• The Castro: One Neighborhood, Many Names  The Castro: One Neighborhood, Many NamesAmong San Francisco's rich tapestry of neighborhoods, one particularly colorful patch stands out. Today we commonly refer to it as The Castro, but over the years this chameleon of a community has had many monikers. For centuries, the gentle slopes leading up to Twin Peaks proved a fertile foraging ground for indigenous Ohlone Indians based in the diminutive village of Chutchui on the shores of a lagoon. In 1776, the de Anza expedition arrived and established the site of the first Mission de San Francisco de Asis, or Mission Dolores, as well as the Presidio. The Mission Trail, which connected the two encampments, intersected existing Ohlone hunting trails at what is now Castro and Market..... |
• Vermont Street - Is it the Crookedest?  Vermont Street - Is it the Crookedest?Did you know that there are two crookedest streets in San Francisco? Yes, you know about Lombard Street--but did you know about Vermont Street on Potrero Hill? Running between 20th and 22nd Streets, Vermont is a 14.3 percent grade and has five full turns and two half turns. But other than those facts, your intrepid editor could not find much else. In various newspaper articles it is cited as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) building project. However, the WPA was created in 1935, and the San Francisco History Center digital photography collection shows a photo dated from 1928 with the existing curves. Also in the S.F. Public Library is a reference book listing all the WPA projects i..... |
• San Francisco's West of Twin Peaks  San Francisco's West of Twin PeaksCongratulations to City Guide Jacquie Proctor on the publication of her book, San Francisco’s West of Twin Peaks, by Arcadia Press. This neighbor-hood, home to the city’s highest hill, Mount Davidson, and the 103-foot-high cross at its summit, also has links to the creation of San Francisco’s first railway and water systems, its tallest buildings and longest bridges, and a number of men who held the City’s highest office. First owned in 1846 by the last Mexican alcalde, Jose Noe, it was later purchased by the City’s fourth mayor, Cornelius Garrison, as well as its 21st, Adolph Sutro. Sutro had made his fortune digging a seven-mile long tunnel to mine the Comstock Lode beneath another Mount ..... |
• In Case of Fire, Look to Twin Peaks  In Case of Fire, Look to Twin PeaksAndy Rooney’s voice lives in my head. Yeah, that unmistakable cranky whine from CBS TV’s 60 Minutes seems to be always asking, “Do you ever wonder why...?” Do you ever wonder why San Francisco has two sizes of fire hydrants? You sometimes see them facing each other across an intersection, one Stan Laurel to the other’s Oliver Hardy. And my inner Andy wanted to know why. A fireman once gave me the first piece of the puzzle. Skinny Stan is a fairly standard model that in San Francisco runs the drinking water pumped from Chain of Lakes, a.k.a. the San Andreas Fault. Husky Oliver, on the other hand, spouts a high-pressure stream that is essentially driven by gravity through its own..... |
• Baroness von Schroeder, Rambling Bits of History  Baroness von Schroeder, Rambling Bits of HistoryThis article began as a search to learn more about Baroness von Schroeder, the developer of a Mission district residential area. Her trail proved to intersect with many of the movers and shakers of San Francisco at the turn of the last century. Between 1889 and 1894, Baroness Mary Ellen von Schroeder developed 27 houses on South Van Ness (then called Howard Street) between 22nd and 23rd Streets and the backing lots with houses facing Capp Street. Designed by architect Thomas J. Welsh (1845-1918), the Eastlake or American Stick style houses sold for around $5,000. Many of the existing houses have the original flash glass—small colored glass squares surrounding the main window pane. Welsh d..... |
• Swensen’s Ice Cream: Looking Back at a Neighborhood  Swensen’s Ice Cream: Looking Back at a Neighborhood
In 1948 Earle Swensen opened his ice cream store on Hyde and Union Streets. Since then, more than 180 flavors have been created, Swensen's franchises have opened worldwide, and Swensen became a multimillionaire. Earle Swensen, the son of a Norwegian brick mason, started making ice cream on a Navy troop ship in the South Pacific during World War II. He only had the ingredients for vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, but he said the sailors didn't care what flavor he made – they just wanted something cold in the hot climate. Back in San Francisco, he became a Deputy City Assessor. When a small store became vacant on Russian Hill, he started his empire with $750. Realizing he needed more cap..... |
