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Destinations for Shopping etc.

SHOPPING

While boasting the large-scale facilities and international names you’d expect in a major city, San Francisco’s shopping scene is low-key and unpretentious. This means prices are slightly lower, and shopping here is a pleasant, relatively stress-free activity.

If you want to run the gauntlet of designer labels, or just watch the style brigade consume, Union Square is the place to be. The heart of the city’s shopping territory, it has a good selection of big-name and chic stores - Neiman Marcus, whose prices have earned it the nickname “Needless Markup,” Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Gump’s and a completely redesigned Macy’s - worth a few hours if you’re into serious dollar-dropping.

SoMa is home to the new Sony Metreon mall at Fourth Street and Mission, a form of “shopper-tainment” with its technology-driven stores and state-of-the-art movieplex.

Books

The Booksmith 1644 Haight St tel 415/863-8688. Good general Haight-Ashbury bookstore with an excellent stock of countercultural titles.

Borders Books and Music 400 Post St tel 415/399-1633. Massive, emporium-style chain stocking over 160,000 book titles as well as a music department with over 60,000 choices. It’s a day’s work getting through this lot, but there’s a café within the store to refresh yourself.

Bound Together Book Collective 1369 Haight St tel 415/431-8355. Haight-Ashbury store specializing in radical and progressive publications.

City Lights Bookstore 261 Columbus Ave tel 415/362-8193. America’s first paperback bookstore, and still San Francisco’s best. The range of titles includes house publications.

A Different Light 489 Castro St tel 415/431-0891. Well-stocked and diverse gay bookstore.

Good Vibrations 1210 Valencia St tel 415/974-8980. A comfortable, decidedly unsleazy place to buy sex books and erotica, specializing in women’s sexuality. Also sells a bewildering array of sex toys, condoms and the like.

Green Apple Books & Music 506 Clement tel 415/387-2272. In the heart of the Richmond district, this relaxed and welcoming store features new and used books (rare out-of-print volumes as well as standards) plus a well-priced selection of CDs and vinyl recordings.

Modern Times 888 Valencia St tel 415/282-9246. Alternative community bookstore in the Mission. Good selection of Latin American literature, women’s issues and hard-to-find contemporary cultural studies.

Rand McNally 595 Market St at 2nd tel 415/777-3131. Travel guides, maps and paraphernalia for the person on the move.

Stacey’s Booksellers 581 Market St tel 415/421-4687. A big store with a big selection, yet dedicated to independent booksellers and the community. The store sponsors author events and can order anything that you can’t find yourself. Also features a large selection of magazines.

Music

Amoeba Music 1855 Haight St tel 415/831-1200. A massive, independent record and CD store with one of the largest and best used collections you’ll ever find (over one million new and used). They also host live performances within the store.

Aquarius Records 1055 Valencia St tel 415/647-2272. Small neighborhood store with friendly, knowledgeable staff and a good range of indie rock, jazz, and things experimental and obscure.

CD & Record Rack 3897 18th St tel 415/552-4990. Castro emporium with a brilliant selection of dance music including a few 1970s 12-inch singles.

Jack’s Record Cellar 254 Scott St tel 415/431-3047. The city’s best source for American roots music - R&B, jazz, country and rock’n’roll - especially on LP.

Mission Music Center 2653 Mission St tel 415/648-1788. Mission store selling music from all over the continent, but especially South America.

Rooky Ricardo’s 448 Haight St tel 415/864-7526. Secondhand store specializing in soul, funk and jazz from the Fifties to the Seventies. Vinyl only.

Streetlight Records 3979 24th St tel 415/282-3550. A great selection of used records, tapes and CDs. The perfect opportunity to beef up your collection on the cheap.

Virgin Megastore 2 Stockton at Market tel 415/397-4525. Three floors of books, videos and music.

BEST OF SAN FRANCISCO

Coit Tower Some of San Francisco’s best photo opportunities are available at Coit Tower, from the great panorama over the bay to the Diego Rivera-inspired murals at its base.

EXPLORE SAN FRANCISCO

Alcatraz

Before the rocky islet of Alcatraz became America’s most dreaded high-security prison , in 1934, it had been home to little more than the odd pelican ( alcatraz in Spanish). Surrounded by the freezing, impassable water of San Francisco Bay, it made an ideal place to hold the nation’s most wanted criminals - men such as Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly. The conditions were inhumane: inmates were kept in solitary confinement, in cells no larger than nine by five feet, most without light. They were not allowed to eat together, read newspapers, play cards or even talk; relatives could visit for only two hours each month. Escape really was impossible. Nine men managed to get off the rock, but there is no evidence that any of them made it to the mainland.

