The World’s Craziest Streets

---

On this trip so far, I’ve had to learn how to drive in mountains.

From rural North Carolina (see Into the Mountains) to the Black Hills (see Sacred Peaks) and Mount Rainier (see The Great Mountain) I’ve dealt with steep twisty roads that require real skill to handle well.

I now believe all of them were just the warm up for the real hill challenge, the outer neighborhoods of San Francisco.





A San Francisco road map shows no concept of the difficulty of these streets.

On a regular map, the city appears as a mostly normal rectangular street grid, like any other western city.

On a topographic map, the problem becomes very clear.

San Francisco is filled with steep hills.

In most places, the city designers would have created curvy streets that follow the hills and are easier to drive, although a nightmare to navigate.

In San Francisco, the designers put the streets straight up and down, ignoring elevation completely!

The result is incredibly steep and narrow streets filled with parked cars.

The views from these streets are incredible when the fog cooperates.

Driving them, on the other hand, pushes driver and car to their limits.

No wonder so many chase movies have been set in this city.

Coit Tower

Leaving the hostel this morning, I got a rare treat at this time of year.

The fog has dropped significantly.

I figured I could finally get the view I have been denied the last two days.

I drove to the Coit Tower.

Located on the top of Telegraph Hill, getting there requires driving some of the steepest streets I have ever seen, even steeper than Deadwood (see The Western Tradition).

On the plus side, the view of the city grew and grew as I climbed.

Eventually, the road formed a tight spiral around a hilltop.

This road is filled with signs that parking is prohibited at the tower on weekends, and people need to take a bus instead.

The top shows the obvious reason, a narrow small lot with barely enough space for the people there now.

The view is fantastic.





The Coit tower was donated to the city by one Lillie Coit as a memorial to city firefighters.

The tower itself is shaped like a tall thin fire hose nozzle.

Coit herself was one of the city’s great wealthy eccentrics.

She became obsessed with volunteer firemen at a young age.

When she got older, she often wore a fireman’s outfit and rode along on calls.

The firemen themselves called her the department mascot, making her an honorary member in 1863.





The tower itself was built during the Great Depression.

The first floor features a wrap-around corridor with murals celebrating the agriculture and industry of California, done by students of Diego Rivera (see Put Your Hands Up For Detroit).

From the lobby, a tiny and creaky elevator gives access to the top of the monument.

The view from here is incredible on a good day, covering the entire city, San Francisco Bay, and Oakland across the harbor.

The most recognizable building, which dominates the downtown view, is the Transamerica Pyramid by William Pereira.

Unfortunately, even today the fog did not fully co-operate, completely covering the Golden Gate and the famous bridge.

It also covered the most infamous place in the city, Alcatraz.







For many San Francisco visitors, Alcatraz looms large.

It was established in 1934 during Prohibition as a federal prison for the most dangerous men in the country.

Federal authorities figured the treacherous currents of the Golden Gate would act as a natural security barrier.

It quickly earned its fame, becoming home for many mobsters including Al Capone.

In reality, at least one escape attempt nearly succeeded.

In 1962 John Paul Scott swam into the current and was swept to a beach under the Golden Gate Bridge.

He left the water suffering from massive hypothermia, and was quickly picked up by the cops.





I ultimately decided to skip Alcatraz.

Part of the reason is that the site memorializes some pretty grim events.

Visiting would feel like the equivalent of slowing down on the highway to view a wreck.

More importantly, the site is popular and tickets are limited, leading to all sorts of shenanigans.

Downtown, I encountered a number of offices advertising ‘Alcatraz tickets!’ that were really fronts for tour companies.

I DID ultimately buy one of the city’s classic cheesy souvenirs, the “Hotel Alcatraz” T-shirt.

Lombard Street Switchbacks

After the Coit Tower, I drove to the next hill over, Russian Hill.

The drive down was just as frightening as the drive up.

San Francisco intersections have warnings that car bottoms may scrape the pavement of the cross street; that is steep!





For many visitors, Russian Hill is famous as the home of the “crookedest street in America”.

It refers to a single block of Lombard Street that goes down the hill through a series of eight incredibly tight switchbacks.

These are some of the only switchbacks in the city!

Residents have surrounded the street with flower beds, making it one of the prettiest streets as well.

When I got there, a huge phalanx of tourists sat at the bottom of the street taking pictures.

The street itself had a line to drive it, but it wasn’t too long.

This is one famous street!







Very few people know the reason why the switchbacks exist.

The west side of Russian Hill is one of the steepest hills in the city.

Of the five steepest streets in the city, THREE of them surround that famous stretch of Lombard Street.

My guidebook has a listing of them, although some dispute the list.

One of them, Filbert Street, has a pitch of 30 degrees, as steep as a black diamond ski slope!

This street is three times as steep as the Medicine Wheel Passage Byway (see The Highway in the Sky).

I couldn’t resist driving it, which requires first gear and a sure foot on the brake.

Palace of Fine Arts

After Russian Hill, I had a bit of time to kill, so I went to one of the city’s finest pieces of public architecture.

In 1915, the area that is now the Presidio hosted a World’s Fair called the Pan Pacific Exposition.

Like all World’s Fairs in this era, it featured beautiful temporary Beaux Arts buildings made of plaster and wood.

The Palace of Fine Arts, which held the main art shows, was a classic of the style.

Designed by Bernard Maybeck, it was a semicircular building surrounding a beautiful series of domes and arches, next to a lake.

Many city residents fell in love with the building, so they petitioned the city to keep it after the fair was over!

The absurdity became apparent over the next decade, as the building (designed to be temporary, remember) slowly decayed.





Something clearly had to be done.

