Touring San Francisco

Touring San Francisco

GEORGE MARTIN

THE USUAL MOTORCYCLE TOUR involves stuffing the old panniers and luggage racks with food, clothing and gear, and then heading off for the boondocks and high adventure. Touring a city might seem silly, but consider San Francisco where there’s plenty to see, plenty to do, and your trip can take anywhere from half a day to a week.

To illustrate the possibilities of an “urban tour,” I recently borrowed a new Honda 305cc Hawk, perched girl photographer Chris Moitra on the pillion pad, and set off to see the sights. Our trip took about five hours, including time spent for picture-taking, and we saw an excellent cross-section of one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

San Francisco’s key word is “changeable.” Things get so uncertain that there is a popular saying in the city, “If you don't like the weather here, just wait a minute.” Thus, while the sun shines brightly down on Fisherman's Wharf the fleecy white fingers of fog may be obscuring all but your handlebars on the Golden Gate.

If at all possible, enter the city from the east, across the Bay Bridge. This is the longest bridge over navigable water in the world, measuring a bit more than eight miles.

As you top the slight rise on the western side of the bridge the city’s skyline forms a sweeping panorama, and you can scan the bay and see the forbidding mass of Alcatraz, once the home of AÍ Capone and the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Take the first off-ramp on the San Francisco side, labeled “Main Street, Broadway,” and vou’Il find yourself leaning your machine into one of the sweetest little descending right bends a highway designer ever put on paper. You are suddenly zipping into a maze of concrete ramps (keep right, then left) and the smell of your machine’s exhaust is suddenly joined by the acrid aroma of coffee from a pair of nearby roasting plants. The road makes a gentle left bend and you leave the coffee aroma behind for the salty smell of the Embarcadero, the city’s waterfront, spread out below. Tool over to the far-right lane and you get a nice seagull’s-eye view of the proceedings: ships from all over the world being unloaded. Next you angle into another leftish bend, downshift a few times and you are in the nightclub world of North Beach.

This is on Broadway, a fairly nondescript street by day, but a real hotspot at night. When the sun goes down, crowds jam the area and the entertainment ranges right through operatic arias, jazz, Gay Nineties, Dixieland, and even Country and Western. Latest little craze is “The Swim,” a sort of variation on the Twist, done by lissome lasses garbed in as little as possible. There’s something for everybody.

Columbus Avenue cuts Broadway at an angle. Turn right, then quickly look for a blue and white sign on the right side of the street featuring a placid looking seagull and the words, “49 Mile Scenic Drive.”

This is a tour route laid out about 15 years ago to help people see the city’s best sights on their own. A contest was held to design the route marker, and the winner was the blue and white seagull sign which you first see on the corner of Columbus and Grant, indicating a right turn.

Now you are driving down the narrow colorful street which was for several years quite famous (or infamous) as the home of the Beatniks. The place still has a Bohemian atmosphere, but the beard and sandal set is not nearly so much in evidence any more. If you like folk music and/or jazz, there are some interesting coffee houses here. Otherwise just keep looking for those seagull signs.

You pass with an “A” if you spot one at Grant and Lombard St. indicating a right turn. This is the road which takes you up famous Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower. The huge granite tower was commissioned by one Lucy Coit, a one-time San Francisco society matron who had a passion for fires. She was an inveterate fire watcher, and legend has it she would ride to and from blazes right on the fire wagon. She had the tower (which some compare to a gargantuan fire nozzle) built to honor the memory of her husband. The fluted tower rises about 100 feet, and the fine view from the base is only surpassed by the panorama visible from the observation floor.

An elevator will take you up weekdays for a small sum, and in the lobby you can view one of those old WPA-commissioned murals, depicting muscled engineers and workmen of the thirties hard at work taming nature with dams, etc.

A cyclist is twice blessed on the trip; you can see lots more on the way up and you can slip the bike into any little crevice on top of the hill, where the traffic is brutal and parking is a real challenge. Just follow the seagulls back down the hill and a few minutes later you’ll pull up in front of Fisherman’s Wharf.

Activity here dates back to the days when San Francisco housewives would come down out of North Beach to buy fish and seafood off the boats of Italian fishermen. Inevitably the commerce became more formalized, and today the area is a center for seafood restaurants and sidewalk fish stands. The aromas of fish and cooking crab and shrimp are about too good to resist, and a particularly tangy type of sourdough French bread is also available. The sidewalk stands will sell you a “walk-away” crab or shrimp cocktail for 75 cents, or you can go about a block down Jefferson St. (near where the boats are actually docked) and get the same thing for a half-dollar. While eating, you can stroll out along the wharf and inspect the multi-colored fishing fleet riding at anchor in the lagoon. Nearby, if you want to rest your bike for an hour or so, Harbor Tours, Inc. offers rides around the bay in their red and white tour boats fairly inexpensively.

Back on the trail of the seagulls, you’ll hit the which ineludes the Maritime Museum (a must for boating buffs) and an assemblage of historic old ships restored to days of former glory. Also here is the Hyde St. turntable of the city’s most scenically spectacular cable car line. These little cars are pulled along by a cable running in a slot beneath the street. They are a real experience to ride, and will still take you all the way across town for 15 cents.

