San Francisco
One of the USA's most attractive cities, San Francisco's hilly streets provide some gorgeous glimpses of the Bay and its famous bridges. The city has an atmosphere of genteel chic mixed with offbeat innovation and a self-effacing quality so blatantly missing from brassy New York and plastic LA.
The treats of San Francisco are not just for locals. The basic pleasures of life here – wonderful food, sparkling nightlife and those glorious views – are there for everyone. Watch the white fog fill the Golden Gate as the sunset lights up the windows across the bay, and prepare to leave your heart.
The best way to explore San Francisco's neighbourhoods is on foot. A leisurely stroll through North Beach, with its relaxed European charm, leads smack into bustling Chinatown. A hike up hoity-toity Nob Hill segues down to the troubled Tenderloin. South of Market, a busy warehouse district during the day, transforms into nightclub central at night. The Mission District is varied: many of its streets are Latino enclaves, but a continuous flow of hip young invaders has redefined many of the district’s crossroads. The nearby Castro was claimed by gay men in the 1970s, and it remains predominantly gay today, projecting an assured, almost mainstream air.
Area: 127 sq km
Population: 775,000
Country: USA
Time Zone: GMT/UTC -8 (Pacific Time)
Telephone Area Code: San Francisco and Marin County 415; Oakland and Berkeley 510; the Peninsula 650; Wine Country 707; San Jose 408 and Santa Cruz 831
back to top Orientation San Francisco covers the tip of a 50km (30mi) peninsula in Northern California, with the Pacific Ocean on its western side and the San Francisco Bay to the north and east. San Francisco is just one of many cities in the Bay Area; others include Oakland (east across the Bay Bridge), Berkeley (just north of Oakland) and San Jose (an hour's drive southeast of San Francisco, near the southern tip of the bay). Marin County and the Wine Country lie to the north, across the Golden Gate Bridge.
The most touristed part of the city resembles a slice of pie, with Van Ness Ave and Market St making the two sides and the Embarcadero the round edge of the pie. The steaming toppings of this homebaked slice are the classy shops around Union Square, the highrise Financial District, the classy Civic Center, the down-and-out but up-and-coming Tenderloin, swanky Nob Hill and Russian Hill, Chinatown, North Beach and the epicentre of tourist kitsch, Fisherman's Wharf. To the south of Market St lies SoMa, an upwardly mobile warehouse zone of clubs and bars that fades in the southwest into the Mission - the city's Latino quarter - and then the Castro, the centre of gay life.
The vast swathe from Van Ness Ave west to the Pacific Ocean encompasses upscale neighbourhoods like the Marina and Pacific Heights, ethnically diverse zones like the Richmond and Sunset Districts and the self-conscious timewarp of Haight-Ashbury. Three of the city's great parklands - the Presidio, Lincoln Park and Golden Gate Park - are also in this area.
When to Go
San Francisco is a popular location any time of the year. Summer is the prime tourist season, so prices are higher, lines are longer and finding a parking place is about as easy as working out what to wear to the Folsom Street Fair. San Francisco's summer weather is none too hospitable anyway: the bay is often foggy, while inland or north in the Wine Country it's often too hot and dusty for comfort. Local weather patterns are highly unpredictable, but generally the best months weather-wise are between mid-September and mid-November.
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Events Public Holidays include:New Year's Day (1 January), Martin Luther King Jr Day (third Monday in January), Presidents' Day (third Monday in February), Easter 26 April), Memorial Day (last Monday in May), Independence Day (4 July), Labor Day (first Monday in September), Columbus Day (second Monday in October), Veterans' Day (11 November), Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday in November) and Christmas Day.
If you like partying and dress-ups, San Francisco could be just the ticket. Chinese New Year (late January/early February) is celebrated in Chinatown with color and verve similar to Chinese centers in Asia. In late April, Cherry Blossom Festival is celebrated in Japantown with martial arts demos, tea ceremonies and other Japanese events. Also in April is San Francisco's International Film Festival, the oldest in the USA. On the third Sunday in May, over 100,000 joggers take part in the Bay to Breakers run, many of them in silly costume (and sometimes in nothing at all).
June is a celebratory month for San Francisco's gay community, with a film festival and Gay Pride Week leading up to the last Sunday in June, when the outrageous Gay Freedom Day Parade is held. The evening before the parade is the Dyke March and the Pink Saturday party on Castro St, attended by up to half a million people. Carnival is celebrated in the Mission District over Memorial Day weekend in May.
Stern Grove, a woodsy park in the Sunset District, teems with music lovers on weekends during its free June-through-August concert series. Cable car drivers compete to be the loudest or most tuneful in the late June/early July Cable Car Bell-Ringing Championship. September is chock full of festivals: there's free Opera in the Park, free Shakespeare performances, a blues festival and the Folsom St Fair, the sexiest S&M street fair in the city. San Francisco really turns it on for Halloween (31 October): this may be the most crazed night of the year, with hundreds of thousands of costumed revelers taking to the streets, particularly Castro St.
