A scenic — mostly — treasure that locals tend to overlook
The 49 Mile Scenic Drive is one of those local attractions to which very few locals are actually attracted.
Its distinctive signs, featuring a chummylooking seagull against a blue and white background, are ubiquitous, popping up in places expected (El Camino Del Mar, Twin Peaks, the Marina Green) and unexpected (the industrial stretch of Cesar Chavez Street east of Highway 101, Woodside Avenue next to the old Juvenile Hall, Howard and Sixth streets). But for most people its route — not to mention its entire concept — is a mystery.
The 49 Mile Scenic Drive turns out to be surprisingly venerable. Although its boosterish, autocentric concept screams 1950s, it was actually created in 1938.
A civic group called the Downtown Association came up with the idea to encourage visitors to the 193940 World’s Fair on justbuilt Treasure Island to explore San Francisco. According to Joseph M. Lubow and Laurel Rosen in “San Francisco’s 49 Mile Scenic Drive,” it is the only mapped drivingtour route found in an American city.
The 49 Mile Scenic Drive is still well worth driving. It takes three to four hours, depending on traffic, and actually runs 46 miles. It covers the waterfront for long stretches, hugging as close as possible to the city’s northern and western shore. It runs through iconic neighborhoods like Chinatown and Nob Hill and includes generous swaths of the Presidio, Golden Gate Park and Twin Peaks, as well as meandering along Roosevelt Way and Dolores Street.
Besides its often spectacular views, the most interesting thing about the drive is how dramatically stretches of it have changed since 1938 — in ways that would have both enthralled and appalled the Downtown Association.
In the “appalled” category, one would have to place the drive’s starting and finishing point, City Hall. In 1938 the Civic Center, with its grand collection of public buildings, was eminently respectable, even if its aesthetic whole was less than the sum of its majestic Beaux Arts parts. It began to decline in the late 1970s, and since then the area around City Hall has been plagued by homelessness and drug use.
Indeed, until a new playground was installed in Civic Center Plaza in 2018, the drive went past a notorious lawn where injectiondrug users tied off and shot up in public, literally under the windows of City Hall — definitely not the kind of scenic attraction the Downtown Association had in mind.
Another change involved Japantown, which the drive goes through after circling Civic Center. This must have been disconcerting for drivers in the route’s early, wartime years, when Japantown ceased to be Japantown after the government rounded up its Japanese American residents and sent them off to prison camps.
North Beach, where the drive goes after leaving Chinatown, also underwent a major transformation. In 1938, North Beach was still an intensely Italian citywithinacity, whose 60,000 residents often came from and married people from the same small Ligurian and Tuscan towns.
With its macaroni factories, accordion shops and quaint markets filled with salamis and Chianti, the neighborhood’s main street, upper Grant Avenue, would be a major visitor draw today. But it was far less of one at the time. And the Beats, who turned North Beach into a tourist mecca, didn’t exist yet. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady would not make their own 4,900mile scenic drive back and forth across the country until 1949.
Fisherman’s Wharf was more of a tourist destination than North Beach when the drive opened, but it was still much sleepier than it is now. Today’s wharf, with its motels, fishing boat tours, seafood restaurants and kitschy attractions, came into existence in the 1950s. In 1938 it was popular with visitors, but primarily it was a working fishing area with a few restaurants.
The drive’s long stretch on Sunset Boulevard was also totally different in 1938. That landscaped thoroughfare was brand new — you can sense the civic pride the Downtown Association must have felt at its creation — and it ran through a landscape still dominated by sand dunes and scrub.
One area that would bring an incredulous smile to the drive’s creators is Dogpatch. In the 1930s, this flat stretch to the east of Potrero Hill, one of the drive’s more unlikely sections, was a grimy industrial and residential neighborhood whose residents toiled at places like the Union Iron Works and the American Can Co. As late as the 1980s, no one would have predicted it would become a soughtafter neighborhood filled with highend housing complexes, upscale clothing stores and stylish cafes.
Another section of the drive that has witnessed dramatic improvement was Howard Street. In 1938, Howard around Fourth Street was the South of the Slot neighborhood and the heart of Skid Row, filled with cheap rooming houses, bars, pawnshops, greasy spoons and liquor stores. Today this area houses the Moscone Center and the fourstar Intercontinental Hotel.
Just half a mile to the northwest, however, the drive traverses today’s Skid Row, Larkin Street in the Tenderloin. In 1938, the Tenderloin was in decline but was still a respectable neighborhood, its residential hotels and apartments housing a cross section of workingclass residents, from longshoremen to bartenders to secretaries. There were increasing numbers of downandout people, but little crime or drug use and no homelessness.
However, as Peter Field notes in “The Tenderloin District of San Francisco Through Time,” the seeds of the neighborhood’s descent had already been planted. Landlords cut back on maintenance of their apartments and hotels during the Depression, a lower class of tenants began to move in, and a downward spiral ensued. While a savvy contemporary observer could have predicted some of what happened to the Tenderloin, it’s unlikely anyone could have foreseen the larger socioeconomic changes — like the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and the rise of an urban underclass — that drove its decline.
If some sections of the drive can no longer be called scenic, overall it’s remarkable how well this 81yearold route has stood the test of time — a testament to the enduring and evolving charm of San Francisco’s neighborhoods, but above all to the timeless magic of its terrain. Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@ sfchronicle.com