Frommer's San Francisco 2012 - Matthew Poole [133]
The Castro
Castro Street, between Market and 18th streets, is the center of the city’s gay community as well as a lovely neighborhood teeming with shops, restaurants, bars, and other institutions that cater to the area’s colorful residents. Among the landmarks are Harvey Milk Plaza and the Castro Theatre (www.castrotheatre.com), a 1930s movie palace with a Wurlitzer organ. The gay community began to move here in the late 1960s and early 1970s from a neighborhood called Polk Gulch, which still has a number of gay-oriented bars and stores. Castro is one of the liveliest streets in the city and the perfect place to shop for gifts and revel in free-spiritedness. Check www.castroonline.com for more info.
The Mission District
Once inhabited almost entirely by Irish immigrants, the Mission District is now the center of the city’s Latino community as well as a mecca for young, hip residents. It’s an oblong area stretching roughly from 14th to 30th streets between Potrero Avenue on the east and Dolores Avenue on the west. In the outer areas, many of the city’s finest Victorians still stand, although they seem strangely out of place in the mostly lower-income neighborhoods. The heart of the community lies along 24th Street between Van Ness and Potrero avenues, where dozens of excellent ethnic restaurants, bakeries, bars, and specialty stores attract people from all over the city. The area surrounding 16th Street and Valencia Street is a hotbed for impressive—and often impressively cheap—restaurants and bars catering to the city’s hipsters. The Mission District at night doesn’t feel like the safest place (although in terms of creepiness, the Tenderloin, a few blocks off Union Sq., beats the Mission by far), and walking around the area should be done with caution, but it’s usually quite safe during the day and is highly recommended.
A detail from Enrique’s Journey by Josue Rojas in Balmy Alley.
For an even better insight into the community, go to the Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center, 2981 24th St., between Harrison and Alabama streets ( 415/285-2287; www.precitaeyes.org), and take one of the 11⁄2- to 2-hour tours conducted on Saturdays and Sundays at 11am and 1:30pm, where you’ll see 60 murals in an 8-block walk. Group tours are available during the week by appointment. The 11am tour costs $12 for adults, $8 for students with ID, $5 for seniors, and $2 for children 17 and under; the 1:30pm tour, which is half an hour longer and includes a slide show, costs $15 for adults, $8 for students with ID, and $5 for seniors and children 17 and under. All but the Saturday-morning tour (which leaves from 3325 24th St. at the Café Venice) leave from the center’s 24th Street location.
A Precita Eyes tour of Balmy Alley.
Other signs of cultural life in the neighborhood are progressive theaters such as Theatre Rhinoceros (www.therhino.org) and Theater Artaud (www.artaud.org). At 16th Street and Dolores Avenue is the Mission San Francisco de Asís, better known as Mission Dolores. It’s the city’s oldest surviving building and the district’s namesake.
THE PRESIDIO & GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL RECREATION AREA
The Presidio
In October 1994, the Presidio passed from the U.S. Army to the National Park Service and became one of a handful of urban national parks that combines historical, architectural, and natural elements in one giant arboreal expanse. (It also contains a previously private golf course and a home for George Lucas’s production company.) The 1,491-acre area incorporates a variety of terrain—coastal scrub, dunes, and prairie grasslands—that shelter many rare plants and more than 200 species of birds, some of which nest here.
This military outpost has a 220-year history, from its founding in September 1776 by the Spanish under José Joaquin Moraga