48 Hours in San Francisco
AUGUST 2010 48 Hours in San Francisco
San Francisco in the summer is often blanketed by fog in the morning and evening. Of course, I chose to stop first at Twin Peaks, usually a spectacular view of the city, but alas, at 9 pm, shrouded by fog. Still, an evocative first shot. It’s always great to arrive in San Francisco, my favorite place in California. These days, getting to the city is really easy, with the BART line now serving San Francisco International directly from downtown. We chose a private car, to do some sightseeing on the way into town, but the fog put paid to that idea. As always, it would help to have a weather contingency plan! If you’re looking for a viewpoint experience, Twin Peaks is perfect, but do it mid-afternoon, mornings and evenings, you’re just going to be shooting inthe fog!We’re staying at the Marriott Marquis near 3rd and Market, right at the edge of the financial district, and in the heart of some of the best big label shopping in the city. Despite a recent lobby remodel, the Marriott Marquis is a little tired, but a very efficient and convenient hotel whose staff do a great job making you feel welcome at such a large place. The view from the 39th floor View Bar is well worth a visit, whether you’re staying here or not. The immediate area South of Market around the Marriott is a little run down. Some nice new additions (Mel’s Drive In Diner), and tired old ones (Metreon Entertainment Center), a few revamped older hotels, and always a lively amount of barhoppers and homeless around late at night, like much of the area after dark. It’s not unsafe, just a little edgy. Within a few blocks are many of downtown’s major shopping streets and hotels, so a lot of crowds during the day ceding the streets to the louder crowd late at night. It’s a busy place and you’ll find much the same night and day difference anywhere in the heart of this city.It’s just a short walk from here to the Chinatown Gate at Grant and Bush Streets. A great place to start our exploration of the city…
San Francisco’s Chinatown starts, famously, at Grant and Bush Streets with a beautiful gateway and, if you keep going along Grant Street, a ton of wonderful souvenir and trinket shops. It’s a ton of junk, mostly, but fun, quirky, Chinatown junk that is just so much fun to browse! My favorite time to wander through here is early morning on a weekday, when tourists have yet to discover the place on their maps, and you are surrounded by the sights and sounds of Chinatown beginning their market business day. The primary tourist track is Grant Street, but you can wander off left or right to find more authentic Chinese market stores and wares.
Grant Street eventually intersects Columbus Avenue, but I prefer to take a right off Grant on Jackson Street, one of my favorite views in all of San Francisco sits at the corner of Columbus and Jackson: The American Zoetrope Headquarters, location of the Coppola Cafe (recently renamed the Cafe Zoetrope), the fabulous Sentinel Building with it’s equally impressive backdrop of the Transamerica Pyramid. The Cafe is full of wonderful film posters from Francis Ford Coppola’s illustrious career, and offers a fantastic Italian ambience, with great Niebaum Coppola wines and good food. It never seems to be that busy, well worth a pause in your San Francisco walk!
Continuing up Columbus Avenue, another famous intersection: Columbus and Jack Kerouac Alley, site of another two local favorites; the City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio’s Bar. Both regular haunts of San Francisco’s Beat Poets and Literary Elite, both uniquely and dinstinctly San Francisco in style and ambience.
Columbus Avenue, well featured in any of my visits to San Francisco, stretches from Montgomery Street at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf. Many tourists queue for an hour or more at the foot of Powell Street awaiting the famous Cable Car ride to Fisherman’s Wharf. I prefer the walk through Chinatown and down the wonderfully diverse Columbus Avenue. After crossing Broadway (a rather seedy collection of strip joints, bars and night clubs) ColumbusStreet literally starts to bloom. Look back toward the city from Broadway & Columbus, and there’s a nice Banksy mural painted above the street on the right.
The Stinkin’ Rose, a garlic restaurant forms the original anchor of garlic row, a wonderfully eclectic row of unique restaurants. All along either side of the street, dozens of neighborhood coffee shops, cafes and restaurants, almost all of them excellent, enticing and just fun to be near! The street transects Little Italy, as well as being the main thoroughfare of North Beach. Both are famous for featuring some of the best smaller restaurants anywhere in the city. For authentic Italian and a fabulous array of other foods, North Beach along Columbus is a must-dine location!
About halfway from Broadway to Fisherman’s wharf, you’ll find the picturesque Washington Park, with it’s beautiful backdrop of the St. Peter & Paul Church on Filbert Street. It’s a dog park, a place for calisthenic aerobics and also a picnic spot around lunch-time. San Franciscans definitely make good and efficient use of their green spaces! A short climb up Filbert Street is the famous viewpoint of Coit Tower, with excellent panoramic views over the Embarcadero, the City and the Bay - and you don’t even have to go up the tower, views of the city are plentiful from the park at its base.
