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.
Could that dank anonymous-looking basement be the factory? Sure enough, past the cluttered boxes of sugar and flour, three women wrapped disks of warm, still-soft cookie around slips of paper. The cheery owner of the 43-year-old factory, Franklin Yee, handed out a free sample. "Make you strong. Makes you long life," he said. "Schoolchildren eat my cookies, get smart!"
I took a couple of bags ($3 apiece) on the chance he might be right and headed back to the cable car. The next car (they come by every 10 minutes or so) trundled up Nob Hill. The glory of the robber barons, who got rich off the ore mined and railroad built by workers like the Chinese, was short lived. San Francisco's 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed many 19th-century mansions.
Lofty lobby. But one surviving example crowns Nob Hill. The Fairmont Hotel was built by the daughters of silver magnate James Fair. After being gutted in the 1906 fire, the lobby was restored to its original gold and marble elegance. It has long been the place for important events. The first charter for the United Nations was drafted here in 1945. And it was in the Venetian Room that Tony Bennett first sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."
The Venetian Room is now reserved for private parties. But anybody with a hungering for a 360-degree panorama and a thirst for history can walk across the street to the Mark Hopkins hotel, take the elevator to the Top of the Mark, and watch the fog roll in past the Golden Gate Bridge while sipping a martini, another San Francisco culinary invention.
I opted to jump on a cable car heading back toward the bay. Gripman Scott, who has placed second in several bell-ringing competitions, clanged musically at the Dirty Harry-like drivers recklessly trying to squeeze past. It was a short two-block stroll from the terminus to the renovated Ferry Building, where local chefs and organic farmers sell San Francisco specialties such as Teleme cheese and sourdough baguettes. The gold prospectors who set off this city's first boom in 1849 discovered that if they left a batter of flour and water out, a native yeast would start to ferment. Knead a bit of that "starter" into some bread dough, and you get a uniquely delicious loaf of bread that is crusty on the outside and soft, moist, and tangy on the inside. I sat on one of the benches overlooking the city's "other" bridge--the silvery Bay Bridge--and watched the boats plow through the swells while enjoying a little fresh bread and cheese. Now that's a real San Francisco treat.
LOCAL FAVE
"I'm a painter. I like to paint the Palace of Fine Arts. I like that classical building and the swans. There are so many views, of the Golden Gate Bridge, of the sailboats. It is just great. When the fog comes in, it is glorious."
Tony Bennett, whose signature song is "I Left My Heart in San Francisco"
This story appears in the July 4, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.