San Francisco Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

• 
  Golden Gate Bridge

  Fog and fierce currents guard the strait beneath you, one of the most dangerous stretches on the Pacific coast. The Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937, after four years of construction that many engineers said could not be done.

• 
  Transamerica Pyramid

  Picture San Franciscans spending a decade hating this pyramidal tower, only to watch it become the city's most beloved symbol. The Transamerica Pyramid was designed by architect William Pereira and completed in 1972 after years of controversy about its unconventional pyramidal shape.

• 
  Haight-Ashbury

  This intersection became the global headquarters of a cultural revolution around you. Haight Street at Ashbury Street — the intersection marked by the double street signs that tourists photograph and locals have learned to ignore — was the address of the Summer of Love in 1967, when an estimated 100,000 young people converged on this neighborhood to live, however briefly, in what they believed would be a new kind of society based on communal sharing, psychedelic experience, and rejection of Cold War conformity.

• 
  Palace of Fine Arts

  Notice how this structure evokes the melancholy beauty of ancient ruins, rebuilt to last forever. The Palace of Fine Arts was created by architect Bernard Maybeck for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world's fair San Francisco staged to announce to the world that it had fully recovered from the 1906 earthquake.

• 
  Golden Gate Park

  This park spreading around you should not exist. Golden Gate Park was created by act of the California legislature in 1870 on 1,017 acres of shifting sand dunes — the Outside Lands, as San Franciscans called the western half of the peninsula, which was considered useless wasteland.

All 40 stops

• Golden Gate Bridge (The Presidio)

  Fog and fierce currents guard the strait beneath you, one of the most dangerous stretches on the Pacific coast.

• Crissy Field / Presidio (The Presidio)

  Three colonial powers and the US military have held this ground in an unbroken line for 250 years, and you're walking it now.

• Palace of Fine Arts (Marina District)

  Notice how this structure evokes the melancholy beauty of ancient ruins, rebuilt to last forever.

• Alcatraz Island (San Francisco Bay)

  From Pier 33 your eyes find the island that once held some of the most dangerous criminals in American history.

• Fisherman's Wharf (Waterfront)

  Salt air and the smell of the sea greet you at the working waterfront that fed San Francisco for a century.

• Ghirardelli Square (Waterfront / Fisherman's Wharf)

  Ghirardelli Square ranks among America's first great examples of urban industrial reinvention.

• Cable Car Museum / Powell-Hyde Turntable (Nob Hill)

  Beneath your feet runs the operational heart of the only moving National Historic Landmark in the United States.

• Dragon Gate (Chinatown)

  Green clay tiles, carved dragons, and bronze lions mark your entrance to the oldest Chinatown in North America.

• Chinatown / Grant Avenue (Chinatown)

  Grant Avenue carries you along the oldest street in the original American grid of Yerba Buena, spine of Chinatown ever since.

• Waverly Place (Chinatown)

  Painted balconies and temple lanterns give this narrow alley its nickname, the Street of Painted Balconies, in the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown you now…

• City Lights Bookstore (North Beach)

  City Lights, the bookstore in front of you, launched a literary revolution and stood trial for obscenity for publishing it.

• North Beach / Washington Square (North Beach)

  Espresso bars and bakeries ring this park at the bohemian heart of San Francisco, a tradition more than a century old around you.

• Coit Tower (Telegraph Hill)

  Rising above you is Coit Tower, a concrete tower whose lobby murals caused a political scandal in 1934 and made it one of the most…

• Telegraph Hill / Filbert Steps (Telegraph Hill)

  A garden staircase drops from up here near Coit Tower, more than 300 feet down the eastern face of Telegraph Hill toward the Embarcadero, one…

• Transamerica Pyramid (Financial District)

  Picture San Franciscans spending a decade hating this pyramidal tower, only to watch it become the city's most beloved symbol.

• The Embarcadero (Waterfront)

  Your walk follows the boulevard that has served as San Francisco's front door since the city was founded.

• Ferry Building Marketplace (Embarcadero)

  Ahead of you rises the Ferry Building, once the busiest transit hub west of the Mississippi and now one of the great urban food markets…

• Union Square (Union Square)

  Polished storefronts around you conceal more layers of history than San Francisco's luxury retail and hotel district first suggests.

• Nob Hill / Grace Cathedral (Nob Hill)

  Railroad barons built their mansions on this hill, the 1906 earthquake burned them to the ground, and it rebuilt itself into the most elegant address…

• Mark Hopkins Hotel / Top of the Mark (Nob Hill)

  Above you towers the Mark Hopkins Hotel, whose rooftop bar became the most emotionally charged room in World War II San Francisco.

• Russian Hill / Macondray Lane (Russian Hill)

  Steep streets and literary ghosts define the hill rising around you in San Francisco.

• Lombard Street (Russian Hill)

  Eight tight switchbacks drop beneath you here, the most photographed block of Lombard Street on the steep Russian Hill face in San Francisco.

• Marina District (Marina)

  The Marina District under your feet was built on the wreckage of one world's fair to house another, and it nearly returned to the bay…

• City Hall (Civic Center)

  San Francisco City Hall, one of the most magnificent public buildings in America, lifts its dome 307 feet over your head, sixteen feet higher than…

• Civic Center Historic District (Civic Center)

  Outside Washington, D.C., no American city holds a larger ensemble of Beaux-Arts civic architecture than the Civic Center Historic District you have entered, built largely…

• Hayes Valley (Hayes Valley)

  An earthquake gave birth to the neighborhood spreading around you.

• Fillmore Street (Western Addition)

  Jazz clubs and record shops once lined this street, the West Coast's most vibrant African American cultural corridor you now walk, nearly destroyed by the…

• Japantown / Japan Center (Japantown)

  Hotels, bathhouses, and markets built by Issei immigrants once filled this neighborhood around you, one of only three Japantowns left in the United States.

• Alamo Square / Painted Ladies (Alamo Square)

  Six Victorian houses known as the Painted Ladies rise in front of you, framed against the downtown skyline in the park with San Francisco's most…

• Haight-Ashbury (Haight-Ashbury)

  This intersection became the global headquarters of a cultural revolution around you.

• The Panhandle (Haight-Ashbury)

  Towering eucalyptus and cypress trees line the narrow strip of parkland around you, the counterculture's outdoor gathering room.

• Golden Gate Park (Golden Gate Park)

  This park spreading around you should not exist.

• de Young Museum (Golden Gate Park)

  Slowly, the de Young Museum in front of you is disappearing into the park that surrounds it.

• Japanese Tea Garden (Golden Gate Park)

  Stone lanterns, a moon bridge, and a pagoda fill the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States around you.

• Mission Dolores (Mission District)

  Your gaze falls on the oldest intact building in San Francisco, a structure whose walls have witnessed the entire span of the city's history.

• Balmy Alley (Mission District)

  Murals cover nearly every garage door, fence, and wall around you in the alley that launched the Mission District's mural movement.

• Castro District (Castro)

  This neighborhood around you became the center of the LGBTQ liberation movement, and paid for that distinction with tremendous loss.

• SoMa / South of Market (South of Market)

  Warehouses and metal shops once filled this district around you, now the center of San Francisco's transformation by the technology industry.

• SFMOMA (South of Market)

  SFMOMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, faces you as the first museum on the West Coast dedicated exclusively to twentieth-century and contemporary art…

• Bay Bridge / Treasure Island Viewpoint (Embarcadero / Waterfront)

  Most people walk right past the Bay Bridge spread out in front of you, heading for its more photogenic sibling to the west, yet it…

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