August 30, 2007 – Whew! It’s been a day of “touring”, and we’re back and tuckered out. Although it’s still daylight here, the clock on the computer (which hasn’t been reset) shows that it’s 10:30 p.m., which everyone knows is well past our normal bedtime.
Today started off early – we took the subway to Embarcadaro, to the Ferry Building – a beautifully renovated public space that was almost lost to a freeway but found new life when the most recent earthquake caused the freeway to collapse. Ta-da – instant public –
space!
Our tour this morning was an overview of the City, lead by Tatiana, who had WAAAYYY too much energy for so early in the morning. We warmed up to her later, though, and decided she actually gave a pretty decent tour.
While at the Ferry Building, we learned that anyplace flat in San Francisco is probably old landfill. This includes the Ferry Building location. Apparently, much of the landfill came from the 1850’s, during the gold rush. People made the trip around the horn and came in by sea to go to the gold fields, which are about 200 miles east of here. The rush to get there was so strong that they apparently just abandoned the boats in the harbor. Aside from the traffic jam this created, it provided some wonderful fill material, although it wasn’t clear if they just put dirt in around the boats or just crunched them down and used them as the fill. In either event, the shoreline grew west from where it was and provided more prime real estate.
San Francisco remained a busy commercial port until the 1960’s, when containerization created ships that were too big to fit in the piers. The buildings and property have now been reallocated to shopping and commercial areas.
There were lots of other tidbits offered as we rode along in that big charter bus.
1. Telegraph hill has nothing to do with Samuel Morse. It was used to allow semaphore signals to be relayed into town so the residents would know when ships came in.
2. The sea lions at Pier 39 moved in about 10 to 15 years ago. Nobody knows why they stayed, but like Canadian Geese on a golf course, they’re smelly and a nuisance. Unfortunately, they’re also protected and can’t be annoyed.
3. Alcatraz started out as a military prison in the 1850’s, and was where persons accused of treason were held during the Civil War. It was also the first lighthouse on the west coast. There’s no natural water or native plant life on the island.
4. Giradelli Square, of chocolate fame, was originally a woolen factory during the civil war. Now it’s not even chocolate, it’s all shopping.
After we’d gotten these and lots of other factoids, we were at Lombard Street, the world’s crookedest street. Traffic is really limited (to primarily 4 passenger vehicles), and the French hydrangeas were originally imported and planted by a resident. The street was originally a 2 –way up and down street, but was too steep for cars in the 20’s to make the grade, so the switchbacks were installed.
While waiting to take pictures at Lombard Street, we met Bruce and Greg, 2 friends who were traveling on vacation from St. Louis. Nice guys, we chatted throughout the day.
We then went to Northbeach, which is adjacent to Chinatown. This was originally an Italian neighborhood, and you can still tell you’re there by the green / white / red stripes on the streetlights and signposts. Northbeach is a very old neighborhood that hosts St. Peter and Paul church, which is where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe took their wedding pictures. Having previously been married, they weren’t able to actually enter into a holy union there, but they were allowed to have some nice photos done.
Northbeach is also the original home to the “beat” generation, which originated in the City Lights bookstore. It was there that the book Howl was penned and sold, and the book was ultimately deemed obscene by someone, charges were filed and a very famous court case coming up with the difference between obscene and literature was decided by the courts.
Of course, all good literature also requires good libations, and next door to City Lights is Vesuvios, which is an equally well known drinking hole for authors. In the alley between the two, which connects Northbeach and China Town, there are granite blocks with quotes from famous authors. My favorite was “Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes”, by Ella Willcox.
Chinatown was next. It smelled much like Chinatowns everywhere, and we don’t need to go back for anything we saw there. It was, interestingly enough, one of the oldest communities as well and was one of the first to recognize the value of tourism. As a result, they rebuilt quickly after the 1906 earthquake and fire, enhancing the “asian” architecture. There are still very strong cultural roots there.
One really cool building was the United Commercial Bank building, which was originally the Chinese telephone exchange. Operators there, all unmarried females, had to know five different Chinese dialects in addition to English. Because their phone book was done in Chinese calligraphy, they also had the only hand painted phone books. San Francisco’s is the oldest Chinatown outside of asia.
From Chinatown we went to Nob Hill, which is now all hotels. It came into existence because of the invention of the cable car, since it was too steep to occupy and travel to before that. Most of the mansions burned in 1906. One guy, Mr. Crocker, donated his building site to the Episcopal Church afterwards and they built Grace Cathedral which has as it’s main entrance the Ghioverti Doors – the same doors that we saw in Florence, Italy, on the Duomo (although there was no tower to climb here!). These were cast form the original molds, which have since been destroyed.
Speaking of cable cars – they were invented in 1873 and travel at 9.5 miles per hour. SF has the only manually operated cable cars in the world.
The morning was finished off going through several different neighborhoods and seeing the different architecture. It’s amazing how much was just ignored until someone decided it was important again and should be saved. By the time they decided this with the Victorian houses, however, they’d already bulldozed about half of them.
Our last stop before lunch was at golden Gate Park, which occupies 1500 acres in the middle of town. 3 miles long by ½ mile wide, when you think about it that’s a sizeable chunk out of a city that’s only 49 square miles to begin with. (For those interested enough to figure it out, there are 640 acres in a square mile, thus this is about 2 ½ square miles of property locked up in a park).
We spent our 20 minutes there going through the Japanese Tea Garden, which is just amazing. It also looks like a lot of work and inspires me to cut back on the landscaping next spring.
