San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ESCAPE TO SAN FRANCISCO!
8 fun and fascinating spots to explore to cure the lockeddown holiday blues
With San Francisco ( and the rest of California) locked down, the holidays may feel more blue than red and green. But even though many indoor activities are suspended, the city itself is a stocking overflowing with treasures waiting to be discovered. Here are eight fun and fascinating places to explore this holiday season — all kidfriendly, outdoors and able to be enjoyed at a safe social distance.
1 Coit Tower
A beloved symbol of San Francisco since it was finished in 1933, the 210foot Italianate tower atop Telegraph Hill was funded by a bequest left by eccentric heiress Lillie Hitchcock Coit, who liked to dress in men’s clothing and was a patroness and mascot of the city’s volunteer firemen. The tower’s inside walls are adorned with superb Works Progress Administration frescoes depicting scenes of California life. Although Coit Tower is currently closed to the public because of the pandemic, you can still see some of the frescoes through the windows. ( Which is more than the public was able to do in 1934, when fear that some of the murals contained Communist propaganda led authorities to close the tower and whitewash the windows.) And the stroll around the tower offers the finest oneminute panorama in town, a dazzling circular vista that includes the East Bay, the North Bay, the Golden Gate, the Marin Headlands, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, downtown, the Ferry Building, the Bay Bridge and the Embarcadero. From Coit Tower, two of the city’s most magical sets of steps — the Filbert Steps and the Greenwich Steps — are also just a short walk away.
2 Aquatic Park
This wondrous cove was long one of the most contested pieces of real estate in San Francisco. In the 19th century it was used as an industrial site and dumping ground, but it was also a favored swimming spot, home to two stillthriving ( and eternally bickering) bathing clubs, the Dolphin and South End clubs. The city saved it from the clutches of the Southern Pacific Railroad and began to develop it as a waterfront park, but ran out of money after finishing the 1,850footlong Municipal Pier. Coming to the rescue was the WPA, a new federal agency created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to provide jobs during the Depression. In 1936, 782 WPA workers, including not just laborers but a full team of artists and sculptors, arrived. They built a seawall, created the beach and built the park’s signature bathhouse, a magnificent Streamline Moderne building in the shape of a luxury liner. If you’re feeling polar bearish, you can join the Dolphins and South Enders and go for a swim in this magical little Shangrila in the heart of the city.
3 Waverly Place
This twoblocklong street is deep in the heart, soul and history of Chinatown. One of the oldest streets in San Francisco, it has rejoiced in no fewer than seven names and nicknames, including Calle de las Rosas, Pike Street, Tien Hou Temple Street and 15Cent Street ( so named after the cost of a haircut at one of the many barber shops that once lined it). Waverly has had a fascinating and often lurid history. The two most famous madams in town, Ah Toy and Belle Cora, each operated luxurious brothels on the street. During the long era when fighting tongs ( mafialike gangs) terrorized Chinatown, hatchetwielding “highbinders” regularly fought bloody battles here. And Waverly, particularly the buildings on the west side of the block between Clay and Washington, offers the finest example of the fauxChinese architecture that community leaders, working with white architects, employed when Chinatown was rebuilt after the 1906 catastrophe. This makeover was an intentional rebranding, intended to shed Chinatown’s old image as sinful and sordid and give it a new, touristfriendly image as an “Oriental city.” One of the many intriguing things about Chinatown is that its pseudoChinese buildings are now so old they have acquired their own unique cultural authenticity.
4 The Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park
San Francisco’s great park celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, and no place within its 1,017 acres evokes its early Belle Epoque atmosphere more than the Music Concourse. The sunken space between the Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum is actually one of the few reminders of the least known of San Francisco’s three great fairs, the 1894 Midwinter Exposition. The Music Concourse is located on what was the heart of the Exposition, the Grand Court of Honor, a 9acre oval carved out of the sand dunes by horsedrawn sleds. The grandiose and ungainly buildings that lined the Court of Honor were all torn down at the end of the fair, except for an ominously Egyptianlike building that became the first of three iterations of the de Young Museum. Other survivors of the 1894 Exposition include the Japanese Tea Garden, originally called Marsh’s Japanese Village and Tea Garden, the Wine Press Statue, Dore Vase and the two sphinxes, all near the de Young Museum. ( The original plaster sphinxes decayed and were replaced by concrete ones created by renowned sculptor Arthur Putnam in 1907. Oddly, Putnam placed lizards on their heads, for reasons only he knew.) The Music Concourse is dominated by the great bandshell — officially the Spreckles Temple of Music — which opened in 1900. At its inaugural dedication and concert, as many as 100,000 people jammed Concert Valley, as the oval was then known, to listen to dignitaries orate and the Golden Gate Park band play — the 80foothigh sandstone bandshell reflecting the sound hundreds of yards. The bandshell is still used for Sunday concerts and the annual Fleet Week High School Band Challenge.
