San Francisco Travel
Alcatraz
Before the rocky islet of Alcatraz became America's most dreaded high-security prison , in 1934, it had been home to little more than the odd pelican ( alcatraz in Spanish). Surrounded by the freezing, impassable water of San Francisco Bay, it made an ideal place to hold the nation's most wanted criminals men such as Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly. The conditions were inhumane: inmates were kept in solitary confinement, in cells no larger than nine by five feet, most without light. They were not allowed to eat together, read newspapers, play cards or even talk; relatives could visit for only two hours each month. Escape really was impossible. Nine men managed to get off the rock, but there is no evidence that any of them made it to the mainland.
Due to its massive running costs, the jail finally closed in 1963. The island remained abandoned until 1969, when a group of Native Americans staged an occupation as part of a peaceful attempt to claim the island for their people, citing treaties which designated all federal land not in use as automatically reverting to their ownership. Using all the bureaucratic trickery it could muster, the government finally ousted them in 1971, claiming the operative lighthouse qualified it as active.
At least 750,000 tourists each year take the excellent hour-long, self-guided audio tours of the abandoned prison, which include some sharp anecdotal commentary and even the chance to spend a minute (it feels like forever) locked in a darkened cell.
Boats to Alcatraz leave from pier 41 ($13.25 including audio tour, $10 without; frequent departures from 9.30am, last boat leaves Alcatraz at 6.30pm). Advance reservations strongly recommended, especially in peak tourist season (allow two weeks; tel 415/705-5555, www.nps.gov/alcatraz ). Night tours are also available in the summer, from Thursday to Sunday departing at 6.20pm and 7.05pm and returning at 8:15pm and 9.30pm.
San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies just 48 hilly square miles at the tip of a slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California coast. Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the US, it remains true to itself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small city whose people pride themselves on being the cultured counterparts to their cousins in LA the last bastion of civilization on the lunatic fringe of America. It's a compact and approachable place, where downtown streets rise on impossible gradients to reveal stunning views of the city, the bay and beyond, and blanket fogs roll in unexpectedly to envelop the city in mist. This is not the California of mono-tonous blue skies and slothful warmth the temperatures rarely exceed the seventies, and even during summer can drop much lower.
The original inhabitants of this area, the Ohlone Indians , were all but wiped out within a few years of the establishment in 1776 of the Mission Dolores , the sixth in the chain of Spanish Catholic missions that ran the length of California. Two years after the Americans replaced the Mexicans in 1846, the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills precipitated the rip-roaring Gold Rush . Within a year fifty thousand pioneers had traveled west, and east from China, turning San Francisco from a muddy village and wasteland of sand dunes into a thriving supply center and transit town. By the time the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, San Francisco was a lawless, rowdy boomtown of bordellos and drinking dens, something the moneyed elite who hit it big on the much more dependable silver Comstock Load worked hard to mend, constructing wide boulevards, parks, a cable car system and elaborate Victorian redwood mansions.
In the midst of the city's golden age, however, a massive earthquake , followed by three days of fire, wiped out most of the town in 1906. Rebuilding began immediately, resulting in a city more magnificent than before; in the decades that followed, writers like Dashiell Hammett and Jack London lived and worked here. Many of the city's landmarks, including Coit Tower and both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, were built in the 1920s and 1930s. By World War II San Francisco had been eclipsed by Los Angeles as the main west coast city, but it achieved a new cultural eminence with the emergence of the Beats in the Fifties and the hippies in the Sixties, when the fusion of music, protest, rebellion and, of course, drugs that characterized 1967's "Summer of Love" took over the Haight-Ashbury district.
In a conservative America, San Francisco's reputation as a liberal oasis continues to grow, attracting waves of resettlers from all over the US. It is estimated that over half the city's population originates from somewhere else. It is a city in a constant state of evolution, fast gentrifying itself into one of the most high-end towns on earth thanks, in part, to the disposable incomes pumped into its coffers from its sizeable singles and gay contingents. Gay capital of the world, San Francisco has also been the scene of the dot.com revolution's rise and fall. The resultant wealth at one time made housing prices skyrocket often at the expense of the city's middle and lower classes but the closure of hundreds of start-up IT companies has brought real-estate prices back down to (almost) reasonable levels. Despite the city's current economic ebbs and flows, your impression of the city likely won't be altered it remains one of the most proudly distinct places to be found anywhere.
Fisherman's Wharf
San Francisco rarely tries to pass off pure, unabashed commercialism as a worthy tourist attraction, but with Fisherman's Wharf and the nearby waterfront district, it makes an exception.
