San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Locals make like tourists for a day
Seeing sights visitors flock to — but residents skip
Sitting at the bar at the Cliff
House on Wednesday morning, clutching a coffee cup in one hand and a warm popover in the other, I looked out the huge windows to see pelicans flying over the ocean and had one overriding thought. I’m getting paid for this? Yes, it’s a tough job, but in the name of, cough, journalism, Chronicle pop culture critic Peter Hartlaub and I declared it Tourist Trap Day in San Francisco and ventured to as many as we could.
It was done in the spirit of remembering that while much of the new San Francisco works our last nerve as it breaks down around us, there’s still a lot of old-time whimsy here to love.
And it was done in the name of forcing ourselves — and encouraging others, we hope — to break out of our everyday routines. Picture a map of San Francisco and draw an imaginary line tracking your usual week. Home to work and back. Repeat. Throw in the grocery store, a playground and school if you have kids, maybe a restaurant or an occasional museum or concert.
But how often do you go somewhere totally off your very beaten track? It’s easy to live in a tourist mecca and think “I’ll get to that famous spot someday,” then realize, years later, you still haven’t been there.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 19 years and until Wednesday, I’d never been inside the Camera Obscura, to Musée Mécanique to see Laffing Sal or to the Buena Vista Cafe for an
“Tourists make my world go ’round!” Buena Vista Cafe server Ryan Monahan
Irish coffee.
The day began at the Powell Street cable car turnaround, where Hartlaub and I met at the very civilized hour of 9 a.m. That was far better than meeting in the deserted Chronicle parking lot at 2:30 a.m. on that crazy day back in April when we rode every Muni line together. Unlike Total Muni, Tourist Trap Day was carefree.
The cable cars have been running since 1873, surviving earthquakes, wars and political squabbles over whether they should continue to exist. And the 19th century technology still works! Nowadays, steel beams at the new $2.2 billion Transbay Transit Center don’t survive intact for six weeks. If only we could get the ghosts of those clever cable car creators to return to straighten everything out — including, of course, the tilting Millennium Tower.
We then hit the Clift Hotel, opened in 1915 for visitors to the PanamaPacific Exposition. I’d been to its famous bar, the Redwood Room, but hadn’t spent much time in its surreal, Alice in Wonderland-style lobby. There’s a Salvador Dali lamp, a sofa featuring ostrich leather and horns, and lots of kooky chairs.
The kookiest is the giant chair — perfect for selfies. Hartlaub vaulted into the chair like an Olympic gymnast, while I embarrassingly needed to pull over a smaller chair to use as a step stool. The underside of the big chair sports a picture of a boy sticking his tongue out. Why, you ask? This is San Francisco. Why not?
I asked the hotel’s bell captain, Peter Counts, what people usually say when they first see the odd lobby.
“What’s up with all the chairs?” he answered.
We then walked to Market Street, braving a sea of people wearing blue lanyards for Dreamforce badges. A very slow Muni ride later, we were at the beach — the crowds, filth and traffic gone, replaced with seagulls and surfers.
We walked to the Cliff House, where big signs out front warned visitors to remove all valuables from their cars. Inside, the restaurant’s walls are covered in autographed, framed photos of celebrities who’ve visited. Michael Douglas wrote, “Keep the good food comin’!” Bob Hope scrawled, “Thanks for the memories.”
We didn’t spot any celebrities, but we did meet the manager, Dana Scott, whose mustache is even bushier than the late Mayor Ed Lee’s was. Scott is the best sort of person — a Chronicle subscriber — and knew all about our Tourist Trap Day from our preview stories.
He’s worked at the Cliff House for eight years and said it’s “the best job in the world.”
“Look at the office we work in,” he said, sweeping his arm toward the giant windows with gorgeous views of the ocean.
He said he’s concerned about tourism in San Francisco, however, because of President Trump’s America First rhetoric and the city’s homeless tent camps, dirty streets and vehicle break-in epidemic. “Why would a nice Italian family want to come here and spend their money when they could go to France or Germany or somewhere else?” he asked.
For charming places like the Cliff House? We hope such lures are still enough of a draw, considering tourists spend more than $9 billion in our city every year. We then popped into the Camera Obscura. Installed in 1946, it projects views from outside onto a large, circular white screen inside.
“Most people love it,” said cashier Carla Gomez. “We do get a few people who say, ‘Is this it?’ ”
What do they expect for the $3? Hey, this city’s not cheap.
Ace Chronicle photographer Lea Suzuki then drove us to Chinatown, but cunningly chose a route including the twisty part of Lombard Street.
Tourists sat on people’s front doorsteps, trampled through foliage and meandered into the street. You couldn’t pay me enough to live on that block, where the famous switchbacks were added in 1922 to make it easier for cars to get down the steep street.
Next was Ross Alley in Chinatown, home of the quaint Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, opened in 1962. We watched women expertly folding little pieces of dough into fortune cookies and even got to write our own fortunes.
Mine said, “Something else will break in S.F. this week.” This was before I heard that a second beam at the Transbay Transit Center had cracked, so clearly I’m clairvoyant.
That is also where we bought a $6.50 bag of X-rated fortune cookies, mostly to make our expense report even more ludicrous. One said something about how you should lie with a straight face, but it’s better to lie with a curvy body. That seems to be the slogan for Washington, D.C., these days.
We saved the real tourist mecca — Fisherman’s Wharf — for last. Making our way through a sea of neon fleece jackets on sidewalk racks, we ordered a sourdough bread bowl (also a first for me!) at Boudin Bakery. Hartlaub surely rues my suggestion to eat outside, since he was promptly pooped on by a seagull.
With its McDonald’s, Applebee’s and endless cheesy gift shops, the area seems far removed from the rest of San Francisco, which prides itself — sometimes obnoxiously — on being nothing like the rest of America.
I preferred the real only-in-San Francisco stops like the Cliff House and fortune cookie factory, but we were determined to give the neighborhood a fair chance.
We popped into Madame Tussauds, the wax museum that has likenesses of many of our dearly departed, including Mayor Lee, Harvey Milk, Robin Williams and Janis Joplin. Then it was on to Musée Mécanique, where we plunked quarters into Laffing Sal, who emits a freakish laugh that’s the stuff of nightmares.
Of course, we had to visit Pier 39 — the most touristy of all tourist attractions. Hartlaub and I were skipping up and down the musical stairs trying to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” when we saw a big blond man in a buttondown shirt decorated with palm trees gaping at us like we were crazy.
He was Ola Johansson, here from Sweden on his first-ever trip to San Francisco. He said he loved the Japanese Tea Garden, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge.
“There are a lot of things to see and do, I must say. It’s really expensive, though,” he said.
After that, we considered the $10 price tag to bungee jump on a trampoline a relative bargain. As I strapped into the harness, staffer Rafael Solorio said it was nice to have an adult, because 98 percent of his customers are children. That made me feel uncool, but not as uncool as when I tried to do a flip and failed. Miserably.
Finally, it was on to the Buena Vista Cafe — via rickshaw, of course. My very first Irish coffee there was delicious, and the charming ambience is truly old-school San Francisco. Owner Bob Freeman and his staff couldn’t have been nicer. And they clearly love tourists, the real kind and the pretenders, like us.
“Tourists make my world go ’round!” server Ryan Monahan proclaimed.
What’s something in San Francisco you’ve never done? Try it and let me know how it goes. This city is prone to disasters of the earthquake, economic and poor engineering varieties, and nothing’s guaranteed to last forever. Play tourist in your hometown for a day and soak it all in.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com, Twitter: @hknightsf