San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Audio tours examine architecture, Golden Gate Park
A unicorn and a lion doing battle carved from marble. Redwoods clustered below a concrete skyscraper. A grove dedicated to a dead bear.
San Francisco is full of delightful oddities and quiet corners whose stories illuminate how the city evolved, including the mistakes along the way. And if someone is whispering tips in your ear on where to look and what to know, all the better.
That’s the idea behind something new The Chronicle launched recently: GPS based audio tours reported and hosted by Chronicle journalists and published on the VoiceMap app. Each tour explores a different area of San Francisco, with your guides’ voices in your headphones, like they’re along for the stroll. As you move, the audio moves with you, so you always know when to turn and where to go.
In “Unfolding the Financial District: Design adventures in San Francisco’s hub,” Chronicle urban design critic John King guides listeners through a crash course on 20th century architectural styles, with surprises that range from glorious to grotesque. The walk is less than two miles start to finish, but that’s long enough to explore not only the dense downtown landscape, but the political and planning backstage dramas that help explain why the city looks the way it does.
In “Secrets of Golden Gate Park: Graft, gunfire and a 90-year-old fish,” Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub and columnist Heather Knight plot a course through San Francisco’s serene oasis on an entertaining urban hike for natives, newcomers and tourists alike. Along the way, they share tales of the arrogant tycoons, natural disasters and community triumphs that have shaped the park we know today (as well as the story of one stuffed 150-year-old grizzly bear that happens to be on the California flag).
Here are some of sights and destinations you’ll visit on each tour.
Highlights from ‘Unfolding the Financial District’
580 California St.: This 23-story postmodern granite tower concludes with 12 faceless, shrouded sculptures up high — figures that the architect wickedly likened to the elected inhabitants of San Francisco City Hall.
Belden Place: Long before there were dining parklets, this one-block alley sprouted chic cafes that put out lunchtime tables and dared the city to intervene. Now it’s a destination for nearby workers, so compelling that it has held on despite the pandemic.
Tusked Survivors, California Street: Forget Pier 39’s sea lions. In the depths of the Financial District, you can encounter a row of walrus heads carved from granite — all that remains of the Alaska Commercial Building that was built in 1908 and demolished 65 years later.
Royal Globe Building, 201 Sansome St.: Talk about an unexpected sight you don’t want to miss: The entrance to this former office building is topped by a clock being wrestled over by a lion and a unicorn. Carved from gleaming white marble, better yet.
1 Bush St.: No gargoyles, no unicorns, no walruses. This modest 20-story tower opened in 1959 and immediately redefined architectural expectations for this part of town — a taut study in metal and glass that remains one of the Financial District’s true landmarks. Russ Building, 235 Montgomery St.: An old-school skyscraper that looks as though Superman should be bounding into orbit from one of its brawny shoulders, George Kelham designed this Gothic triumph that opened in 1927 and for 35 years was the city’s tallest tower.
Highlights from ‘Secrets of Golden Gate Park’
Sweeny Observatory ruins: Thomas U. Sweeny built Sweeny Observatory in 1891 at Golden Gate Park’s highest point near Stow Lake, paying in cash so no one could protest his fortress-like structure that ruined some of the park’s best views. But fate had other plans. When the 1906 earthquake destroyed the observatory, William Hammond Hall, one of the original park designers, was quoted in The Chronicle saying, “apparently a higher power has taken matters into his own hands.”
Steinhart Aquarium’s incredibly old fish: The park’s museums, gardens, lakes and roads are filled with violent, uncomfortable and often really weird stories. Like the time they put live reindeer in an elevator to the roof at California Academy of Sciences, or Methuselah, the Australian
lungfish that is at least 90 years old — possibly much older — and has been an aquarium exhibit since the 1930s.
The grove named for a taxidermied bear: San Francisco Examiner owner William Randolph Hearst sponsored a hunt for one of the state’s last grizzlies in 1889, and Monarch was captured during a news cycle as big as a royal wedding and the O.J. Simpson trial combined. He eventually ended up on the California flag, though grizzlies had been hunted out of the state entirely. Where is Monarch now? He’s stuffed, sitting in an underground archive at California Academy of Sciences, where he still makes occassional appearances.
The statue park founder John McLaren would
have hated: Longtime Golden Gate Park superintendent John McLaren is the hero of our story, and also a bit of a crank. He fought to build parks within walking distance of every San Francisco home, but the hard-line naturalist may have gone a little too far, resisting museums in Golden Gate Park and fighting against statues — ordering his gardeners to cover new ones with shrubs and vines.
He would have hated his own statue, though, as you’ll see, it’s different than the rest, and as you’ll hear, it’s worth paying tribute to the horticulturalist, even several generations after his death. Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s culture critic, and John King is The Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle. com, jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub, @johnkingsfchron