A few blocks further along Columbus street, you’ll find Lombard street, and a short walk up it’s steep hill, you’ll find the single block section of Lombard Street that is the windiest (that’s twistiest) street in the world. There’s not many moments in the day that it isn’t full of people who just have to drive down it, but the nice thing is once you get up to the foot of it, there’s a nice walk downhill straight to Ghiradelli Square, the cornerstone of Fisherman’s Wharf, with it’s chocolate factory and souvenir shops galore.Back along Columbus, you’re now heading downhill into Fisherman’s Wharf. Any time after 10 am, it’s packed with tourists, but still well worth a look-see. At the foot of Columbus Avenue, as it dead ends at Beach Street, you’ll find the Hyde Street Historic Pier, with ferry boats and industrial steamers from years gone by (as well as the filming location for much of the television series Nash Bridges). This pier is a lot quieter than the nearby Pier 39 with its bustling boardwalk with huge variety of tourist shops and an excellent aquarium as well as a good selection of restaurants, most with great bay views.
Here at Fisherman’s Wharf, we decided to rent some bicycles for the highlight of our visit, biking across the Golden Gate Bridge. There’s many good places and ways to view and photograph this incredible bridge, but none surpass the buzz of actually crossing it, either on foot or, in this case, on two wheels. Between Broadway and Fisherman’s Wharf you’ll find dozens of places to rent all kinds of bicycles. We chose Bay City Bike at 1325 Columbus Ave., for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because it was right there at the foot of Columbus Street, which, after the bridge ride and ferry return trip from Sausalito, would be easy to get back to from the ferry. Secondly, their pricing at about $32 a day for a really comfortable bike was very reasonable and their web site was one of the most helpful in planning that part of the trip.Kitted out with bikes, we headed off for the bridge along a well laid out series of bike lanes, bike paths and parks which stretch from Fisherman’s Wharf along Crissy Field and the edge of the Marina District to the foot of the Golden Gate. There are many opportunities for side trips along this route before you even get to the bridge. You’ll pass Fort Mason, which offers a very popular antiques market on Mondays or Saturdays and a Farmers Market on Sundays; Fort Point, for a beautiful view of the bay at the foot of the bridge (and filming location for many a San Francisco shoot out as well as the famous Kim-Novak-rescued-from-the-bay-by-Jimmy-Stewart scene in Vertigo (incidentally, the apartment exterior used as Kim Novak’s in the same film is on Lombard street a couple of blocks off Columbus). There’s also the picturesque Palace of Fine Arts dome, columns and reflecting pools, now home of kid favorite science museum ‘The Exploratorium’. Right after the Palace of Fine Arts, you’re cycling along the edge of the former naval base The Presidio as you climb up winding paths and roads to the bridge level.
The Golden Gate Bridge is a major tourist attraction, and therefore always busy, but it is also a major commuter route, and equally busy in people simply trying to get across as well. As a bicyclist, you must follow designated directions and lanes and avoid running afoul of the rather angry local bike enthusiasts, who don’t appear to like sharing their bridge at anytime. On a Sunday, there’s hundreds of people cycling in both directions along one side of the bridge designated for cyclists. It’s a little chaotic, and the local speed bicyclists don’t help matters shouting and barging dangerously through wobbly hordes of tourists, but there’s plenty of room with patience, and there are some good spots to pull over and enjoy the view out of the way — just be aware of your surroundings, and stay out of the way of the replica Tour-De-France-gear-wearing bike nazis.
If you time your bridge biking like we did, you’ll start along the bridge in the fog, and emerge on the other side in bright sunshine (we started around 11 am), a wonderful transition, and a great photo opportunity looking back at the city. Once across the bridge, it’s an easy coast down the hills into Sausalito, a lovely little bayside area with a perfect view of the bridge and the city beyond.
We stopped here for lunch at one of the many little cafes and restaurants along the main thoroughfare through town. Cafe Tutti, despite it’s incredible location right near the ferry pier, was very reasonably priced and served a wonderful mediterranean and Greek-inspired menu and excellent coffee, too. There’s a ton of boutiques and souvenir shops that looked worth exploring, but we elected to hop on the next ferry back to the city, as the sun was out, and it was time for a nice cruise across the bay!
Our ferry ticket was added to the bicycle rental (I think around $3 or $4) so we were armed with tickets for any ferry. Boarding was prompt and efficient and we departed just about on time at 2:10 pm. This ferry ride (Sausalito - San Francisco Pier 1 or Pier 39) is rated as one of the best in the world. It is wonderful, first with fantastic views of the Golden Gate Bridge spanning the gateway to the Pacific Ocean, then, closing in on Alcatraz Island as it nears the city, you get a great view of the island with the city as its backdrop, rounding the Island before heading in to the pier.