• Albion Castle – San Franciscans, their Beers, and the Story of One Brewery  Albion Castle – San Franciscans, their Beers, and the Story of One BreweryNineteen-year-old John Burnell, already an experienced brewer trained in London, came to San Francisco in 1868. He bought a parcel of land with large flowing springs in an area where brothers Robert and Philip Hunter managed real estate transactions for the new city – an area known today as Hunter’s Point. Here in the 1870s Burnell established the Albion Porter & Ale Brewery. The building he erected, featuring a three-story tower reminiscent of a Norman castle from Burnell’s native England, has always been known as the Albion Castle. The Castle was recently in the news when it was auctioned off for $2.1 million. The building has walls two to three feet thick and was built with stone t..... |
• 826 Valencia: Pirates and More  826 Valencia: Pirates and MoreLast year while doing one of my walks in the Mission Dolores Neighborhood, I suddenly realized that I had been bypassing one of San Francisco's most interesting and famed addresses, 826 Valencia, now listed as a San Francisco Designated Landmark. picture1right300 This relatively modest storefront exterior masquerades as a pirate supply store, providing a commercial “front” for its real business, which must be seen to be believed. If you can get past the tantalizing random and eclectic pirate supplies, such as spyglasses, eye patches, wooden legs, a fish tank, and an infamous tub of lard, the rest of the facility is dedicated to a vibrantly unique tutoring enterprise, now in its ninth ..... |
 Old Mt. Sutro, Reborn!Mt. Sutro – where is that? This is a question that I often get from San Francisco natives and long-time residents. After over 20 years spent growing up high up on Sutro’s southern slope, even I didn’t know precisely until recent years, although I knew that it was somewhere in that dense forest up behind UCSF. The summit of Mt. Sutro lies in Sutro Forest, which is to the south of UCSF’s main campus at Parnassus Heights, west of Cole Valley, east of the Inner Sunset, and north of the Sutro Tower and Twin Peaks. Mt. Sutro is San Francisco’s fourth highest summit at 904 feet. Nearby Twin Peaks and Mt. Davidson are much more visible, partly due to the remnants of Sutro’s Giant Forest, w..... |
 Graffiti in San FranciscoCity Guide's North Beach by Night guides are saddened every time they lead walkers past the marvelous mural on Romolo Place off Broadway between Columbus and Kearny. Created by artist Ann Sherry in 1994, the 200-foot-long mural entitled “Gold Mountain” depicts the history of the Chinese in San Francisco. It includes such Chinatown icons as Donaldina Cameron, who rescued Chinese girls forced into prostitution, Edsel Ford Fong, the famously rude waiter at Sam Wo’s restaurant, and Betty Ong, a flight attendant on the first plane to hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, who was painted into the mural in 2003. Chinatown native Betty Ong, a flight attendant whose plane was flown into the World Tr..... |
 Jack Kerouac Alley Mural
Perhaps as you stroll along Columbus Avenue in North Beach, you pay little attention to the sixty-foot-long Jack Kerouac Alley, aptly situated between the landmark City Lights Bookstore and legendary Vesuvio Café. The passageway that served as a transportation shortcut from Chinatown to North Beach was once a refuge for back-alley drinkers and rotting garbage. Today, Jack Kerouac Alley is transformed into an inviting pedestrian-only thoroughfare complete with decorative lampposts and poetry from eastern and western cultures inscribed on the brick walkway connecting the two neighborhoods. The renovated alley was opened to the public on March 31, 2007, under the funding and direction of the Ch..... |
• Secret Places to Go in San Francisco  Secret Places to Go in San Francisco
City Guides know that San Francisco holds a plethora of delightful surprises beyond the cable cars and Fisherman’s Wharf. But could there be some FREE hidden gems you haven’t discovered yet? With map in hand and a bit of Internet route pre-planning, I recently set off to see some of San Francisco’s non-traditional sights. First stop was the City College campus on Ocean Avenue to view Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity mural, painted in 1940 for the Golden Gate International Exposition. Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo lived in San Francisco while he created this stunning work combining the art, culture, history, politics, religion, and technology of the Americas. City Guides will offer a t..... |
• San Francisco Armory in the Mission  San Francisco Armory in the MissionCity Guides offers three different tours in the Mission. None venture remotely near the hulking ugly pseudo-Moorish Armory building at 1800 Mission Street. With clinker brick exteriors, four octagonal towers, and 200,000 square feet of space, this forbidding structure was built in 1912-14 as an arsenal for the US National Guard, replacing one in the Western Addition destroyed in 1906. Its ultimate cost, including land, was $500,000. Besides its official function as a military training and storage facility, it was used frequently for sporting events and prizefights. Said to be the largest building of architectural importance in the Mission, it has the largest unsupported enclosed volu..... |
