We haven’t left our hearts in the amazing city of San Francisco, the only city on earth where you can get a “panoramic view of the ocean, the bay, skyscrapers, several different bridges, hills, and mountains by walking up a modest incline”. However, we fell in love with the city on the very first day of our visit after experiencing the cool must-sees in the very heart of San Francisco, aka ‘Frisco – the iconic cable car and the Golden Gate Bridge, the touristy Fisherman’s Wharf and the palm-fringed promenade, Embarcadero, the crookedest Lombard Street at the Nob/Russian Hill neighbourhood, the colourful Victorian-style homes called the “Painted Ladies”, the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, and the historic Haight-Ashbury District.
On the last day before flying to Winnipeg via Vancouver we still have to complete our bucket list – Chinatown, Ghirardelli Square, the new 61-storey Salesforce, North Beach, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
‘Frisco boasts the biggest and the oldest Chinatown, founded in 1848, in North America and one of the largest Chinese enclaves outside the Asian continent with more than 100,000 residents centered on Grant Avenue and Stockton Street. Retaining their own customs, dialects, places of worship, social clubs, and cultural identity, this largest Chinese community outside of China itself has become important and influential in the history and culture of ethnic Chinese immigrants in North America, including Canada. Here, particularly beyond the iconic Dragon’s Gate in its bustling maze of streets and alleys, we find all kinds of tea shops, dim sum joints, grocers’ knick-knack shops, bakeries, restaurants, souvenir shops, herbalists, florists, live animals for sale, cocktail lounges, and karaoke bars. Swarming with people, the place is a sea of activity!
Adjacent to Chinatown is North Beach, known as “Little Italy”, a very busy neighbourhood steeped in northern Italian cultural heritage and traditions. You can whet your taste buds here at the many Italian restaurants. The famous 210-foot Coit Tower is here at the Telegraphic Hill of Washington Square Park with an observation deck that provides a 360-degree view of the city and the bay, including the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges.
The city’s tallest skyscraper, started in 2013 and completed in 2018 at a cost of US$41.1 billion, is the obelisk-shaped 61-storey Salesforce Tower, a cloud-based software company, that screens videos of the city – filmed daily – on the sides of its “Day for Night” rooftop sculpture.
Worth a visit is the 1935-founded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at 151 3rd Street, one of the oldest art museums in the United States, is also one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art with exhibits from among 33,000 paintings, sculptures, photographs, architecture, design and media art. Collections include works by artists Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and photographer Ansel Adams.
Last but not the least is the historic Ghirardelli Square, a bayside landmark since 1862 at 900 North Point, considered as the first successful adaptive reuse project in the United States. Originally a chocolate factory established by Domenico “Domingo” Ghirardelli, this specialty retail and dining complex, granted National Historic Register status in 1982, houses unique shops and restaurants.
We didn’t leave our hearts here in San Francisco! We just fell in love.