We rode around from the tea garden past the Palace of Fine Arts – another impressive building, this one remaining from the Panama Pacific Expo in 1915, held to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal. It now houses a museum and the first interactive museum (like Discovery Place in Charlotte), which was founded by Frank Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Talk about a juxtaposition.
Incidentally, houses facing the Palace run between $2 and $5 million dollars.
By now, we’d been historied out – much as you’ve probably been if you’ve read this far, so I’ll skim some of the rest of what we learned.
Lots of military space around San Francisco has been decommissioned and is being very nicely renovated into other things. It’s great to see the space being used to better the community instead of sit idle. Some of this lies on each end of the Golden Gate Bridge, which I already talked about yesterday as we rode across it.
Factoids that we didn’t know yesterday, though, were that the bridge was completed in May, 1937 by Joseph Strauss. He cut the loss of life during construction by 2/3 by using safety nets for the first time, and invented hard hats and showed how much they helped. The bridge is 1.7 miles long, and at the apex it’s 220 ft. to the water. There are signs there about help for suicide prevention.
We made the trek around into Salsalito again for a lunch break. Nothing spectacular or unusual there – in fact, we ate at the same place as yesterday since we knew it would be fast and we didn’t have much time.
After lunch, we left Tatiana when the tour split. Some went back to San Francisco, while others (including us) went on to the Muir woods to see the giant redwoods. Our tour guide for this was Don, who was just as somber as Tatiana had been energetic. A nice guy, but after a while he sounded like Charlie Brown’s mom. WAH-Wah-wah-wah-wah.
This part of the tour was thankfully shorter – not only because of Don’s lack of dynamics, but because our brains were full by then. They don’t allow guided tours in the Muir Woods, so he had to give us all the skinny on the bus on the way in.
Giant Redwoods have been around at least 160 million years. Once they covered most of North America but by the time people showed up to start chopping them into lawn furniture 10 to 12 thousand years ago, they were limited to just a strip along the coast. They’ve got pretty discriminating tastes on where they’ll grow, so they stay to this region. My thought is that they like the public services available and the tax-free status that they enjoy.
They are the tallest things on earth, growing to 385 ft or 40 stories. Some have trunks over 20 ft in diameter at the base, and the bark is over a foot thick. There’s another variety that don’t get quite as big and their bark is thicker. We never could figure out which was which.
Redwoods reproduce both sexually and a-sexually. Although the sexual reproduction sounds more interesting, in reality it’s just plain old vanilla plant sex. The a-sexual reproduction, though, is kinda snazzy – if a tree is damaged by fire or lightning or some such thing, there will be a “family ring” that grows around it. These new trees are genetic clones of the original tree and pop up in the place where the original tree fell down. There are burls at the base of the tree and on the roots that contain this genetic material and from which the new trees grow. Of course, you could also buy burls in the gift shop should you decide to repopulate your own giant redwood forest.
Big honkin tall trees. No bugs, though – apparently there’s not enough sunlight for them to survive. No significant undergrowth, either, other than some ferns that grew along the creek bank. We took the short version of the hiking trail and went back to the gift shop to have a cold drink along with Bruce and Greg.
From the Muir Woods we went to the Muir Woods Overlook, which is this little path that goes WAAAYYYY out on the rocks over the ocean several stories up. People were doing it anyhow, so the government finally decided a few years ago to improve the path and put up a handrail, which meant that those of us with common sense and maturity could also go out and enjoy the view. Otherwise, there was no way on earth you were gonna get me out there on the tip of that rock.
Great view, even with the fog rolling in. Apparently we weren’t the first ones to notice this, since there were 4 concrete bunkers there that were used to look for Japanese planes and submarines during the war.
Mind you, 350 days of the year the fog is so thick you can’t see to spit much less to shoot a large weapon at a piece of machinery. Musta been a Halliburton job, you think?
After a few minutes for pics there, we passed the Green Gulch Farm, which is a beautiful operating farm ran by buddist monks without the aid of either chemicals or machinery. We saw it from a ¼ mile up the hill, but it looked beautiful.
It also looked like a hell of a lot of work. Give me that Roundup and some fertilizer any day.
The road, which was INCREDIBLY windy and curvy, led us into Tubano, where the tour ended. We were left off in a parking lot near the docks (much like Disney World, it seemed like many places we stopped had shopping opportunities available) to wait for the ferry back. Like yesterday, all the people with bicycles were packed in there. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to ride another few miles into Turbano. Some of them really showed it, too!
A drink on the ferry and we were dumped us off where we started the day so we caught the 5:30 subway back and decided to stay in tonight. We ate leftover mac and cheese from last night and didn’t go out, other than a short walk down the street to get some sunburn cream and visit the cookie store we saw just up the block.
Last night's dinner -- we ate at a great restaurant called Sumi's, which offered a prix fix menu for $25.00. The guy at the hotel said it was great and very popular with the locals, and he was exactly right. We had a salad, "mac and cheese", and a chocolate pate.
Now, I know that you may be thinking "the blue box" when I say "mac and cheese". Trust me, this had nothing to do with that. Penne pasta with grueuy, chicken and other stuff. it was incredible, but so rich that we couldn't eat more than half. This left us with the other half for dinner tonight.
Tomorrow we have no agenda, and thus anticipate a slower start. Although breakfast is supposed to be included here, we’ve always been out the door before they started serving and were on our own.