Due to its massive running costs, the jail finally closed in 1963. The island remained abandoned until 1969, when a group of Native Americans staged an occupation as part of a peaceful attempt to claim the island for their people, citing treaties which designated all federal land not in use as automatically reverting to their ownership. Using all the bureaucratic trickery it could muster, the government finally ousted them in 1971, claiming the operative lighthouse qualified it as active.

At least 750,000 tourists each year take the excellent hour-long, self-guided audio tours of the abandoned prison, which include some sharp anecdotal commentary and even the chance to spend a minute (it feels like forever) locked in a darkened cell.

Boats to Alcatraz leave from pier 41 ($13.25 including audio tour, $10 without; frequent departures from 9.30am, last boat leaves Alcatraz at 6.30pm). Advance reservations strongly recommended, especially in peak tourist season (allow two weeks; tel 415/705-5555, ). Night tours are also available in the summer, from Thursday to Sunday departing at 6.20pm and 7.05pm and returning at 8:15pm and 9.30pm.

Chinatown

Its 24 square blocks smack in the middle of San Francisco make up the second-largest Chinese community outside Asia. Almost entirely autonomous, with its own schools, banks and newspapers, it has its roots in the migration of Chinese laborers to the city after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the arrival of Chinese sailors keen to benefit from the Gold Rush. The city didn’t extend much of a welcome: they were met by a tide of vicious racial attacks and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Nowadays they have been joined by Vietnamese, Koreans, Thais and Laotians: by day the area seethes with activity, by night it’s a blaze of neon. Overcrowding is compounded by a brisk tourist trade - sadly, however, Chinatown boasts some of the tackiest stores and facades in the city, making it more similar to shopping in a bad part of Hong Kong than in Beijing. Indeed, Chinese tourists are often disappointed in the neighborhood’s disorder, and the new, some say true, Chinese neighborhood is in the Richmond district along Clement Street.

Gold ornamented portals and brightly painted balconies sit above the souvenir shops and restaurants of narrow Grant Avenue ; pass under the entrance arch at Bush Street to be met by an assault of plastic Buddhas, cloisonné”health balls,” noisemakers and chirping mechanical crickets in every doorway. Old St Mary’s Church , on Grant and California, was one of the few San Francisco buildings to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire, and they have a good photo display of the damage to the city in the entranceway of the beautiful church.

Parallel to Grant Avenue, Stockton Street is crammed with exotic fish and produce markets, bakeries and herbalists. Inside the Ellison Herb Shop at no. 805 Stockton St, Chinatown’s best-stocked herbal pharmacy, you’ll find clerks filling orders the ancient Chinese way - with hand-held scales and abacuses - from drug cases filled with dried bark, roots, sharks’ fins, cicadas, ginseng and other staples. Here, between Grant and Stockton, jumbled alleys hold the most worthwhile stops in the area. The best of these is Waverly Place, a two-block corridor of brightly painted balconies that was lined with brothels before the 1906 catastrophe and now home to three opulent but skillfully hidden temples (nos. 109, 125 and 146), their interiors a riot of black, gold and vermilion, still in use and open to visitors. North of Waverly Place, between Jackson and Washington streets, Ross Alley features the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company , no. 56, specializing in X-rated fortunes, and, next door, a barber who will cut your hair to resemble that of any Hollywood star’s.

Some of the hundred-plus restaurants are historical landmarks in themselves. Sam Wo , at 813 Washington St, is a cheap and churlish ex-haunt of the Beats where Gary Snyder taught Jack Kerouac to eat with chopsticks and had them both thrown out with his loud and passionate interpretation of Zen poetry.

Financial District

North of the city’s main artery, Market Street, the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of the Financial District have sprung up in the last twenty years to form its only real high-rise area. Sharp-suited workers clog the streets and coffee kiosks during business hours, but after 6pm, the area pretty much shuts down. Stop at the corner of Kearny and Market streets to admire the just-refurbished Lotta’s Fountain , San Francisco’s most treasured artifact. It was around here that people gathered to hear news following the 1906 earthquake and fire, and also where famed soprano Luisa Tetrazinni gave a free concert on Christmas Eve, 1910.

