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Bay Area Trip: Part IV

Click on the thumbnail images to get larger ones (around 100-300K). Click on the "huge" link to get the full size pictures (around 3M). Around 100 pictures included.

Part I: Golden Gate Bridge and Marin County
Part II: Marin and Sonoma Counties
Part III: Point Reyes National Seashore
Part IV: San Francisco

The map below shows, more or less, my travels in San Francisco. I took the BART train to the Powell Street station, walked kind-of-westward, and just south of the Presidio, I decided it was too far and late to get to Golden Gate Park, so I took a bus back to Powell Street and then took the BART train back to Berkeley.

The locations are approximate, based on my recollection and the location of some of the pictures. This isn't a GPS-based track by any means. The blue dashed line is mostly connecting the main locations together. I'm sure my actual route was more circuitous, winding, and zig-zaging that is suggested here. But you get the basic idea. The blue circles are links to the relevant sections on this page.

Frank's path is in blue, stopping points are dashed circles. Click on the cicles to jump to that part of the page.
Huge version of the map

San Francisco Sunset from Berkeley

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Three pictures of the sunset. The Claremont is one of those grand, old hotels with lots of little rooms, and twists and turns and little bits and pieces jutting out. You can see one of the little roofs jutting out in the first two pictures.

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Looking towards downtown Oakland, and then the San Francisco Bay, and then beyond the fog a little of San Francisco is visible. It was a bit hazy by then.

San Francisco

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First off, some pictures of downtown. It started on a less hilly area and then got more hilly. Of course the cable cars are going all over. And in the distance is the distinctive pyramid shape of the Transamera building.

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More cable car action. And a picture in Chinatown looking up the hill. And then two cable cars passing each other.

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At a fire station in Chinatown, they have a sign with hands holding a baby surrounded by a hexagon (house shape) that says "safe surrender site." To me, this is just a freaky concept. And it's freaky that it's a problem enough that they need to have places like fire stations accept babies. And that they have some international sign for "baby recycling."

The second shot is of the typical houses and apartments in San Francisco that sit on one of the many hills. Coit Tower, the next stop, is visible in the background.

Pioneer Park on Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower

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Once again, a sign helps me remember where I was.

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The top of the park has a nice view panoramic view of San Francisco. The first shot was looking west-ish. The second shot was looking north-ish. And the third picture is looking to the northwest, with the Golden Gate Bridge visible in the distance.

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A shot of Coit Tower with a statue of Christopher Columbus next to it. And a shot of yet another one of those USGS survey markers.

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A shot of the back of the Christopher Columbus statue along with a view of San Francisco. And a shot lookup up at Coit Tower from the bottom.

Inside Coit Tower

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Another sign which describes the murals and Lillie Coit after whom the tower is named because she donated a large part of her estate to the city.

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The two shots are the left and right halves of a mural showing people on the street of San Francisco.

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The next mural is called Library. The first and third shots are the left and right parts of it, while the second shot is of the card explaining the mural. Some of the headlines on the papers, as well as book titles, are interesting, though this requires looking at the high-resolution (i.e., huge) pictures.

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Two shots, left and right, of a mural about newspapers. The second shot is blurry. Sorry, I don't have anything better. Around the window are some murals of comic strips, but it's hard to read here. The next set of pictures fixes that.

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The first shot is of the comic strips in the windows using existing light and the second one is using a flash. The newspaper in the bottom of the window is the San Francisco Chronicle, dated April 1934 and has the following headlines: Artists Finish Frescoes Coit Tower Murals" with some names I'm assuming are the artists, and one that says "Arists Work in Harmony" and one that says "Roosevelt" (with the subheadline unreadable). And there is a picture of Coit Tower.

San Francisco Bay/Pier 39/Ghirardelli Square

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I took a few shots of Alcatraz, visible from the pier. The second shot is of a large barge (named Marge?) in the bay. I'm not sure how those "cargo containers" compare in size to railroad cars or trucks, but there are probably over 600 of them on that boad. Damn that's a lot of stuff.

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A shot of a military looking gray kind of boat. No wait...it's the Jeremiah O'Brien which was a WWII ship that was part of the D-Day armada and now is a historic landmark, available for people to tour. The Golden Gate Bridge is visible behind it. The other picture continues the San Francisco Bay panorama to the right of the boat.