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Public Holidays
1 Jan - New Year's Day
third Monday in January - Martin Luther King Jnr Day
third Monday in February - Presidents' Day
Mar/Apr - Easter
last Monday in May - Memorial Day
4 Jul - Independence Day
first Monday in September - Labour Day
second Monday in October - Columbus Day
11 Nov - Veterans Day
fourth Thursday in November - Thanksgiving
25 Dec - Christmas Day
Attractions
Chinatown
Chinatown is densely packed and colourful. There are some tacky curio shops, but the 30,000 Chinese - most of whom speak Cantonese - live in a tightly knit, distinctly un-Western community. It's a great place for casual wandering through narrow alleys, where on quiet afternoons you can hear the clack of mahjong tiles from behind screen doors.
The most colorful time to visit Chinatown is during the Chinese New Year in late January or early February, with a parade and fireworks and other festivities.
back to top Downtown
San Francisco's densely populated downtown is squeezed into the hilly northeastern corner of the peninsula. The often dramatic cityscape came about because the streets were laid out as if their planners had never so much as glanced at the city's topography. They simply dropped a grid pattern onto the steeply undulating terrain, and the result is that streets often climb or drop at ridiculously steep gradients. It makes parking hazardous, breeds bicycle messengers of superhuman strength and provides a hairy setting for car chase scenes in movies.
Union Square is San Francisco's downtown tourist centre. It's a mishmash of glitzy shops and hotels, flower vendors and homeless people. Cable cars rumble down the west side of the square; try looking down Hyde St towards Aquatic Park, down Washington St to Chinatown and the Financial District, or down California St from Nob Hill. And if you're in Nob Hill, you've just got to ride the elevator to the Top of the Mark, the famous view bar at the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. SoMa ('South of Market St') is a combination of lofty office buildings spilling over from the Financial District, fancy condos along the Embarcadero, a touristy gallery and museum precinct around Yerba Buena Gardens and the late night entertainment scene along Folsom and 11th Sts.
Fisherman's Wharf
There's no getting away from unspeakable kitschiness of Fisherman's Wharf, but it remains both fun and hugely popular. The gateway for several top attractions (Alcatraz, the Maritime Museum and the Historic Ships Pier), its focal point is Pier 39, which is as popular with a sea lion colony as it is with tourists.
back to top Golden Gate Park
San Fransico's great playground is a cunningly designed rectangle that appears far larger than it is. Woods line the edges, and nature lovers can wander in the fern dell, the arboretum, the Japanese Tea Garden and the tulip gardens. It's hard to believe it's all artificially created on top of sand dunes.
Haight-Ashbury
Keep on truckin' southwest of downtown and you'll hit Haight-Ashbury ('the Haight'), the locus of San Francisco's brief fling as the home of flower power in the late 1960s. Today, the Haight is still colourful, but its pretty Victorian houses and proximity to Golden Gate Park have prompted increasing gentrification.
North Beach
North Beach is sandwiched between Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf. It's a lively stretch of strip joints, bars, cafes and restaurants that started as the city's Italian quarter and gave birth to the Beats in the 1950s - City Lights Bookstore is here, at the corner of Columbus Ave and Jack Kerouac Alley. The neighborhood is hemmed in on the east by Telegraph Hill, which features tree-shaded stairways that ramble down the steep eastern face of the hill, and Coit Tower. One of the city's most famous landmarks, the tower is a prime spot to let loose your postcard-vista voyeurism. The 360° views from here are superb.
back to top San Francisco Bay
San Francisco's bay is curiously shy. It always seems to be around the corner, glimpsed in the distance, seen from afar. It is spanned by bridges, surrounded by cities and suede hills, dotted with sails and crisscrossed by fast-moving ferries. The bay is the largest inlet on the California coast, stretching about 60mi (100km) in length and up to 12mi (20km) in width.
The beautiful Golden Gate Bridge crosses the 2mi (3km) mouth of the bay. Completed in 1937, the bridge remains the symbol of the city despite competition from modern constructions. At the time of its completion, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world and the 746ft (224m) suspension towers were higher than any structure west of New York City. The Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Oakland, is five times as long as the Golden Gate Bridge, carries far more traffic and predates it by six months, but it's never had the same iconic fame.
The bay's other attractions include Alcatraz Island, which operated as an 'escape-proof' prison from 1933 to 1963. Al Capone, 'Machine Gun' Kelly and Robert Stroud, the 'birdman of Alcatraz,' were among the prison's unsavory residents. North of Alcatraz, Angel Island served as an internment camp during WWII; it's now a popular place for walking, hiking, biking, picnics and camping. Both islands are accessible by ferry from Fisherman's Wharf and the Embarcadero.
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