San Francisco
Seven by seven miles of hills, fog, and the bridge that never stops being surprising — no matter how many times you see it.
"San Francisco is a city that has perfected the art of seeming both permanent and provisional — the Victorian painted ladies next to the tech headquarters, the fog rolling in over the Golden Gate as if the twentieth century never quite arrived."
— Personal notesHills, fog, and the particular light of the bay
San Francisco is built on hills — forty-three of them, which makes the city simultaneously exhausting and beautiful. Every street that crests a rise reveals a view of the bay, or the Pacific, or the bridge, or all three. The cable cars are not just a tourist attraction; they are an engineering solution to the problem of getting up inclines that would defeat any ordinary wheeled vehicle, and they have been running since 1873 with a simplicity of mechanism that is extraordinary.
The fog is the city's most characteristic feature — the marine layer that Karl (as the city's collective sentiment has named it) rolls in through the Golden Gate in the late afternoon, cooling everything by ten degrees and making the bridge disappear and reappear in slow motion. San Franciscans have a complex relationship with Karl: irritated by the grey mornings, proud of the atmospheric effect when the towers of the bridge emerge above the cloud line.
The Mission, the Castro, and the Haight
San Francisco's neighbourhoods are each their own world. The Mission District is the city's culinary heart — taquerias and burritos that have no equal anywhere else in California, murals on every surface, and the particular energy of a neighbourhood that is simultaneously very old (as San Francisco measures age) and in permanent transition. The Castro is both a historic site of the gay rights movement and a functioning residential neighbourhood. The Haight still carries the nostalgia of 1967 in its record stores and Victorian storefronts, even as the city around it has changed beyond recognition.
The Marin Headlands, across the Golden Gate, are the best place to understand the bridge in its landscape — standing above the Pacific at the northern end, you see how the bridge emerges from the headland cliffs and spans the entrance to the bay, and you understand for the first time why building it was considered impossible until it was done.
"The Golden Gate does not become ordinary. This is its remarkable property. You see it in photographs for years before you arrive, and then you stand in front of it and it is still surprising — the scale, the colour, the way it belongs to the landscape as if it grew there."