Google Maps and the Stairways of San Francisco

Google Maps is trying to get me to switch to their new map system.  But that means I can't search and add locations to my San Francisco Map.  Each time I have to go to "custom maps", choose San Francisco and then click on "open original map".  In the new Google map you can "save" (star) a location but it is not obvious how you retrieve saved items.  The street view is supposed to load faster than the old one but it doesn't and it's harder to get to.  I'm sure the new Google Map works better on your mobile device when you want to find something nearby but doesn't Google realize how much fun old people like us have exploring a location that we are not in?  Maybe what I can do is look up things on the new Google map and then duplicate the search on the old Google map and add it to San Francisco.  Or maybe I'll eventually learn how to use the new version.

Right now I'm trying to find interesting streets to explore.  USA Today listed Fillmore Street as one of the best shopping streets in the nation.  It runs from Pacific Heights to Japan Town on Geary and "appeals to those with varied interests; it has three quaint bookstores, three flower shops and even three hardware outlets".  And then in Japan Town, SanFrancisco.travel lists a Soko Hardware store which "hosts every Japanese cooking tool, décor item, or gadget you could ever possibly need. This is the place to get your paper lanterns, wooden floor mats, rice cookers, and chopsticks."  We can't miss that!

Maybe we should explore the Stairway Walks in San Francisco.  How are our knees?  Just around the apartment on Russian Hill there are the Green Street steps, the Vallejo steps which run through Ina Coolbrith Park, Macondray Lane, not to mention the Filbert and Greenwich steps that go up to (or down from) Telegraph Hill.  They should provide some nice photo opportunities which we can't preview in Google Map's Street View because the Google camera truck can't go there...

OK.  I bit the bullet and bought the Kindle edition of Stairway Walks in San Francisco.  They have two walks for Russian Hill that we simply have to do because it is our neighborhood!  The author ferrets out all the little stairways in the neighborhood but warns against continuing on the cobblestones of Macondray Lane.  Unfortunately she doesn't cover the Inner and Outer Richmond because that area is flat, except for the Coastal Trail with the Cliff House and the Sutro Baths, which I wouldn't mind checking out.  She gives lots of history and points out every historical house.   So what day do we wander the neighborhood?  Maybe we should have scheduled a two week visit...

Hunting for that Deli

The weekend before Willy was born, Fernando and I drove into San Francisco and wandered around the Russian district out on Geary.  We stopped at a little delicatessen and Fernando swears that they had the best pastrami (or was it corned beef?) that he's ever eaten -- either before or since.  So naturally he has commanded me to find that place...

Will Wise Sons Delicatessen at the Contemporary Jewish Museum do?  They also have locations in the Ferry Building and in the Mission District.  The owners are from LA and offer pastrami and corned beef, matzoh ball soup and chopped liver.  But they also offer a Chinese Chicken Salad and a Country Club Cobb...  Not authentic Jewish?

A search on Yelp brings up 5 or 6 Russian Delis in the Richmond like the Russian Deli, the Gastronom Deli & Bakery and the Moscow & Tbilisi Bakery Store.  Most of them are along Geary in Little Russia and the food appears more Russian than Jewish but still worth a visit.  Remember M & I International Food in Brighton Beach?  I'm not a great fan of meringues or meat pirogies but there's bound to be something we can't resist.

A search on Yelp for Jewish delis in the Inner and Outer Richmonds only brings up the House of Bagels and A K Meats until it moves on to Shabu House and Thanh Thanh Cafe (??).  Maybe we better try LA for Jewish delis, not San Francisco.  Or we could go to Miller's East Coast Deli in the meantime, which has everything: hoagies and burgers as well as deli sandwiches.  Its website doesn't have prices on its menu but I can't imagine that it is out of our price range...  Or we could just go to Tommy's Joynt and have a pastrami sandwich or lamb shanks and a beer.  Except I'm looking through their 590 photos and can't find a pastrami on rye that I'd like to eat...   They do have some shots of the lamb shanks so you can see whether you'd like to eat it.

Ferry Building Marketplace and Farmers Markets

As Penny noted in the last post on the Exploratorium, there is no Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building on Fridays and we arrive too late on Saturday to make the big one.  There are Farmers Markets on Tuesday and Thursday from 10 am to 2 pm and every day the Ferry Building MarketPlace is open ("minimal hours": M-F 10-6; Sat 9-6; Sun 11-5).  The MarketPlace is within the Ferry Building and consists of a variety of shops and some restaurants, including the Acme Bread Company (the one that supplies Chez Panisse) and the Cowgirl Creamery.  The hours posted for the Acme Bread Company are 6:20 am to 7:30 pm.