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A sign about what is in the area around Pier 39 (in the Bay), and two shots of the sea lions that sit around and sun themselves and make loud belching noises. I guess they've been there for a while and just kind of hang out there.

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I had lunch at a restaurant by the Pier 39 area and had a nice view of the Bay, including Alcatraz. The first picture shows that. The second is of a marina in the backgroudn with a young girl doing some sort of bungee thing between two blue poles. The thirds shot is has a view of the Coit Tower and Transamerica building in the distance.

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Next up I walked to Ghirardelli Square, where the chocolate company resides. They had samples when you walked in, unfortunately it happened to be one of their less compelling flavors. The first shot is of a fountain in the square with mermaids. The second was of people in the area, including a guy with an interesting white hat. And the third is of the sign for Ghirardelli Square.

Fort Mason and Marina Green Beach

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The first shot is of the entrance, the second a closeup of the plaque, and the third is of the Great Meadow park area withe the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. The statue is of a former US Representative, Phillip Burton, who was responsible for creating the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and many other wilderness areas across the US.

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Another shot of the Burton statue and the Great Meadow and Golden Gate Bridge. And a shot of some palm trees on the Great Meadow.

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There was a cool, knarly, twisty tree I saw towards the edge of Fort Mason. I took three shots of it, getting closer to see the interesting patterns. I suppose it might have looked good in high contrast black and white.

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The western entrance to Fort Mason. From there I continued on to Marina Green.

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A shot of some sailboat masts in a marina. A shot of a plaque about Lincoln Beachy who was an early pilot who died while performing. And a shot of alcatraz from the Marina Green beach.

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Three pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marina Green beach.

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Two worm's eye view shots of the sand at Marina Green beach.

Palace of Fine Arts

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A shot of the Palace of Fine Arts dome, from a distance (Marina Green beach). And then the entrance to the palace. Just to the right is the San Francisco Exploratorium, a very cool hands-on science museum. But it was getting late in the afternoon, and there wasn't time for the museum. The last picture is a sign talking about the restoration of the Palace.

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Three shots of the palace. The first shows some statues on top. The second is of the palace from across the pond. And the third is of the palace by one of the entrance stairs.

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Three more shots of the palace. The first is of the artwork/statues at the top. the second is of the statues at the base. And the third is of some of the columns. It looks like ruins.

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A few shots from inside of the Palace. Two first and third are two shots of the ceiling and the second is looking out from the middle of the palace.

The middle one reminds me of the movie Time After Time which takes place in San Francisco. Late in the movie, the main character is walking through The Palace of Fine Arts in the dark, and hears the girl's voice echoing around, he also hears the music from the pocketwatch of the bad guy. It's much better than I'm presenting it. But anyway, that's what goes through my mind.

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The first shot is a closeup of a statue at the top of the inside of the plaace. The second and third are of ducks in the water next to the Palace.

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A shot of the fountain. Another one of the fountain and of the palace. And one of the fountain again and another part of the palace.

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And finally, a shot of the place with the picture dark enough so that the gold/orange dome is visible.

Northwest San Francisco/Lyon Street Stairs

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These two shots were taken just beyond the Palace of Fine Arts, on the road just beyond the pond. The first is looking south to some houses on the hills, and the second is kind of across the street from the Palace (just east of it) on Baker Street. The typical funky San Francisco style houses.

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One option after the Palace of Fine Arts was to continue to the Golden Gate Bridge. While this seemed cool, it also seemed like it'd be a fairly far walk just to get to the bridge, then a hike over it, then back and then...well, I wasn't sure what next. And I had driven over it a few days earlier. So instead I wandered into the Presido and went to the Letterman Digital Arts Center because it sounded cool. I had no idea what it was, I thought it was part of a college or something. Turns out it's where Industrial light and Magic and LucasArts are located.

