Let other cities build grand monuments. San Francisco days are better spent sunning by the bay and digesting lavish seafood dinners – no matter whether you’re a human or a sea lion that’s belly-flopped on Pier 39.
Outlandish behavior comes with the territory here. What with all the earthquakes and eccentrics, this peninsula keeps only a tentative hold on the planet, not to mention the continental US. But as any San Franciscan will tell you, gravity is overrated. With 43 hills and a population of free thinkers, crafty inventors, and weirdoes passing as normal, this city stubbornly refuses to be brought down to earth. Instead reality is forced to rise to the occasion, with flocks of wild parrots taking to the treetops, ingenious meals by rising star chefs, and poets who just keep on riffing until their words take flight. San Francisco’s stratospheric booms and crashing busts aren’t for the weak of heart, but as anyone who’s clung onto the side of a cable car will tell you, this town gives one hell of a ride.
With a shrug of her shoulders, SF wryly admits to a lascivious past. In the Gold Rush days she played madam to the biggest continuous drinking party around, in a wharf area notoriously known as the Barbary Coast (now overlapped by Chinatown, North Beach, and the Financial District). Here, sailors, miners, prostitutes and shady opportunists made a lethal mix, and rich prospectors gambled away or were conned out of the gold nuggets in their jeans pockets. The Tenderloin was home to many speakeasies and gin joints during Prohibition, and there’s one or two that have been cleverly revived. All kinds of drinks were invented here to keep local lushes happy, so take your pick of SF’s specialties. Today, the intoxicating array of bars are more modestly prepped to set you up with a round or two – although some of the gracious old saloons still have a hauntingly wicked feel about them.
San Francisco is one dinner party where most of the guests arrived rather rudely late. When Spanish cowboys came to the area we know as San Francisco there was already a standing dinner date with local Native Americans going back over 14,300 years. Early California cuisine included shellfish, bear meat, edible flowers, and acorn-flour bread, and when the seasons changed, the Native Ohlone moved their progressive dinner venue further up or down the coast.
Say what you will about Sam Brannan, the man knew how to sell a story. In 1848, the real estate speculator and Mormon tabloid publisher of the California Star published sensational news of a find 120 miles from San Francisco at Sutter’s Mill, where sawmill employees had taken to gold-panning duty after flakes had surfaced downstream. Brannan had his reasons for publishing what was then pure speculation as fact: he was hoping it would excite some interest back East in some swampland he was trying to sell. San Franciscans ignored Brannan’s bluster at first, preoccupied with news of the handover of California to the US from Mexico. To prove his point, Brannan traveled to Sutter’s Fort, where news of the find was verified under conditions of strict secrecy.
Con men, visionaries, crackpots, adventurers, fugitives and anyone with nothing to lose: there was a place for everyone in San Francisco in 1849. For a couple of flush years, Chinese, Irish, African Americans, Australians, and Mexicans panned for gold side by side, boozed together, and slept in close quarters. But as gold became harder to find, backstabbing became more common – sometimes literally. The city worked hard to live up to Rudyard Kipling’s 1889 assessment: ‘San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.’
With new piers and the fanfare of the Panama Expo, San Francisco became the major West Coast port. Local longshoremen didn’t see the upside of the shipping bonanza, unloading heavy cargo in dangerous conditions from 8am to midnight for pay that hardly put dinner on the table. A historic 83-day strike in 1934 won public sympathy, forced concessions from the shipping magnates, and established San Francisco’s reputation as the organizing headquarters of the ‘Left Coast.’
San Francisco would continue to be a testing ground for freedom of expression in the years to come, as comedian Lenny Bruce uttered the F-word on stage and burlesque dancer Carol Doda bared it all for titillated audiences in North Beach clubs. But it wasn’t ribald jokes or striptease that would pop the last button of conventional morality in San Francisco – that was a job for the CIA. In one of its more pronounced lapses in screening judgment, the CIA hired a writer named Ken Kesey to test psychoactive drugs intended to create the ultimate soldier. Instead they had unwittingly inspired Kesey to write the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, drive psychedelic busloads of Merry Pranksters across country, and introduce the city to LSD and the Grateful Dead at the legendary Acid Tests.
By the 1970s, San Francisco’s gay community was fed up with police raids, done with Haight squats and ready for music with an actual beat. In 1959, when an opponent had accused the mayor at the time, George Christopher, of allowing San Francisco to become ‘the national headquarters of the organized homosexuals, ’ Christopher authorized crackdowns on cruising areas and gay bars and started a blacklist of gay citizens. Never one to be upstaged or harassed, self-proclaimed Absolute Empress of San Francisco José Sarria promptly ran for mayor and received 5600 votes. When local media joined the growing criticism of the continuing raids, the crackdown stopped – a feat not achieved until 1969 in New York, several years later, by the Stonewall protestors. San Francisco gays soon ditched hetero hippies in the Haight, headed over the hills to Victorian fixer-uppers in the Castro, and proceeded to make history to a funky disco beat.
Perfectly arranged on a secure little bay harbor, Sausalito is undeniably lovely. Named for the ‘tiny willows’ that once populated the banks of its creeks, it’s a tiny settlement of pretty houses that tumble neatly down a green hillside into a well-heeled downtown. Much of the town affords the visitor uninterrupted views of San Francisco and Angel Island and, due to the ridgeline at its back, fog generally bypasses this charmed spot.
Sausalito began as a 19,000-acre land grant to an army captain in 1838. When it became the terminus of the train line down the Pacific coast, it entered a new stage as a busy lumber port with a racy waterfront. WWII brought dramatic changes when Sausalito became the site of Marinship, a huge shipbuilding yard. After the war a new bohemian period began, with a resident artists’ colony living in ‘arks’ (houseboats moored along the bay). You’ll still see dozens of these floating abodes.
Nestled under the redwoods at the base of Mt Tamalpais, tiny Mill Valley is one of the Bay Area’s most picturesque hamlets. It was originally a logging town, the name stemming from an 1830s sawmill that was the first in the Bay Area to provide lumber. Though the 1892 Mill Valley Lumber Company still greets motorists on Miller Ave, the town’s a vastly different place today, packed with wildly expensive homes, fancy cars and pricey boutiques.
Mill Valley also served as the starting point for the scenic railway that carried visitors up Mt Tam. The tracks were removed in 1940, and today the Depot Bookstore & Cafe occupies the space of the former station.
The headlands rise majestically out of the water at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge, their rugged beauty all the more striking given the fact that they’re only a few miles from San Francisco’s urban intensity. A few forts and bunkers are left over from a century of US military occupation - which is, ironically, the reason they are protected parklands today and free of development. It’s no mystery why this is one of the Bay Area’s most popular hiking and biking destinations. As the trails wind through the scenic headlands, they afford stunning views of the sea, the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, and they lead to isolated beaches and secluded spots for picnics.
At the end of a small peninsula pointing out into the center of the bay, Tiburon is blessed with gorgeous views, much like Sausalito. It’s a small community, but has a handful of fine restaurants that constitute destinations in themselves. Take the ferry from San Francisco, browse the shops on Main St, grab a bite to eat and you’ve seen Tiburon. The town is also the jumping-off point for nearby Angel Island.