Once cut off from the rest of San Francisco by the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway - damaged in the 1989 earthquake and finally torn down in 1991 - the Ferry Building , at the foot of Market Street, was modeled on the cathedral tower in Seville, Spain. Before the bridges were built in the 1930s it was the arrival point for fifty thousand cross-bay commuters daily. A few ferries still dock here, but the characterless office units inside do little to suggest its former importance. The area in front of the Ferry Building is the site of the much-loved Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market (Tues 11am-3pm, Sat 8am-1.30pm), a great place to buy or merely gawk at the colorful local produce.

Since the freeway was pulled down, the area around it, known as The Embarcadero , has experienced a dramatic renaissance - from an area of charmless office blocks into a swanky waterfront district with the city’s most fashionable restaurants and hotels springing up beside palm trees and views of the bay.

From the vast and unimaginative Embarcadero Center shopping mall and the fountains of Justin Herman Plaza at the foot of Market it’s a few blocks down to Montgomery Street , where the grand pillared entrances and banking halls of the post-1906 earthquake buildings era jostle for attention with a mixed bag of modern towers. For a hands-on grasp of modern finance, the World of Economics Gallery in the Federal Reserve Bank , 101 Market St (Mon-Fri 9am-6pm), is unbeatable: computer games allow you to engineer your own inflationary disasters, while exhibits detail recent scandals and triumphs. The Wells Fargo History Museum , 420 Montgomery St (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm; free), traces the far-from-slick origins of San Francisco’s big money, right from the days of the Gold Rush, with mining equipment, gold nuggets, photographs, and a genuine retired stagecoach. Tucked discreetly in a nondescript building at 121 Steuart St is the little-known Jewish Museum San Francisco ($5, free first Mon of month and Thurs 6-8pm; Sun-Wed 11am-5pm, Thurs 11am-8pm), which, far from being the somber trudge through history its name suggests, has an impressive collection of contemporary work by Jewish artists. The museum will be moving to a new building in Yerba Buena Gardens in 2003.

Fishermen’s Wharf

San Francisco rarely tries to pass off pure, unabashed commercialism as a worthy tourist attraction, but with Fisherman’s Wharf and the nearby waterfront district, it makes an exception.

An inventive use of statistics allows the area to proclaim itself the most-visited tourist attraction in the entire country; in fact, this crowded and hideous ensemble of waterfront kitsch and fast-food stands makes a sad and rather misleading introduction to the city. It may be hard to believe, but this was once a genuine fishing port; the few fishing vessels that can still afford the exorbitant mooring charges are usually finished by early morning and get out before the tourists arrive. The shops and bars here are among the most overpriced in the city, and crowd-weary families do little to add to the ambience.

If you wish to get out on the water, 60-minute bay cruises depart several times a day from piers 39 and 41. Better instead to head to the museums of Fort Mason and on to the expanse of green parkland along the Marina district , affording excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Golden Gate Bridge

The orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge , perhaps the best-loved symbol of San Francisco, are visible from almost every high point in the city. The bridge, which spans 4200ft, had taken only 52 months to design and build when it was opened in 1937. Some quarter of a million people turned up for a sunrise party to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 1987; the winds were strong and the bridge buckled, but fortunately did not break. Driving across is a real thrill, racing under the towers, while the half-hour walk across allows you to take in its enormous size and absorb the views. It’s also a favorite with the suicidal - in a typical year dozens jump to their deaths. Those jumping are said to hit the water at a speedy 80mph - few have survived the leap.

The Fort Point National Historic Site beneath the bridge gives a good sense of the place as the westernmost outpost of the nation. This brick fortress, built in the 1850s, has a dramatic site, the surf pounding away beneath the great span of the bridge high above - a view made famous by Kim Novak’s suicide attempt in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo . A small museum (Thurs-Mon 10am-5pm; free) inside the fort displays some rusty old cannons and artillery.

San Francisco’s best waters are to be found at the beaches at the tip of the peninsula, but beach culture doesn’t exist here the way it does in southern California. Dangerous riptides and excruciatingly cold water make it impossible to swim with any confidence, and nude sunbathing is about as adventurous as things get.