I only found that out now when I was trying to figure out where the hell the statue of Eadwerd Muybridge really was. That's the figure in the first picture, and the second has his plaque. He's the one that did the stop-motion photos of a horse galloping (Leland Sanford commissioned him to do that to settle a bet; it turns out at a gallop there is a point when all four feet are off the ground; Stanford won his bet and remained fantastically rich; had he lost he would also have remained fantastically rich). I had read that little fact a few months earlier, and so knew who he was and found it interesting. I just had no idea where I was at the time.

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I wandered around the Presido a little, but realized there were only a few entrances and didn't want to get stranded there and have to backgtrack. So I got to Lyon Street and walked south on it. It's a cute little road, and in the distance of the first picture, some stairs are visible that just go up and up and up.

The second picture is a nice house on Lyon Street. And the third was of the stairs, as I got closer to them. People are visible going up and down.

I decided, hey, why not? Sure, it was a long-ish staircase, but it wasn't that long, and besides there might be something interesting at the top. Why not give it a go. There were various people going up and down the steps. Some of them were carrying things. Like weights. Similar weights. Or a big ball. Or something stacked on their shoulders. Like this was some sort of training program. In the third picture (at least the huge version) you can see one guy has a sort of weighted life-preserver around his neck (possibly for someone who can only breathe water and needs to make sure they won't float), another is carrying a long, silver rectangular rod, and one other is ahead of them and you can't see whta he has (it might have been the medicine ball). Someone going down the stairs is looking on at this group of three like "I'm so glad I'm not doing that right now."

It seemed like some sort of sadistic exercise program.

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So I started ascending the stairs. There were a lot of them, but it was OK. At the top was a nice view looking north. And there was someone who looked like a coach or a sadist that was giving these young-ish people heavy stuff to carry down and up.

The area was a sort of landing, cul-de-sac, as seen in the second picture. And at the end was...another stiarcase. Not too long. So I climbed that. At the top was a mini-garden-y sort of place, shown in the third picture.

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In the little garden, courtyard place is a cute little bronze-colored sculpture of a heart symbol. Perhaps for all the people whose hearts failed when the looked past the little garden to find...another fucking staircase, as shown in the second picture. Well, at this point I'm kind of committed and curious. I want to know what it is that's so cool at the top. The exercise people stopped two staircases ago. The third picture is looking north again, downhill, as I start up that set of stairs.

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At the top of those stairs, I got a nice view to the north, very similar to before. I took a picture and it's nice, but it's not that great. The road then went up another block or two. So I kept going. At the top was an intersection. I took a picture looking west (the second one), and south (the third one).

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And a picture looking east and then north.

And that was it!?! The whole climb up the damn hill and all those damn stairs to get to the top of nothing. Nothing. Just a small intersection that then goes downhill in all directions. OK, I get it, I get it. San Francisco is a city that has a lot of hills in it, a lot of hills. But I kind of figured that out around Chinatown. I didn't need to keep going up and down and up and down and all that.

At that point, I was getting sick of things and decided to just catch a bus back to the train. Depending on things I might hang out in the city a little more or bail and go back to Berkeley and the hotel.

Cable Car

Back at the Powell Street station (I guess the beginning of the Powell-Mason and Powell-Hyde cable car lines), I took a few pictures of what happens.

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First the car goes onto a circle. It's now disconnected from the underground cable. Then a guy starts pushing on the car to spin it around on the circle. He keeps pushing and pushing (and of course he has to remember to keep breathing).

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Once it has turned around, 180 degrees, the guy pushes it off of the circular area. In the first picture, the guy is just barely visible behind the cable car, leaning against it with his back and pushing it off of the turn-around.

Once off the platform, it has to reconnect with the cable. The cable car operator (not the same guy who was spinning it around), pulls some sort of lever (it looks like an old enough mechanism that the first "e" in "lever" would be pronounced with a long-e sound) that seems to reconnect the car. After that, it's pulled by the cable.

Note that the guy who has to spin around the cars and push them off the platform is doing that same job all the time. He doesn't get to ride the cars, only push them.

There was a long line of people waiting to take the cable car. I think I rode them before, so at that point I decided to head back across the Bay, followed by a return home the next day, thus ending that chapter of my travels.

Part I: Golden Gate Bridge and Marin County
Part II: Marin and Sonoma Counties
Part III: Point Reyes National Seashore
Part IV: San Francisco

Back to Frank's photos.

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