An inventive use of statistics allows the area to proclaim itself the most-visited tourist attraction in the entire country; in fact, this crowded and hideous ensemble of waterfront kitsch and fast-food stands makes a sad and rather misleading introduction to the city. It may be hard to believe, but this was once a genuine fishing port; the few fishing vessels that can still afford the exorbitant mooring charges are usually finished by early morning and get out before the tourists arrive. The shops and bars here are among the most overpriced in the city, and crowd-weary families do little to add to the ambience.
If you wish to get out on the water, 60-minute bay cruises depart several times a day from piers 39 and 41. Better instead to head to the museums of Fort Mason and on to the expanse of green parkland along the Marina district , affording excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Golden Gate Bridge
The orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge , perhaps the best-loved symbol of San Francisco, are visible from almost every high point in the city. The bridge, which spans 4200ft, had taken only 52 months to design and build when it was opened in 1937. Some quarter of a million people turned up for a sunrise party to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 1987; the winds were strong and the bridge buckled, but fortunately did not break. Driving across is a real thrill, racing under the towers, while the half-hour walk across allows you to take in its enormous size.
The Fort Point National Historic Site beneath the bridge gives a good sense of the place as the westernmost outpost of the nation. This brick fortress, built in the 1850s, has a dramatic site, the surf pounding away beneath the great span of the bridge high above a view made famous by Kim Novak's suicide attempt in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo . A small museum (ThursMon 10am5pm; free) inside the fort displays some rusty old cannons and artillery.
San Francisco's best waters are to be found at the beaches at the tip of the peninsula, but beach culture doesn't exist here the way it does in southern California. Dangerous riptides and excruciatingly cold water make it impossible to swim with any confidence, and nude sunbathing is about as adventurous as things get.
Inland, Lincoln Park , at 34th Avenue and Clement Street, primarily an unusually dramatic golf course, offers striking views of the Marin headlands and is home to the remote, white-pillared California Palace of the Legion of Honor ($8, $2.50 off with Muni transfer, free every Tues, surcharge for special exhibitions; daily except Mon 9.30am5pm; www.legionofhonor.org ). Re-opened in late 1995 after extensive renovation, the museum is arguably San Francisco's best and most staggeringly majestic building. Its isolated, windswept location, high on a bluff overlooking the ocean, is unsurpassably romantic, and deters the hordes that swarm the MoMA and the museums in the park. The emphasis is on fine art, with the Renaissance represented by the works of Titian and El Greco, hung in spacious, high-ceilinged, well-lit marble halls. Some great canvases by Rembrandt and Hals, as well as Rubens' magnificent Tribute Money , are highlights of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish collection. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist galleries contain works by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Czanne. Several galleries are devoted to Rodin sculptures bronze, porcelain and stone pieces including The Athlete, Fugit Amor and a small cast of The Kiss . A highlight of the museum, The Thinker , greets visitors in the museum's front courtyard.
Golden Gate Park
In a city with an abundance of green space, Golden Gate Park stands out as not just the largest, but also the most beautiful, and safest, of its parks. Spreading three miles or so west from the Haight as far as the Pacific, it was constructed on what was then an area of wild sand dunes, buffeted by the spray from the ocean. Despite the throngs of joggers, polo players, roller-skaters, cyclists and strollers, it never seems to get overcrowded and you can always find a spot to be alone.
Of the park's several museums, two are under construction at the time of writing. The M.H. de Young Museum , with its large and diverse range of painting and sculpture, is in the midst of a massive rehaul and not due to reopen until 2005. The similarly under-construction Asian Art Museum is moving locations entirely, within the old Main Library space, next to the new Main Library in the Civic Center district. It is considered one of the largest and most impressive museums devoted only to Asian art in the Western Hemisphere. (You can check on the status of its development at www.asianart.org ) The California Academy of Sciences ($8.50, $2.50 discount with Muni transfer, free first Wed of month; summer daily 9am6pm; rest of year daily 10am5pm; www.calacademy.org ) opposite is a good place to amuse restless children, with its 30ft dinosaur skeleton, life-size replicas of elephant seals and other California wildlife, and live colony of black-footed penguins. Over 6,000 specimens of aquatic life can be viewed in its Steinhart Aquarium (admission included in museum ticket; daily 10am5pm), the best are the alligators and other reptiles lurking in a simulated swamp. Sky shows in its Morrison Planetarium cost $2.50 more. Slightly to the west is the Japanese Tea Garden ($3.50; daily 9am6.30pm), dominated by a massive bronze Buddha. Bridges, footpaths, pools filled with carp, bonsai and cherry trees lend a peaceful feel. Busloads of tourists pour in; by far the best idea is to get here early for a breakfast of tea and fortune cookies in the tea house ($3.50 anytime).
The beautiful National AIDS Memorial Grove is in the eastern end of the park, near the tennis courts. Inaugurated in 1991, it is a pleasant and thought-provoking place to stroll. Tours take place Thursdays from 9.30am to 12.30pm (tel 415/750-8340, www.aidsmemorial.org ).