 Visitacion ValleyEditors Note: City Guide Cynthia Cox fell in love with Visitacion Valley after purchasing a wonderful old fixer-upper there six years ago and hearing tales of the community’s past from her octogenarian neighbor. Cynthia incorporated this information into her two-part City Guides Special Visitacion Valley May/October Neighborhood Walk. GuideLines is grateful to Cynthia for sharing the following Viz Valley historical overview: For thousands of years, today’s southern San Francisco neighborhood nestled between Bayview Heights and John McLaren Park was inhabited by Native Americans who hunted in the hills and fished in the nearby bay. But with the July 2, 1777 “discovery” and nami..... |
• Yerba Buena Lane: San Francisco's Newest Street  Yerba Buena Lane: San Francisco's Newest Street
Although open since 2002, the pedestrian-only thoroughfare named Yerba Buena Lane is finally coming into its own. With the recent opening of the Contemporary Jewish Museum and Jessie Square, many people are now taking notice of this lively and interesting area for the first time. Yerba Buena Lane allows pedestrians to flow from the Union Square area north of Market Street to the museums and public landscapes of Yerba Buena Gardens south of Market (SoMa), without a long detour down to Third or Fourth Street. At 550 feet long, it is designed to provide a convenient corridor for over 5 million people annually, fulfilling a vision of urban planners over 50 years in the making. Historical..... |
• San Francisco’s Mount Davidson  San Francisco’s Mount DavidsonCentered in the crossroads of Portola Drive, O’Shaughnessy Boulevard, and Monterey Boulevard, Mount Davidson is near the geographic center of the city. You can walk up to the trailhead on Juanita Street. The walk winds up the hill, through overhangs of pine and eucalyptus trees, to the top of the mountain, at 938 feet it is the highest peak in San Francisco. As you wind around the hill towards the west, you come upon solemn and lonely trees. Once known as Blue Mountain thanks to its profusion of colorful wildflowers, the peak was part of Don Jose de Jesus Noe’s 4,443-acre San Miguel Rancho granted in 1845 by Mexican governor Pio Pico. After California gained statehood, French naval ca..... |
 Lombard StreetThe block of Lombard between Hyde and Leavenworth Streets began as a straight, cobblestone street with a 27% grade. In the 1920s the people living on this street wanted cars, but the street was too steep for vehicles. Carl Henry, insurance and drug business executive, is credited with initially proposing the idea of a curved street. Henry owned half of the lots on the 1000 block of Lombard and land all around the street. He created a lily pond and rose gardens, and had planned to give his land to the city as a park. However, when he died his widow sold the property to pay off debts. Since the Lombard Street lots were inaccessible by autos, the property values were not as high as on ne..... |
 Dearborn GardenJoni Mitchell’s well-known lyric “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” is a rueful sentiment about the destruction of our natural environment. But there is at least one place in San Francisco where that process was actually reversed. The Dearborn Community Garden is located on a quiet street about two blocks northeast of Dolores Park, adjacent to 43-49 Dearborn Street. It was formerly an employee parking lot for the Pepsico bottling plant situated at the southwest corner of 17th and Valencia Streets. This is also where the police station is now. As the plant's business started to wane, the parking lot stood virtually empty for many years. Neighbors started to garden there, taking..... |
 Our Day with Huell HowserHuell Howser, creator and host of California Gold on Public Broadcasting affiliates, contacted City Guides seeking people for two episodes of the program. This included the 75th Anniversary of Coit Tower, and a story on which street is the crookedest. picture1right300 Laura Schoeder recruited Mary Nell York and Masha Zakheim for Coit Tower. City Guide Emeritus Mary Nell led this tour for many years, and Masha, an author and educator, is the daughter of Coit Tower muralist Bernard Zakheim. Because of a GuideLines article, I became the subject matter expert on Vermont Street. Phil Noyes, the show’s producer, asked me to give some history on Lombard Street. He said, “Just read a tourist ..... |
• Sutro’s Triumph of Light Statue  Sutro’s Triumph of Light StatueSan Francisco maps from the early 1900s show a depiction of the Statue of Liberty on a hill above 17th Street, near Clayton Street. This rise is called Mount Olympus, and at the time, was considered the geographic center of San Francisco. Adolph Sutro—silver baron, philanthropist, and one-time mayor—owned the land. And, as he did on his other property, Sutro installed a statue. picture1right300 Like Sutro’s other statuary, this was a Belgian copy of something he saw on his travels. The Triumph of Light depicted Lady Liberty victorious over Despotism. picture2right300 On Thanksgiving Day, 1887, a crowd congregated at the no-longer-existing intersection of Ashbury and 16th Streets f..... |