One of the restaurants is The Slanted Door, a Vietnamese restaurant whose chef has a cookbook out on Vietnamese Home Cooking.  Somehow I feel that a chef who has written a cookbook can't be all that bad -- it must be a librarian's bias.  He also has other restaurants including an Out the Door kiosk at the Ferry Building and Heaven's Dog (modern Chinese cuisine and pre-Prohibition era cocktails) that sounded interesting but is closed for renovation.

There is also a Sur la Table and a Rancho Gordo bean shop.  A lot of the shops must be holes in the wall, like the one for Heath Ceramics and The Gardener, but that is OK since we won't be buying pots to take home.  Unless, that is, we are interested in some 5-piece place settings like the Olima Full Dinnerware Set.

How long do you suppose it will take us to browse through the MarketPlace?  Do we want to do it on a Tuesday when there is also a Farmers Market?  What do we do with what we buy?  Do we go to Yank Sing at Rincon Plaza for dim sum while we are there?  Juan thinks it is overpriced and suggested Lai Hong Lounge in Chinatown instead.  But I like the idea of the little carts so you can see what you order first, although their gallery of deem sum makes it easier.

Exploratorium and Pi Day on Friday?

Imagine that!  I thought the Exploratorium was still out by the Palace of Fine Arts, and I find that it's now "in a spectacular new location at Pier 15 on the Embarcadero at Green St."
Yes, Green Street!  So I'm thinking we can roll out of bed and down Green and end up at the Exploratorium just before we splash into the bay.  Wrong, when I hop into my Google maps car, I find I can't get there from here.  Part of Telegraph Hill is in the way, and Green doesn't appear to go through.  My Google takes me to Columbus where I jog right until I hit Broadway southeast (L) for two blocks and then north (L) on Sansome two blocks to pick up Green and continue east (R) to my destination.  It's about a mile.

On to the Exploratorium site where I discover:

Friday, March 14, is Pi Day and the museum is FREE.  It's a holiday founded by the museum.  Open 10 to 5, and we'd better get there early!  Senior admission is normally $19.
Also, that 1.5 acres of the Exploratorium's new 2 acres of outdoor exhibit space is free and open to the public.  I'm wondering where they got those 2 acres of outdoor space on a pier and whether we'll need snorkels.
Read about the "Metamophosis" of the museum at Funworld Magazine. 
IAAPA is dedicated to the preservation and prosperity of the amusement industry and we'll just miss their convention in SF the week before.  Did you know that?  Well, I sure didn't!

Fernando, your mission should you choose to accept it, is to scout out the best exhibits.  And there are apps for you that should help....maybe?
And lots of videos on such topics as Hack this Book, and the Science of Cocktails.  We'd better get lots of sleep the night before because this visit is really going to stretch our minds!

Now, we're on the Embarcadero....should we go to the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market first.  Opps!  only Tues, Thurs and Saturdays.

Well, there's always a streetcar ride along the Embarcadero!  Then Fort Mason?  The Presidio Trust at the Montgomery Street Barracks:  Building 103 has an exhibit "Crown Jewels:  5 Great National Parks Around the World and the Challenges They Face."

Those Hills of San Francisco

I've been roaming around in "street view" on my Google map of San Francisco and am beginning to feel that I really don't want to WALK to Swensen's Ice Cream Parlor even if it is only 6 blocks away.  It's all uphill until Leavenworth.  This is a good time to hop onto the trolley buses that run along Union and between the #41 and #45 one should run by every 5 minutes.  I've been scoping out the neighborhood and there aren't any stores to browse along Union anyway until you get to Hyde Street where there is Swensen's on one corner, the Zarzuela tapas restaurant on the opposite corner, a Searchlight Market and an interiors store.  This is a residential neighborhood.

You plunge downhill on Union after Larkin (and I'm behind a Trolley Bus now on the Google street view) and things begin to liven up and become more commercialized when you make a left on Polk Street (which is where the hardware store is).  After that, of course, comes Van Ness Avenue and that is the outer limit of our San Francisco walking experiences.  As kids I don't think we ever walked out that far, much less ventured beyond Van Ness.  We had lunch at Tommy's Joynt and that was Van Ness for us, except when we were driving out of town.  We did go to Golden Gate Park but frankly I don't remember how we got there.  I don't ever remember taking any public transportation except for the cable cars.  We took taxis.  However, when I went to the UC San Francisco Dental School, I would take the East Bay Transit from Albany to the San Francisco Station and then take the Parnassus bus up to Parnassus Avenue so I have a lot of experience with SF buses, not to mention the fact that Will and Camila were born on Mt. Parnassus or maybe it is Mt. Sutro.

