A Premium Cable Car Ride
Tuck it in. Cable car coming on the left side!" Dangling by an arm, I was gulping cool salty air, and looking down the dizzying California Street hill to the bay. I quickly pulled myself in and hugged the wooden strut on the outside of my descending cable car. The uphill car rattled by so close I could have bumped shoes with the other open-air riders.
Gripman Walter Scott III muscled the chest-high metal trigger that works the front brakes on the 99-year-old car. He carefully creaked our 9-ton load down the hill. Luckily, on this descent, the brakes held, and none of the passengers got sideswiped off into traffic. Such accidents are rare, but that little whiff of danger is another reason that riding a cable car is so much fun.
Wharf speed. Riding the nation's only moving monument is, of course, a quintessential San Francisco experience. The vast majority of tourists, however, settle for the least authentic and least interesting version. They typically wait in two-hour queues to ride the Powell Street lines that take them to touristy Fisherman's Wharf.
That's too bad. For the same price--$3 one way, or, better yet, $9 for an all-day pass--tourists can join the locals who jump right on the city's oldest cars (there's usually no line) and take an open-air tour of San Francisco history. Noting that his car rumbles through Chinatown and up Nob Hill, gripman Scott declares: "Every trip is an adventure."
The adventure begins just two blocks up from the bay, where the California line starts off for the skyscrapers of the financial district. It clangs slowly up to Grant Street, the gateway to Chinatown.
Stepping off here at first seemed a little disappointing, since souvenir joints are increasingly pushing out butcher shops with live chickens and basement vegetable emporiums cluttered with crates of mysterious dark roots. (Many locals have shifted their shopping one block west on Stockton Street.) But there are still plenty of authentic bits of history from the 19th century, when Chinese immigrants sought their fortune at what they called "Golden Mountain," and thousands of Asian workers were imported to do the backbreaking work of building the transcontinental railroad.
It took only a few minutes to find the real Chinatown. I strolled three blocks to Clay Street and turned down Ross Alley, which quickly grew eerily dark and quiet. The alley cuts between dingy buildings with musty doorways emblazoned only with Chinese symbols. The sense of mystery deepened for me when I saw a small man in a soiled white butcher's jacket and knee-high black rubber boots wheeling a big trash barrel toward me. I stopped, fascinated by the big green mesh bag that seemed to be squirming on top of the barrel. Why that's . . . frogs! At least two dozen hand-size fat green frogs were jumping and wriggling inside the bag. Ignoring the temptation to trail the frogs, I instead followed a delicious smell--cooking vanilla. Up to the right was a sign: Golden Gate Fortune Cookies factory. Now the standard dessert in Chinese restaurants, this cookie was actually invented by the operators of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, a few miles away.
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