5 Glen Canyon
One of the city’s leastknown natural treasures, Glen Canyon is a 70acre miracle in the geographic heart of the city — a wild and largely unspoiled canyon with a stream trickling through it, populated by coyotes, owls, raccoons, skunks and foxes, and featuring some of the most stunning rock formations to be found anywhere in this famously rockpunctuated city. Glen Canyon’s history is as unexpected as its jagged chert outcroppings. In 1868, the first dynamite factory in the United States opened in what was then called Rock Canyon. After an explosion killed the factory’s chemist and a teamster, authorities moved the plant to another remote area, the Richmond District. In 1898, the estate of railroad tycoon Charles Crocker, which had acquired “Little Switzerland” ( the canyon’s second nickname) from magnate Adolph Sutro, opened a pleasure garden and zoo in Glen Canyon, hoping to attract homeowners to the estate’s development in nearby Glen Park. Complaints about rowdy behavior led the city to buy Glen Canyon in 1922 and turn it into a park. In 1959, plans to run an elevated freeway above the canyon were abandoned, thanks in large part to neighborhood resistance led by a 64yearold lifelong Glen Park resident named “Minnie” Straub Baxter. Today, Glen Canyon is a designated natural area, and nothing more intrusive than hikers wandering its network of trails and nonnative plants threaten its serenity.
6 Urbano Drive
The Ingleside District is one of San Francisco’s lessknown neighborhoods, but it contains one of the odder avenues in the city: Urbano Drive, an ovalshaped street that exactly traces the course of an old racetrack. As related in Woody LaBounty’s “Ingleside Terraces,” the story begins in 1895, when the Ingleside Track opened in the thensparsely populated area off the old Ocean House Road, claiming to be the most opulent horse racing venue west of the Mississippi. The racetrack’s inner track was
7/ 8 of a mile long. At first crowds flocked to the track, including respectable citizens not usually seen at horse races. But within a few years, the Ingleside Track, too, began to attract a seedy clientele, and the antigambling fervor of the Progressive Era led to its closure. It reopened again only to be converted after the 1906 earthquake and fire into a refugee camp for the aged, indigent and alcoholic. In 1910, the land was sold to developer Joseph Leonard, who built a new upscale residence park he called Ingleside Terraces, centered on the old racetrack. The former clubhouse became a sales office and community center, and Urbano Drive was built over the inner racetrack. A weird exclamation mark to this peculiar history is provided by the Giant Sundial, a 30footlong, 17foothigh concrete sundial set inside the oval as a marketing gimmick for Ingleside Terraces. Promoted as the world’s largest sundial ( today it is not even the largest one in San Francisco), supposedly one can read the time from a block away — if there is any sun to cast a shadow in one of the city’s foggiest neighborhoods.
7 The Golden Hydrant above Dolores Park
The uphill southwest corner of Dolores Park, at 20th and Church streets, offers one of the city’s great views. It’s also the site of a castiron fixture that saved the Mission District: the Golden Hydrant. On April 21, 1906, the third day after the earthquake started a series of fires that would destroy most of San Francisco, flames were racing south along Guerrero and Lexington streets and threatening to burn everything in their path. Because the water mains had broken, none of the city’s hydrants had any water. But miraculously, a single hydrant at the corner of 20th and Church was found to be working. A small crew of exhausted firemen began pulling their heavy engine up Dolores Street. Three hundred refugees sheltering in the park ran to help them, shouting like soldiers going into battle. It took more than an hour to drag the engine to the hydrant. When the firemen connected their hose to the hydrant, a great jet of water shot out and the crowd cheered again. Firemen, policemen and civilians — 3,000 men in all — battled the flames. After seven hours, they had stopped the inferno at 20th Street and saved the Mission. The hydrant is still there, painted gold every April 18.
8 South Park
This unexpected little oval bounded by Second and Third and Bryant and Brannan streets has experienced more booms and busts than any other place in San Francisco. In 1854, an Englishman named George Gordon created South Park as an exclusive residential enclave, modeling it after aristocratic English spaces like Berkeley Square. For 20 years, South Park and adjoining Rincon Hill ( the remnants of which support the Bay Bridge anchorage) were the toniest addresses in town. But the growth of industry South of Market, and the invention of the cable car, led the city’s blue bloods to move to Nob Hill, and South Park declined. It was a rundown quasislum for more than a century, until the first dotcom boom transformed it into the upscale oasis it remains today. A number of historic buildings survive, including three residential hotels ( the Madrid, the Park View and the Gran Oriente Filipino) that once housed the Japanese and Filipino immigrants who settled in South Park after 1906.
Gary Kamiya is the author of “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City” with illustrations by Paul Madonna and “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.” He writes the Portals of the Past column for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: Culture@ sfchronicle. com