San Francisco - Alison Bing [66]
The Presidio is the vast stretch of green that caps the northwest corner of the San Francisco peninsula, with Hwy 1 running north–south through the center and Doyle Dr running east–west. Both streets take you to the Golden Gate Bridge and a glorious stretch of coastline popular for hiking, jogging, biking and bird-watching.
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top picks
THE MARINA & THE PRESIDIO
Golden Gate Bridge
Crissy Field
Exploratorium
Baker Beach
Greens
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THE MARINA & COW HOLLOW
The Marina may be populated by clean-cut, sporty types, but it has plenty of dirty little secrets. Back during the Gold Rush, a lagoon just south of Lombard St gave washerwomen a local livelihood: attempting to remove accumulated months of soil from miners’ jeans and sailors’ whites. By the 1880s the water had turned so foul it would only have made clothes dirtier, and prison chain gangs were brought in to fill in the polluted lagoon. Dairy farming was the next neighborhood enterprise, with cattle being fed leftovers from SF’s whiskey stills. Poor hygiene soon ended this drunken bovine venture, but the name for the Union St gulch stuck: Cow Hollow.
Most of the Marina materialized after the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco was looking to stage a comeback. The waterfront marshland was filled in with rubble to create the grounds for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, ostensibly commemorating the completion of the Panama Canal while craftily announcing that San Francisco was once again open for business. When the expo was over, most of the displays came down, but San Francisco romantics attached to Bernard Maybeck’s picturesque plaster Palace of Fine Arts insisted that it be rebuilt in concrete for future generations to enjoy.
Real-estate speculation began, and the makeshift Marina soon took on the look of permanence, with wood-beamed Arts and Crafts churches, Mex-deco adobe apartments with tiled foyers, and the ritzy Golden Gate and St Francis yacht clubs.
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TRANSPORTATION: THE MARINA & THE PRESIDIO
Bus Bus 30 gets you to Fort Mason and the Marina from Union Square. Buses 42, 47 and 49 serve Fort Mason from Van Ness Ave. The 28 bus goes from the Marina to the Presidio and Golden Gate Bridge.
Cable car The Powell-Hyde line terminates three blocks from Fort Mason.
Parking Ample parking in the Presidio, especially Crissy Field. There are two lots in Fort Mason and one at Marina Green.
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The shaky land mass had developed a solid reputation as a safe haven for new-moneyed arrivals by the 1980s, when the 1989 Loma-Prieta earthquake left millions of dollars in damages. Again the Marina cleaned up and turned its luck around, and today its tranquil streets reveal nothing of its turbulent past.
The Marina is still where the city quarantines most of those wispy-haired California blonds and beefy, back-slapping frat boys often seen in Hollywood movies, but not so much on the streets of San Francisco – and most locals prefer it that way. Some categorically refuse to set foot in the Marina watering holes Armistead Maupin referred to as ‘breeder bars,’ which are among the last places in San Francisco where men loudly compare salaries and the women are insistently called ‘girls’ well into their 40s. ‘So Marina’ is not generally meant as a compliment in San Francisco, often snarled in the direction of anyone flashing cash or unironically sporting a baseball cap in the Mission or the Haight.
But with more local designers supplying the Marina with cutting-edge fashion sense and flashy new money pouring into other neighborhoods, such as Potrero Hill, soon it may not be so easy to distinguish the Marina.
EXPLORATORIUM Map
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