• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1138 0

you’re looking for confirmation that California is run by a secret club, well, here you have it: many of the nation’s founding fathers were Freemasons, including George Washington, and the same can be said about California’s. It’s all captured in the modernist stained-glass windows, which supposedly depict founders of Freemasonry in California and their accomplishments – that is, if you can decipher the enigmatic symbols and snippets of fabric embedded in the glass. The frieze below the windows has soil and gravel samples from all 58 California counties, plus Hawaii for some reason known only to those in on the secret handshake. Downstairs a visitors center and art displays reveal some of the society’s intriguing secrets.

CABLE CAR MUSEUM Map

415-474-1887; www.cablecarmuseum.org; 1201 Mason St; admission free; 10am-6pm Apr-Sep, to 5pm Oct-Mar; Powell-Mason, Powell-Hyde;

Grips, engines, braking mechanisms…if terms like these warm your gearhead heart, you will be completely besotted with the Cable Car Museum, housed in the city’s still-functioning cable-car barn. See three original 1870s cable cars and watch as cables glide over huge bull wheels – as awesome a feat of physics now as when the mechanism was invented by Andrew Hallidie in 1873.

PACIFIC-UNION CLUB Map

1000 California St; 1; California

The only Nob Hill mansion to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire is a squat neoclassical brownstone, which despite its grandeur lacks architectural imagination. Today it’s a private men’s club. The exclusive membership roster lists newspaper magnates, both Hewlett and Packard of Hewlett-Packard, several US secretaries of defense and government contractors (insert conspiracy theory here).

Democrats, people of color and anyone under 45 are scarce on the published list, but little else is known about the 800-odd, all-male membership: members can be expelled for leaking information. Cheeky cross-dressing protesters have pointed out that there’s no specific ban on transgender/transvestite visitors supping in its main dining room or walking through the front door – privileges denied women. Give it a try and report back, won’t you?

* * *

Return to beginning of chapter

JAPANTOWN & PACIFIC HEIGHTS

Drinking; Eating; Shopping; Sleeping

Porcelain kitties wave from every countertop here, but like the floating town in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, picturesque Japantown is also the site where trials have been endured and legends made. Retro Japan Center looks like it’s torn from a 1960s Japanese leisure travel brochure, but actually San Francisco’s Japanese community dates back to at least the 1860s – not that it’s been an easy 150 years. First there were California’s anti-Asian exclusion laws passed in the 1870s, limiting employment and marriage for San Franciscans born in Japan. Then came the 1906 earthquake and fire, when local Japanese fled to an area of lower Pacific Heights that came to be known as Nihonjinmachi, or ‘Japanese people’s town,’ starting businesses, schools, temples and newspapers. Second- and third-generation Japanese San Franciscans had already gained citizenship and joined the US armed forces to fight the Axis powers (including Japan) by 1942, when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, mandating the removal of residents of Japanese heritage, including US citizens.

Japantown’s approximately 7000 residents were rounded up and sent to internment camps, bringing only what they could carry. Long-term residents and US citizens alike endured cramped living conditions under armed guard and, to add insult to injury, were required to sign loyalty oaths under threat of deportation to Japan. Japanese Americans immediately took their civil rights case to the courts and, for almost 40 years, fought for reparations and an official letter of apology from the US government (finally delivered by President George HW Bush). Japanese American GIs finished tours of duty in WWII to find they often didn’t have a home to return to, and many Japanese Americans were resettled by the government in makeshift Japantown apartments,