• Treasures at Mission High Museum  Treasures at Mission High MuseumSometimes an era or institution is forgotten when not enough resources are available to collect and memorialize artifacts or stories from the past. This is not the case for Mission High School, whose rich history has been preserved in a museum located right inside the school. The idea for the museum was initiated and eventually implemented by a group of volunteers in the Mission High School Alumni Association. This included Ted Scourkes and Walter Swan, who previously served as principal and teacher at the school, respectively, and now are active volunteers at the museum. Tucked inside a rectangular room, the museum’s artifacts include antique school furniture and equipment, photogra..... |
 Crocker’s Spite FenceIf you look up “spite fence” in the Wikipedia you will read: “A spite fence is an overly tall fence typically constructed between adjacent lots by a property owner who is annoyed with, or wishes to annoy, a neighbor or who wishes to completely obstruct the view between lots.” Just below the definition you see a picture of the top of Nob Hill before 1906 that includes one of the most famous (or shall we say infamous?) spite fences ever built. picture1right300 The story has been told a number of ways, but generally goes like this. Charles Crocker, one of the “Big Four” partners in the Central Pacific Railroad, had become a multi- millionaire and wanted to build a mansion at the to..... |
 Opera in North BeachGuideLines frequently receives emails from people who have read our articles on the City Guides website, and request information. This includes:
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Falling for Vertigo’s Madeleine
by Jesse Warr
If five years ago I‘d not visited the town of San Juan Bautista, there‘d be no guided Vertigo tour. Most people go there as fourth-graders to see the old Spanish mission, the stable, and associated buildings--a field trip during their year of California History. As a tour operator, I went out of idle curiosity.
I love the town because it appears to have no aspirations to fame. (Search in vain for a “San Juan Bautista” T-shirt.) But what a unique place! Its mission church sits adjacent to the San Andreas fault. Stand next to its Indian cemetery on a rise above the old El Camino Real to view miles of cultivated fields stretching across the Salinas Valley to the Gabilan Range. Face west to see the Castro adobe, where the Breen family, survivors of the Donner Party, took refuge with the Mexican authority; Breen descendants still hold public office in the county. There’s a saloon straight out of the Old West, the original land office still selling real estate, and antique shops along main street known throughout the region. San Juan Bautista is also the home of El Teatro Campesino, whose Zoot Suit went on to national acclaim.
But I believed that no potential customer would ask to be taken two hours south from San Francisco to San Juan Bautista. So I considered another tack. Other than fourth-graders, San Juan Bautista is best known to legion of fans of Hitchcock’s classic film Vertigo. Two critical scenes were filmed here, though the thing most come to see is not there: the bell tower from which two women fall to their deaths. Not there in ‘57, or today, the fatal tower was re-created on a sound stage.
The full-day version of my tour covers most of the surviving Vertigo sites. (Ernie’s, Hitchcock’s favorite restaurant--where Scottie (James Stewart) first sees Madeleine (Kim Novak)--sadly, does not survive. After a morning of traveling to and exploring the historic plaza of San Juan Bautista, we stop for lunch under redwoods in Scotts Valley, because the Hitchcocks summered there for 32 years. Then back in San Francisco, we pay homage to Carlotta Valdez--“the beautiful Carlotta, the sad Carlotta”--at her gravesite in the Mission Dolores cemetery. She’s not here...never was. But it makes for an enchanted beginning to Scottie’s pursuit of Madeleine.
Yet we don’t spend the day looking for things that don’t exist. A remarkable number of sites are still here to be explored: the Palace of Fine Arts, the sanatorium where Scotty has his unsettling flashbacks, Scotty’s apartment below the Crookedest Street, Madeleine’s next to the Fairmont, Judy’s in the then Empire, now York Hotel, the Flood mansion atop Nob Hill, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor...alas, Carlotta is not here either. Aficionados often love most the spot at Fort Point where a possessed Madeleine jumps into the Bay. Cinephiles appreciate that Hitchcock ingeniously used mysterious, elusive San Francisco as a main character in the film--perhaps its brightest star.
City Guide and former Management Board member Jesse Warr is owner of A Friend in Town. See toursanfranciscobay.com/
All historic photos in this issue reprinted with permission, SF History Center, SF Public Library.
Hitchcock fans continue to seek out the fictional gravesite of Carlotta Valdez
at the Mission Dolores cemetery, shown here in a photo taken sometime between 1870 and 1890.
Ernie’s Restaurant provided the romantic setting where Scottie first glimpsed Madeleine.
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