The ferry docked at Pier 1, which is a much quieter place to arrive than Pier 39, and allows a really nice bicycle ride along the Embarcadero Parkway all the way back to Fisherman’s Wharf. We did stop at Pier 39, always worth a look, on the way back to drop off the rental bikes. At just $32 a day, there’s a lot more bicycling can be done in the Bay Area, ours was just a glimpse of one of the routes around the Bay.
A quick tip here. I mentioned earlier that the Cable Car turnaround at Market and Powell and at the other end of the line in Fisherman’s Wharf is always busy with long lines of tourists most days of the week. However, at the California line turnaround near Pier 1 (at the famous ferry building clock tower), the lines are often a lot shorter and I find the ride a lot more exciting, as California Street is I think the steepest of the two lines. So, if you didn’t take a bike over to Sausalito, hopping the Cable Car here is a good way to get back up to Powell Street and get back to the shopping!
Shopping. San Francisco has always been famous for it, and our afternoon walk was reserved for the best of it. Draw a square from Market Street & Powell, up the hill to Union Square, then along Bush Street to Grant at the Chinatown Gate, and back down Grant again to Market Street. That area covers the best of San Francisco shopping and includes Macy’s, Macy’s for Men, Nordstrom, all the big ticket apparel retailers including Armani Exchange, Prada, Tiffany’s and more. At Powell & Market you’ll find the San Francisco Centre Shopping Mall, a spacious indoor collection of high-end retailers. Hidden away among the larger streets and storefronts, take a wander down Maiden Lane (Union Square - Grant Street) which has a fun selection of street cafes, galleries and exclusive stores. Down another famous alleyway between Grant and Kearny Streets, Belden Lane, discover some of the best French bistro fare in the city.
Sunday, I’ve always found is a great day to explore San Francisco, as many of the city’s museums and parks offer discount or free entry at least one Sunday a month. Also, a lot of the city’s scheduled public events take place around the city on the weekends. Just consult listings at http://events.sfgate.com/ and take your pick!Dining in San Francisco is an art form, the city offering one of the liveliest dining scenes in any city I’ve visited. The key, I think, is to know before you go. San Francisco offers spectacular dining in world famous surroundings, and researching the best or the latest can be daunting without local help. On this visit, we chose to simplify and just eat where we landed, so to speak. There’s no shortage of excellent food here, so picking what sounds or looks good usually works a treat. This evening, after a long day all over the city, we decided to simply go up instead of out and had dinner on the 39th floor of our hotel at the View Bar. A fantastic place to watch the fog roll in over the city. Another great place for a similar experience: Harry Denton’s Starlight Room, above the Sir Francis Drake Hotel at Powell & Sutter Streets (though it is a nightclub later in the evening). Both also offer decent happy hour discounts around 4-7 pm, too.
Yerba Buena Gardens, located between 4th and 5th Streets at Howard, just South of Market Street, is right next to the Marriott Marquis where we stayed, and a lovely little escape right in the heart of the city. On one side, SF MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), on the other, The Metreon, a rather tired movie theater multiplex, and behind it, the Moscone Convention Center. The gardens are rather small, but nicely positioned in juxtaposition to the city, and also feature a Martin Luther King Memorial Fountain which looks out over a tiny old church surrounded by skyscrapers. Lovely place.
For our return to the airport on Monday, we chose the much more economical BART which you can pick up at a number of underground stations along Market Street in the center of the city. It costs less than $10 and is one of the easiest airport-to-downtown links I’ve found. With heavy luggage it might be a bit of a struggle, but traveling light, it’s a breeze.San Francisco is always busy, always exciting and never short of fun. With a little more time on your hands, I recommend exploring a little more than we did. The Palace of the Legion of Honour, in Lincoln Park offers an incredible sampling of art from just about every period, and it’s position overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge is worth the visit alone (it’s one of the most popular local wedding backdrops, too). Keep going down Geary Street (past the turn for Lincoln Park and the Palace of the Legion of Honour) until it reaches the Pacific Coast at Cliff House, and begins one of the world’s most famous drives, along Highway 1 past Pebble Beach and through Big Sur. Union Street, away from the big ticket retailers of downtown offers fantastic boutique shopping and dining with a true San Francisco neighborhood feel. Golden Gate Park is simply to big to cover in a short visit, but it’s picnic areas, bike paths, ponds and museums are just wonderful places to be any weekend of the year.
Year round, San Francisco will always deliver a little fog, some sunshine, and a lot to see and do. It’s one of my favorite cities in America, in my opinion second only to New York for vibrance, photographic and sightseeing opportunities, and a fantastic visit every time. I could live here, if I could afford it!