San Francisco - Alison Bing [44]
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DOWNTOWN
Drinking; Eating; Shopping; Sleeping
Like a gold miner’s grin, Downtown is full of character but a little crooked. Where once sailors abandoned their ships in search of gold, stock brokers now speculate on Asian markets and the US dollar. The neighborhood that once parted new arrivals from their gold nuggets with hundreds of saloons, gambling dens and waterfront brothels has mostly lost its con-artist touch, except for friendly bets at a few sports bars and savvy junior copywriters cadging drinks at champagne lounges. But the biggest scammers are hotels that boast of a location in ‘the theater district,’ and on arrival turn out to be squalid residential affairs, conveniently located near methadone clinics and massage parlors. To tell the real boutique hotels from the pretenders, consult Click here.
The seductive spirit of yore is kept alive in designer showrooms and art galleries that will tempt the last dollar out of you. Otherwise, despite its reputation as a shopping paradise, Downtown mostly offers the usual chains and a few department stores. Once named for the ladies of the night who worked the block, Maiden Lane has since gone upscale and plays hostess to the likes of Chanel and Marc Jacobs.
Despite all the drinking and dining establishments in the area, only a few tempt San Franciscans to stay Downtown after work. Fleur de Lys and Aqua are among the few restaurants that rise to locals’ exacting standards for inventiveness – for culinary kicks, most people instead head to SoMa. Locals don’t frequent Downtown hotel bars, but when relatives are visiting they’ll make an exception for the swanky stylings of the Clock Bar or the Starlight Room.
Downtown San Francisco may have lost its bite since the Barbary Coast days, but it’s still best admired from atop Russian or Nob Hills or looking backwards from Crissy Field. The irregular-shaped buildings stick out at odd angles, lorded over by the pointy Transamerica Pyramid.
Running diagonally through San Francisco’s tidy east–west grid is Market St, creating angular intersections and a series of V-shaped flatiron buildings. North of Market between 4th and 5th Sts is the Powell St cable-car turnaround, often surrounded by a religious type warning against fornication, and squadrons of competitive chess players and tap dancers. Follow Powell St two blocks north to Union Square for department stores and grand hotels. Along the southern edge of Union Square runs Geary St, which heads east to galleries and west to theaters and more dubious amusements. Southwest of Union Square is the Tenderloin. The Financial District starts east at Kearny and Market Sts, and runs east to the bay and north to the Transamerica Pyramid. East of Columbus Ave and south of Broadway is Jackson Square, where once many a sailor’s lucky streak ended.
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top picks
DOWNTOWN
Galleries at 49 Geary and 77 Geary
Sunday gospel services at Glide Memorial
Cable cars
Market St flatirons
St Francis Hotel Glass Elevators
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FINANCIAL DISTRICT
The Financial District may not loom as large as Wall Street, but until the late 1990s this was the historic financial capital of the American West, dating back to the mid-19th century. Los Angeles has lately supplanted San Francisco for high finance, but Montgomery St remains home to big-name brokerage houses and banks.
The Mex-deco, pseudo-Mayan banking buildings along Sansome St near Sacramento St are monuments to money-making enterprises that have become ever more abstract. Once fortunes were made in gold nuggets, then came shipping and railroad holdings, then (ever so briefly) dot-com stock certificates, and now digital readouts of fluctuations in technology and Asian markets.
By day the hustle is palpable. Taxis discharge briefcase-toting venture capitalists, narrowly missing kamikaze bike-messengers, who swerve dangerously near hot-coffee-bearing stockbrokers.