In the 1930s, the city finally replaced the original with a copy in concrete.

It was now safe from the elements, but completely empty.

For many years, the city used it as a storage area for the public works department, finally turning it over to the Exploritorium science museum in the late 1970s.

I spent some time wandering around the public courts, all classic dome arches and tall columns.

Geese float in the lake.





As I left the Palace, the fog was returning with a vengeance.

Sun and warmth became cold haze.

As I headed south into Golden Gate Park, it reached the point where I could actually see waves of fog blowing down the streets.

I wonder how people cope with it all.

I finally found some respite in the DeYoung Art Museum.

DeYoung Art Museum

San Francisco’s three main art museums have the remarkable property that their collections have little overlap.

The Museum of Modern Art handles art after 1950, the Legion of Honor has old masters, and the DeYoung handles everything else.

Having seen modern art yesterday, it was time for older works.





Art at the DeYoung is arranged topically by movement, and then chronologically.

Unlike most museums, the chronology is backwards from the museum entrance, so patrons see the newest works first.

These works are California pop art.

The state had a vigorous pop art scene, which had to live in the shadow of the fame of New York artists.

Wayne Thiebaud, the most well known member, created pictures of banal food items like pies in vivid colors.

One of his pictures has three gumball machines with no handles.

The caption describes it as a symbolic comment on consumer culture, creating desires that it can’t fulfill.

I find it an appropriate observation so close to Burning Man, which is completely non-commercial.

Abstract Expressionism follows next.

Much of the work is along semi-figurative lines rather than the action painting created by Jackson Pollock, such as Ovals on Stilts by David Smith.





This section leads into work created during the 1920s, a highlight of the museum.

These paintings cover ever major style of the time, including American Scene paintings such as Portrait of Orleans by Edward Hopper, precisionist works such as From The Garden of the Chateau by Charles Demuth, and a nearly abstract painting by Stewart Davis, Night Life.

The picture shows a highly distorted view of a jazz pianist designed to show the energy of a concert.

The section has a number of paintings by African American artists, including Migration by Jacob Lawrence and Aspiration by Aaron Douglas.

Both are highly symbolic figure paintings about the conditions of their time.





The section ends with an astonishing piece of modern sculpture, The Spine and Tooth of Santo Guerro by Al Farrow.

The work initially looks like an incredibly detailed gothic cathedral.

Flying buttresses, long thin windows, and tall towers appear around the sculpture.

The twist with this one is that the entire thing is made of bullets.

The piece is a comment on both many Americans’ religious fervor surrounding guns, and the often tragic results of that fervor.







The second floor held older American artwork.

First up was a small selection of early abstract work created by Arthur Dove, and one of Georgia O’Keefe’s flower paintings, Petunias.

This lead into a room of American Impressionist works, such as Seaweed and Surf Appledore at Sunset by Childe Hassam.

This style, based on French Impressionism, developed after the former became popular among American art buyers (see Luminescent Visions).

The room is filled with examples.





That room segues into art from the mid 1800s.

Much of this is based on French Academic Art, which is not to modern taste.

The room does contain two of John Singer Sargent’s portraits, along with a famous painting of a life drawing class of the era, Bouguereau’s Atelier at the Academie Julian by Jefferson Davis Chalfant.

That leads to a room featuring the Hudson River School.

This painting movement romanticized the American landscape (see Do you Like Green Eggs and Ham, SAM I Am?).

California, with its spectacular and relatively unknown scenery, became a magnet for these artists.

The museum has one of Thomas Moran’s paintings of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (see So This is What A View Looks Like) and another of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

Sadly, not one of the many pictures of Yosemite Valley appears in this section.

The floor finishes with a handful of colonial era portraits, including one by John Singleton Copley.





The corridor outside the main exhibit rooms held a thematic show that I consider a highlight, Portraits of Washington.

This show is post-modern curation done right (see Interesting Things in a Dull Landscape).

It held a series of paintings of the first US president.

Some were straight portraits, such as one of the many copies Gilbert Stewart made of the portrait found on the dollar bill.

These contrasted with works of folk art featuring Washington, and a special portrait made entirely of dollar bills, E Pluribus Unum by Ray Beldner!





Tonight, I got to experience one of the good sides of staying near the Tenderloin.

The neighborhood has a number of decent all night diners.

They serve comfort food at low prices that is some of the best available in the city for the price.

I ate at the Pinecrest Diner tonight.

I got there early enough that the crowd was not at all scary.

---

Photos

Coit Tower
The Coit Tower on top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco

Coit Tower Mural
One section of the Coit Tower Murals celebrating California

Coit Tower East
The view from the Coit Tower looking east, with the Bay Bridge and Oakland in the distance

Coit Tower South
View from the Coit Tower looking south, dominated by the Transamerica Pyramid and the financial district

Coit Tower Southwest
The view from the Coit Tower looking southwest toward Twin Peaks

Coit Tower West
The view from the Coit Tower looking west toward Russian Hill. The Golden Gate Bridge is hidden in the fog on the right. The narrow patch of green surrounded by buildings in the upper center is the Lombard switchbacks

San Francisco Hills
Lombard Street, heading west down Telegraph Hill toward Russian Hill. The famous switchbacks are at the top of the hill in this photo.

The Crookedest Street in America
No visit to San Francisco is complete without a photo of Lombard Street on Russian Hill. Here it is :)

San Francisco Vertigo!
This is what a 30 degree street pitch looks like, on Filbert.

Palace of Fine Arts
The central dome of the Palace of Fine Arts. The original building was built for the 1915 Pan Pacific Exposition. This is a later copy.

San Francisco Fog
I can't escape it :(