Inland, Lincoln Park , at 34th Avenue and Clement Street, primarily an unusually dramatic golf course, offers striking views of the Marin headlands and is home to the remote, white-pillared California Palace of the Legion of Honor ($8, $2.50 off with Muni transfer, free every Tues, surcharge for special exhibitions; daily except Mon 9.30am-5pm; ). Re-opened in late 1995 after extensive renovation, the museum is arguably San Francisco’s best and most staggeringly majestic building. Its isolated, windswept location, high on a bluff overlooking the ocean, is unsurpassably romantic, and deters the hordes that swarm the MoMA and the museums in the park. The emphasis is on fine art, with the Renaissance represented by the works of Titian and El Greco, hung in spacious, high-ceilinged, well-lit marble halls. Some great canvases by Rembrandt and Hals, as well as Rubens’ magnificent Tribute Money , are highlights of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish collection. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist galleries contain works by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne. Several galleries are devoted to Rodin sculptures - bronze, porcelain and stone pieces including The Athlete, Fugit Amor and a small cast of The Kiss . A highlight of the museum, The Thinker , greets visitors in the museum’s front courtyard.

Golden Gate ParkIn a city with an abundance of green space, Golden Gate Park stands out as not just the largest, but also the most beautiful, and safest, of its parks. Spreading three miles or so west from the Haight as far as the Pacific, it was constructed on what was then an area of wild sand dunes, buffeted by the spray from the ocean. Despite the throngs of joggers, polo players, roller-skaters, cyclists and strollers, it never seems to get overcrowded and you can always find a spot to be alone.

Of the park’s several museums, two are under construction at the time of writing. The M.H. de Young Museum , with its large and diverse range of painting and sculpture, is in the midst of a massive rehaul and not due to reopen until 2005. The similarly under-construction Asian Art Museum is moving locations entirely, within the old Main Library space, next to the new Main Library in the Civic Center district. It is considered one of the largest and most impressive museums devoted only to Asian art in the Western Hemisphere. (You can check on the status of its development at ) The California Academy of Sciences ($8.50, $2.50 discount with Muni transfer, free first Wed of month; summer daily 9am-6pm; rest of year daily 10am-5pm; ) opposite is a good place to amuse restless children, with its 30ft dinosaur skeleton, life-size replicas of elephant seals and other California wildlife, and live colony of black-footed penguins. Over 6,000 specimens of aquatic life can be viewed in its Steinhart Aquarium (admission included in museum ticket; daily 10am-5pm), the best are the alligators and other reptiles lurking in a simulated swamp. Sky shows in its Morrison Planetarium cost $2.50 more. Slightly to the west is the Japanese Tea Garden ($3.50; daily 9am-6.30pm), dominated by a massive bronze Buddha. Bridges, footpaths, pools filled with carp, bonsai and cherry trees lend a peaceful feel. Busloads of tourists pour in; by far the best idea is to get here early for a breakfast of tea and fortune cookies in the tea house ($3.50 anytime).

The beautiful National AIDS Memorial Grove is in the eastern end of the park, near the tennis courts. Inaugurated in 1991, it is a pleasant and thought-provoking place to stroll. Tours take place Thursdays from 9.30am to 12.30pm (tel 415/750-8340, ).

Haight-Ashbury

The fame of Haight-Ashbury , two miles west of downtown San Francisco, far outstrips its size. No more than eight blocks in length, centered around the junction of Haight and Ashbury streets, “The Haight” was a run-down Victorian neighborhood until it transmogrified into the epitome of cool during the 1960s. Since then the area has become gentrified, but it retains a collection of radical bookstores, laid-back cafés, record stores and secondhand clothing emporia, not to mention a collection of characters still flying the counterculture’s rather worn flag.

All there is to do in the Haight today is to stroll around what is one of the best areas in town to shop . It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to update your record collection, dress yourself up and blow money on books and beer. The eastern end of Haight Street, around the crossing with Fillmore Street, is the funkiest corner of the district. Known as the Lower Haight , and for decades a primarily black neighborhood, it was reborn a few years ago - thanks to low rents - as a stomping ground for young hipsters. Though its trend appeal has since been surpassed by the Mission, it remains home to a small glut of DJ shops and a boisterous Brit-heavy population of club kids.

                  * Region: California
* Time Zone: Pacific (GMT-8)
* Geography: Northern Hemisphere