Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Street and start climbing the hard hill. The upside of the Tenderloin is its low
rents, which attract hardy artists, nightclubs, immigrants—and liquor stores. It's
surprising that such a squalid part of town could be located so close to the most
prestigious parts of town, Union Square, Nob Hill, and the Financial District.
The Tenderloin is best avoided after dark, particularly for single women; go north
to Bush Street if you want to cross it and head west. Every time I'm in the
Tenderloin, I get furious at San Francisco. How can a city so obsessed with fancy
foods and wines, and with celebrating the good life, let its homeless problem get
so out of hand? The Tenderloin, I think, isn't just San Francisco's shame—it's a
national shame.
COW HOLLOW, PACIFIC HEIGHTS & THE MARINA
Best for:
Upscale boutiques, sit-and-linger restaurants and pubs, a neighborhood feel
What you won't find:
Attractions
Cow Hollow is the type of neighborhood with lots of shops selling designer
clothes and useless imported silk pillows, but not many supermarkets. It's a ter-
rific place to get an espresso or a pub burger, but when it comes to culture that
you don't have to purchase to participate in, there's not much deeper beauty.
Union Street between Laguna and Steiner is its principal shopping and dining
thoroughfare—a few hours of window-shopping here can make you fall in love
with the city. The Marina is even more about new money, much of it earned in a
hurry during the dot-com boom and now being slowly spent at its upscale bou-
tiques. Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights, both full of handsome old wooden
homes that you and I can't afford, are built on solid ground, but the Marina is
notorious for having been built, foolishly, on rubble from the 1906 quake, which
means that in a really bad earthquake, the ground stands a very good chance of
liquefaction,
meaning it'll turn to pudding and everything on it will collapse in an
instant. Yet the district is still popular with many of the city's newly wealthy, who
build L.A.-style mansions in the blocks leading away from the Bay. I wouldn't live
in the Marina; it just makes me nervous walking around there, no matter how
nice its Apple Store is.
THE MISSION
Best for:
Cool cafes and restaurants, cheap knockoff goods, people-watching
What you won't find:
Museums, high-end shopping
Known principally as the down-at-heel district where Latin immigrants and young
artists coexist in a past-its-prime urban landscape, the Mission is increasingly the
sort-of-gentrifying place where you'll find some of the coolest cafes and places to
eat—you'll find both yuppie chow rooms and down-and-dirty burrito joints.
Mission, its main drag, has the air of an avenue that was probably a lovely neigh-
borhood Main Street in the 1960s but is now a jumble of cheap clothing stores and
loose street detritus. Some visitors find the atmosphere to be a little hairy, but
really, the district's rough presentation is more a function of its residents' lower eco-
nomic status, and not indicative of any predilection toward crime. Most of the
restaurants and shops are on Mission and Valencia streets, so these places are per-
fectly safe. It's east of Mission where things get sketchier, so if that's where you're
going, just get solid directions before setting out. BART connects to this part of
