The only mobile National Historic Landmarks, clanging cable cars trundle up and down steep Nob Hill, once called “Snob Hill”, topped by mansions built by silver barons who financed the transcontinental railroad, opening the city to a gilded age.
The 1886 neo-classical James Flood mansion is now a private men’s club; next door, guests from the surrounding hotels, and residents walking their poodles, stroll snug Huntington Park, where dolphins and ephebes play on a replica of the curvaceous Tartarughe Fountain in Rome.
Medieval-style
stained-glass windows glow above the great nave of the French Gothic-style
Grace Cathedral. Marble, gilt and glamour characterize a clutch of
five-star hotels on the hilltop. The opulent Big 4 restaurant in The
Huntington recalls the halcyon days of the notorious railroad tycoons,
Huntington, Crocker, Stanford, and Hopkins.
Revelers sip Blue Hawaiis in the rainforest-themed Tonga Room at the Fairmont, while romance ensues on the 19th floor of the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins in the Top Of The Mark sky-bar. Guests arrive beneath a Tiffany-style stained glass dome and Baccarat chandeliers in the Renaissance Stanford Court.
Famous for “the crookedest street in the world”, a brick-paved, switchbacky, narrow roadway with stunning views, Russian Hill is a green and gardeny neighborhood. The fictional site of Barbary Lane in the “Tales of the City” TV series, Macondray Lane is the reward at the top of a creaky wooden stairway leading to a cobbled and wooden byway lined with shingled Edwardian cottages, ballast stones from sailing ships, and riots of trees and flowers. The hidden staircase is one of more than 300 throughout the hilly city connecting dead end streets and picturesque neighborhoods. For a 90 minute self-guided walk through Russian Hill, click here.
On upper Chestnut Street, art students and tourists share a sunny courtyard with a fountain and a gull’s-eye city view at the San Francisco Art Institute Café, where food is hearty and cheap. In a Spanish-style, 1920s building designed by the architects of the City Hall, the art school is the oldest in the West, and notable for the Diego Rivera Gallery. Locals sunbathe (or, fogbathe) in tiny Alice Marble Park at Greenwich and Larkin; and in Ina Coolbrith Park, named for the state’s first poet laureate.
| The article on this page is adapted from guidebooks written by Karen Misuraca, the author of Our San Francisco, Fun With the Family in Northern California, and other travel books. Available for purchase on Amazon. |  |