But back to Polk Street, where there is a Crunch Fitness Gyn that has taken over the local theater and advertises "Love, Fitness, Happiness" on the marquee.  Polk Street is bicycle route #25 so I hope that means it is flatter than the other streets in the neighborhood.  Now that we are on the flats, there is a Russian Hill Bookstore, lots of restaurants, quite a few dry cleaners and "interior" stores, and a French lingerie store (no Victoria's Secret here!).  I only hope these establishments are still in business in March since one never knows how long ago these Google street views were photographed.

When Polk hits Broadway we are out of the chic area and into Walgreens with a big parking lot and a block later at Pacific the Jug Shop and its parking lot, where we could stock up on liquor for a month.  But there are definitely a lot of restaurants along this stretch, like Tai Chi, whose name refers not to the exercise but to the fact that they offer both Thai and Chinese food.  Polk wouldn't be a bad street to walk on as it is flat and there are lots of restaurants and stores, including the Big Apple Discount Store.

Now we are on Polk between Sacramento and California Streets and supposedly this is Nob Hill, although it looks awful flat and plebian to me.  Within this block is Swan's Oyster Depot, the favorite seafood spot for locals according to Frommer's.  I vaguely remember Andrew Zimmern (or was it Anthony Bourdain?) eating here in one of his TV episodes.

A few blocks south on Bush is the Alliance Francaise which has a Tuesday movie night where they show French cinema at 6:30 pm (or 7 pm if you speak French).  This is in case we have some unspent energy at the end of the day.

By now we are almost at Polk and Sutter and the street is getting a bit less interesting with the International School of Cosmetology, GNC and the Lush Lounge.  It's beginning to look like LA because there are palm trees bordering the street (we haven't run across too many tree-lined streets in San Francisco so far).  It's time to walk a block over to Van Ness and catch a bus to somewhere else, unless we want to have lunch at Tommy's Joynt at Van Ness and Geary and have a pastrami sandwich (or lamb shanks on Thursday).

When we're not eating we'll ride the historic streetcars and cable cars

One of the fun, and sometimes challenging, experiences in a city is figuring out transportation.  Of course San Francisco is not exactly a new city for us, and it's a small city to boot.  So we should have more of the enjoyment and less of the challenge in our explorations.
Of course you realize our Airbnb is located almost on top of the Powell-Mason line

We're hoping it's not as crowded as we remember it last time.  While the cable cars are used to a certain extent by commuters, the vast majority of their 7 million annual passengers are tourists.  So we should feel right at home.  Did you know that the San Francisco cable car system is the world's last manually operated cable car system?  The US Department of Transportation counts the cable cars among the mass transportation systems with the most accidents per year and vehicle mile in the US, with 126 accidents and 151 injured persons reported by the city during the 10 years until 2013.  So we'd better be careful.  You can read all about it on, you guess it, Wikipedia.

And don't you think it's about time to go to the Cable Car Museum.  It's free and pretty close at 1201 Mason.  I think we can just jump off the cable there.

"Stop, we need to get off at the museum"

I'd link to it, but I think the site has been hijacked.  "The facility, which is inside the city's last cable-car barn, takes the top off the system to let you see how it all works. Eternally humming and squealing, the massive powerhouse cable wheels steal the show. You can also climb aboard a vintage car and take the grip, ring a cable-car bell (briefly), and check out vintage gear dating from 1873."

What about the historic streetcars?  They also run on rails, but are powered by electricity rather than cables.  In 1962 construction began on BART which was supposed to put the 5 Market Street trolley lines underground.  I guess it wasn't a unilateral success or perhaps someone saw the great tourist potential of historic streetcars, especially if another Embarcadero route was added to Fisherman's Wharf.

San Francisco's Municipal Railway has assembled one of the most diverse collections of vintage streetcars, trolleys, and trams in transit service anywhere. Up to 20 of these vintage vehicles carry passengers along Market Street and The Embarcadero every day.

very faint, but you get the idea!

And finally, there are the trolley buses with wheels, not rails, and powered by electricity.  You can find a detailed map here. 

And, if I'm reading it correctly, the 30, 41 and 45 are trolley bus lines run right by the apartment.

Oh, we have got to pick up that MUNI pass and start traveling.

I Love Hardware Stores!

Not the big box stores like Lowes and Home Depot (although they are interesting too) but the small ones that used to be independent and joined Ace Hardware just to survive.  Monroeville doesn't have one but Oakmont does and I will forever love Strosnider's in Silver Spring, Maryland.  No, Patterson's Hardware in Fillmore is still independent and doesn't belong to Ace.  Didn't there used to be a Brigg's Hardware?  But I can't picture it.

