Neighborhoods
The Mission District is a very well-known neighborhood in San Francisco. It’s popular for a number of reasons: it has some of the best restaurants in the city (it was the birthplace of the Mission Burrito after all), it’s a Mecca for clubbers and others wanting to have fun, it’s home to one of the…
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Berkeley, Oakland and Alameda, the San Francisco-facing parts of the wider East Bay region, have a lot of attractions and things to see and do. They’re also popular places to stay for visitors to the Bay Area, since they’re reasonably well-connected to the BART and SF ferry systems, as well as being a short hop…
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San Francisco has a lot of great opportunities for getting out on two wheels (or more), powered by legs and lungs. It’s true the city, and wider Bay Area, is pretty hilly, but there are ways to avoid them, if you prefer (and no one would blame you for that – our hills are often…
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The San Francisco neighborhood known as the Castro is one of the best-known in the city. It was a birthplace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the U.S. and was where Harvey Milk, the gay-rights activist and politician, began his political career. It’s also a very picturesque and historic part of the city, with some…
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San Francisco has the oldest Chinatown in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the West. Chinese first began moving to the city in 1849, as news of “Gam Saan” (Gold Mountain) spread around the world and reached China, firing the imaginations of thousands of young men who were struggling after years of prolonged…
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North Beach is one of San Francisco’s most storied and picturesque neighborhoods. It’s chiefly known nowadays for being our ‘Little Italy’ and most visitors want to see it while they’re in the city, to eat at one of the many great Italian restaurants and cafes that line its streets. It was also the West Coast…
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Today Maiden Lane is an upscale, boutique-lined, pedestrian street running east off Union Square, notable chiefly for its gates and for being the home of San Francisco’s only Frank Lloyd Wright designed building. However, the narrow, quiet, street has a scandalous past as one of old San Francisco’s main red-light districts, in the late nineteenth…
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Almost everybody visiting San Francisco is going to make a trip to Fisherman’s Wharf at some point, it’s our Times Square or Hollywood Walk of Fame. However, like those other attractions, it can be a little underwhelming for the visitor – a few too many tourist traps and well… tourists! Nevertheless, again like the aforementioned…
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Background In the mid-1960s, San Francisco exploded with a counterculture movement. A tremendous spontaneous expression of youthful enthusiasm, loving life, allied with opposition to the Vietnam War, attracted an estimated 100,000 young people to San Francisco. More than ten years earlier, in the early 1950’s, another counter-cultural movement, also against materialism and conformism, called the…
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A “Chinatown” is defined as an ethnic enclave of people of Chinese background, that is outside China itself. From the 1830’s onwards a large, and growing, number of them have popped up all over the world, in cities like New York, London, Los Angeles and Melbourne. The oldest in the Western world is considered to…
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