San Francisco

Why San Francisco works

The Golden Gate Bridge, its International Orange towers rising 227m above the strait it spans, remains San Francisco's defining image, often half-swallowed by the fog that rolls in from the Pacific most summer afternoons — a phenomenon so consistent that Mark Twain apocryphally claimed the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Alcatraz Island, the former federal penitentiary that once held Al Capone, sits isolated in the bay and is reached by ferry, its cell blocks preserved largely as they were left after the 1963 closure, offering an audio tour narrated partly by former inmates and guards. San Francisco's cable cars, the last manually operated system of their kind in the world, still climb the city's steepest grades — Powell-Hyde's route past Lombard Street, famous for its tight switchback turns through a garden-lined block, remains among the most photographed streets in America. Chinatown, the oldest and one of the largest outside Asia, predates the 1906 earthquake and retains dim sum parlours and herbalists behind ornate dragon gates. Fisherman's Wharf's sea lions, hauled out on Pier 39's docks since the early 1990s, have become an unplanned but beloved attraction. Beyond downtown, Golden Gate Park rivals New York's Central Park in scale, holding a Japanese Tea Garden and the de Young Museum, while nearby Silicon Valley's presence is felt city-wide in San Francisco's tech-driven economy and famously high cost of living.

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