There are two schools of thought on how to ride the jerky little cars. The official tour-book view is that any real San Franciscan wouldn’t be caught dead riding in the enclosed portion. However, the battle for seats and/or standing room on the outdoorsy end gets pretty fierce, and I have always regarded it is a subtle form of one-upmanship to just drop the whole struggle and retire to the inside half of the car, where there is no danger of losing a piece of leg to a passing St. Bernard.

Back on two wheels, the omnipresent seagull signs lead you a short distance to the Marina District, site of the city’s two yacht clubs. You then take a left, and you are cycling up to one of the world’s most beautiful examples of architecture, the Palace of Fine Arts.

This huge structure was built for the 1939 World’s Fair, out of laths and a plaster material. Time and moisture have wreaked a great deal of havoc with the building, and it is now crumbling into a beautiful ruin. The grandeur is still present, though, and looking across the quiet, duckspotted lake you’ll go far to find a prettier scene. A big effort by several wealthy and concerned San Franciscans combined with a municipal bond issue voted by the people has raised a fund to re-do the building in permanent concrete, but many think the re-done structure (not all of it will be rebuilt) will never equal the beauty of the original ochre-colored work.

After firing up and leaving the Palace, you enter the gates of The Presidio, an army base which encompasses the entire San Francisco side of the Golden Gate. The scenic drive winds through the wooded hills and army installations in a series of gentle curves that one suspects would make a pretty tolerable road race circuit. Just after you drive under a freeway overpass (taking cars to the Golden Gate Bridge) you will come to a turnoff from the main road which heads down to the bay. This will lead you to old Fort Winfield Scott, a three-story brick fortification right at the base of the bridge, where you get a terrific view of the graceful orange span and the rushing blue water beneath it.

Back on the main route, you drive up the hill to the observation area at the bridge itself. Here you might stop long enough to take a bit of a walk out on the bridge itself, which is equipped with spacious walkways. The height is dizzying, the sea breeze is refreshing, and the view of the city is exhilarating. It is a walk well worth the dime and the half hour or so it takes.

From the bridge, you have a few minutes pleasant riding through more of the Presidio, then out and through the luxurious Seacliff District. Keep following the signs and you’ll reach Lincoln Park, which contains a nice golf course and an excellent art museum. If you only have a few minutes, at least check out the large casting of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” We received permission to photograph the Honda beneath the statue from a guard, who quipped, “Why not, both Cadillac and RollsRoyce have used the statue for their ads.”

We clicked away, confident we were in good company, then took off down the road and out of the park.

You soon begin smelling salt water again, when the road starts going down a hill and you find yourself in the Point Lobos, Ocean Beach area. Just before the beach itself is the famous Cliff House restaurant and gift shop, and just up the hill from that is the Sutro Museum. This latter place is a private establishment which was an “in” place to go to take the waters many years ago. The huge baths are empty now, but there is still a somewhat corny “museum of wonders” inside. The main attractions are a collection of great old musicmaking machines and one of the prototypes of the ill-fated Tucker automobile.

But the best thing about the Sutro Museum doesn’t cost a thing. It is an old custom-built steam motorcycle which is displayed in an outside window, facing the street. The thing has been covered with a rather awkward red paint job and the tires are shot, but it looks like with a little work it might go again. A sign near the machine notes that no one has ever dared ride it full throttle, and then comments in true P.T. Barnum fashion that it “may be the fastest thing on wheels.” One wonders what class it would go in at the Bonneville Speed Trials.

Along here you can cut about 10 miles off your trip by taking the turn-off to Golden Gate Park, skipping the Zoo and Lake Merced. Follow the signs that say “Main Drive,” and you’ll soon pick up the guiding seagulls again as they meander through the green and lake-spotted park.

The park itself is about one-half mile wide by nearly four miles long. It contains numerous drives, equestrian trails and many lovely lakes and ponds. There is also Steinhart Aquarium, the De Young Museum, and the very interesting Morrison Planetarium. Out of the park, the seagull signs will lead you a merry chase up to twin peaks, a large two-pointed mass which sits almost in the exact geographical center of the city. The view is pretty much unexcelled from this point.

Then down the hill and past the U.S. mint, but here you should abandon the signs for a bit because they take off for the extreme south of the city where nothing much is. Instead, follow Market Street a few blocks to Van Ness, turn right past the classically designed Civic Center, and you’ll be back on the trail just in time to lean into a right turn and drive down Geary Street, home of the city’s two legitimate theaters. Geary crosses the other end of the cable car line, goes past Union Square (union sympathizers demonstrated here during the Civil War) and down to the financial district. You take a left on Grant Avenue, however, for the last main stop on the tour, Chinatown. San Francisco’s Chinese colony is the largest outside the orient, and tourism is one of the largest businesses. Nearly all the buildings show heavy Chinese influence in design; even the lamp posts have oriental decor. The street you are driving on is Grant Avenue, immortalized in the musical, “Flower Drum Song.” It is narrow, crowded, and you can buy anything here from Turkish cigarettes to egg rolls.

Grant runs into Broadway, where you catch a right and proceed until you are back where you started. You should be about four hours older, but much richer in touring experience.