for all the wrong reasons when a Siberian tiger escaped from its enclosure, killing one person and injuring two others.
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Sf Arts Commission Gallery
Get in on the next art movement at this lobby-level public gallery featuring international perspectives and local talents. You never know what you might find. As well as hanging shows and hosting receptions in its gallery, the commission also sponsors wide-ranging works, such as a recent sound sculpture in the rotunda of City Hall. Very cool. Drop by to hear what's doing now.
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Sf Camerawork
Since 1974 this nonprofit organization has explored the experimental world of photo-based imagery beyond vintage black and white, including rotating exhibits such as Binh Danh's ethereal portraits developed directly on leaves, Lars Laumann's conspiracy-theory video collage of Morrissey from the Smiths apparently predicting Princess Diana's death, and Matthew Geiger's composite photos capturing commuter tide patterns in subways.
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South Park
‘Dot-com' was the word on the street here in the mid-'90s, when venture capitalists plotted website launches in parkside cafes with tattooed 20-something techies. But speculation is nothing new to South Park, which was planned by a real-estate speculator in the 1850s as a bucolic gated community. Though the South Park development itself never quite took off, a plaque on an office building around the corner at 601 3rd St marks the birthplace of Jack London, esteemed author of The Call of the Wild, White Fang and many other popular adventure stories. Otherwise the neighborhood retreated into obscurity, and Filipino American war veterans formed a quiet community here until the dot-com boom. Nowadays it seems even the birds in the trees are twittering about another South Park venture, founded here after the dot-com bust: Twitter.
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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.
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SS Jeremiah O'Brien
Hard to believe this 10, 000-ton beauty was turned out by San Francisco's ship workers in under eight weeks, and harder still to imagine how she dodged U-boats on a mission delivering supplies to Allied forces on D-Day. Of 2, 710 Liberty Ships launched during WWII, this is the only one still fully operational. For steamy piston-on-piston, 2700HP action, visit during ‘steaming weekends' (usually the third weekend of each month) or check the website for upcoming four-hour cruises.
