A cooler way to see the sights of the city
“I found a lot of (existing tours) kind of dry, kind of stale, made for a more conservative or maybe boring demographic.” Wes Leslie, Wild SF Walking Tours
Wes Leslie stood next to a giant heart sculpture in Union Square. He was wearing a brown felt hat, blue wire-rimmed glasses, a bow tie, cropped pants and a guitar, and holding up a bright yellow flag that read “Free Tour.” As a gentle mist started to fall on a chilly San Francisco morning, I realized I was the only one who had shown up for the daily 10 a.m. Free and All You Need tour of San Francisco. Leslie wasn’t fazed in the least.
I was fazed. Five minutes earlier, I’d been a passenger in an Uber car that collided with another Uber car. I let Leslie guide me through the square as I stretched my wobbly legs and relaxed into his easy presence. The walk, presented by Wild SF Walking Tours, aimed to both provide a history lesson and offer practical advice for visitors and transplants looking for a local’s introduction to the city. It also came with a sprinkle of Leslie’s passion for social justice.
He gestured with a lean, freckled arm around the square and explained its history as a onetime spiritual center of the city, home to numerous 19th century congregations. “It’s no longer the religious district,” Leslie said. “Unless you’re coming for the gods of consumerism and capitalism.”
Leslie co-founded Wild SF Walking Tours five years ago. The company offers five tours throughout San Francisco, two of which are free. Their thrice-weekly $18 Haunted SF Ghost Tour consistently sells out. “The free tour we see less as a money-maker and more as a marketing tool,” Leslie said.
He was raised in Pleasanton, but the 27-year-old Mission District resident considers himself a third-generation San Franciscan. He proudly sported an impressive diamond-encrusted Golden Gate Transit ring that belonged to his grandfather, a former bus driver. Leslie fell for the free tour concept while studying abroad in Europe and when he returned, founded Wild SF Tours with Jordan “J. Jo” Jo. They began their company by showing up in local hostels and offering young, cash-strapped tourists tours for tips.
“I found a lot of (existing tours) kind of dry, kind of stale, made for a more conservative or maybe boring demographic,” Leslie said. “We realized that people don’t want to feel like idiots when they go on tours. They want to hang out with cool locals.”
Throughout our walk, Leslie easily spouted off local history and flavor, peppering each of the tour’s landmarks with obscure examples of how each contributed to the spirit of San Francisco. He seemed partial to the Gold Rush and post-1906 earthquake eras of community spirit and quirky characters.
Leslie labored over dusty books and documents in the San Francisco Main Library’s history room to develop his signature take on the city. He and Jo are in the process of writing an immersive art tour of the Yerba Buena art district. Often, they’ll customize tours for local companies hoping to give new employees a hip and welcoming overview of San Francisco. The Free and All You Need tour was designed to answer questions that Leslie and his team of tour guides were asked on other tours. “We kept getting all the same questions,” Leslie said with a smile. “‘How do you score marijuana? Where are all the cool bars? What’s with all the homelessness?’ ”
Leslie is happy to answer. A sometime bartender, Leslie is delighted to offer insider’s drinking advice. And the social-justice-minded tour guide tackled the question of homelessness with a little blame on Ronald Reagan and a lot of emphasis on compassion. He skirts around any ambiguous legality of the marijuana question by telling folks what to avoid if they don’t want to score weed.
Leslie led me beneath Market Street, down into the Montgomery Street BART Station. There, he explained cable cars, Muni, BART and how Clipper cards work, all while plucking his guitar. Back above ground, we meandered through the Financial District pausing at a statue of William Alexander Leidesdorff, a remarkable San Franciscan about whom I had never heard. At this portion of the trip, Leslie handed me a free postcard and explained that this is where his tour stops to send a note home, just as San Francisco transplants did 150 years ago.
We ended in the free public gardens of the Financial District, popping up to the 15th floor of 343 Sansome St. Leslie gazed across the skyline and lauded San Francisco’s long history of community involvement and activism. My tour guide grinned: “I like to end the tour on a note of people power.”