Right now the reason for my affection is the fact that Cole Hardware on Polk Street in San Francisco sells the 7-day San Francisco MUNI passport and it is open from 8 am to 8 pm EVERY DAY!  So that means that on Sunday morning we could walk the 6 blocks to Polk and buy the passport, unless the San Francisco Information Center at the SF airport is still open when we arrive at 7 pm on Saturday night.  In that case we would buy it at the airport but it is nice to know there is a hardware store near the apartment in case we need a plunger or a flashlight.

To get to Cole Hardware on Polk Street we would have to go up some steps since Green Street ends at Taylor and then recommences half a block later but after that it is pretty flat until Leavenworth when it goes downhill.  And it keeps going downhill block after long block until it reaches Polk Street.  On the left corner is Cole Hardware and on the right corner La Boulange bakery (the one that is supplying Starbucks now).  So we could have breakfast too!  Or lunch.  They have a wild mushroom mac and cheese, for those interested.

I don't think I want to walk back uphill to the apartment.  Maybe back uphill two blocks to Hyde Street to catch the cable car.  Or over to Van Ness and down to Pacific to catch the #49 Van Ness/Mission MUNI bus since we are doing the Mission District on Sunday.

Our SF Neighborhood

So, what is around 856 Green Street?  One thing for literary fans is Macondray Lane, the street that Barbary Lane in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City books is modeled after.  I read the first Tales of the City years ago and remember being struck by the fact that Winnemucca, Nevada, was featured in it.  I connected right away...

The original Swensen's Ice Cream shop is on the corner of Union and Hyde and was founded in 1948 and so is the same age I am.   Unfortunately they don't seem to carry "Bittersweet Chocolate" as a flavor any more.  It was my favorite at the El Cerrito shop when we lived in Albany because it was wonderfully dark and rich and was absolutely decadent in a milk shake.

Another nearby attraction is the San Francisco Art Institute, with its Diego Rivera mural,  about 6 blocks away, and the twisty Lombard Street, another 6 blocks away.  Equally distant is Coit Tower, the one with the WPA murals that is closed for renovation.

In a San Francisco Chronicle article, "In heart of S.F., food and pleasure long linked," the author chooses a square mile that defines the city and that square mile is bordered by Fisherman's Wharf and the Embarcadero on the north, Hyde Street on the West, Sansome on the East and Clay Street on the south.  856 Green Street is within that definitive square mile so we should be able to eat authentically.  Of course when we visited as kids we stayed on Union Square and so were outside of that square and pretty much ate outside of that square (except for Grotto #9 at Fisherman's Wharf) and we did fine.  That "square" cuts out a lot of Chinatown.  Where was Tao Tao, the Chinese restaurant where we had bird's nest soup the first time we were there?  And Yamato Sukiyaki  was on California at Grant.  And the Tadich Grill is on California outside of that grid.  And the Ritz Old Poodle Dog was on Post, again outside of the grid.  Did you know that the Ritz Old Poodle Dog started out in 1849 as "Le Poulet d' Or" but the Americans mispronounced it as the "Poodle Dog" restaurant.  Jim Smith has a website with the history of the Poodle Dog restaurant, in case anyone is interested.

What Happened to Japanese Restaurants?

One of my fondest food memories of San Francisco is Yamato Sukiyaki, the Japanese restaurant where we got to sit on the floor and have a Japanese waitress cook the meal tableside (usually sukiyaki with tofu and beef and bean thread noodles).  Willy's first eating out experience was at a similar restaurant, Maiko, on San Pablo in Berkeley when he was about a week old.  I don't remember eating sushi at all then and now all the Japanese restaurants seem to be sushi bars.

There is a Japanese Izakaya in the Mission District that is very intriguing: Izakaya Yuzuki, which uses koji (the yeasty rice that they make miso out of) in its cooking.  There's a review in the Chronicle and in BarFlySF.  Its presentation looks very simple, elegant and very Japanese and they serve fresh home-made tofu.

 

There's also Nombe in the Mission District but it doesn't look as appealing and pushes its RamenBurger.

Apparently more of the Japanese are in outlying areas, like Mountain View.  Or there seem to be a lot in the inner and outer Sunset, like Nabe, which does have sukiyaki and they are open for lunch.  But all the way to the Inner Sunset? What else is there?  Oh, wait!  That's just on the south side of Golden Gate Park, a block from the San Francisco Botanical Garden.  One of the Yelp reviews gave this tip:

"If you are a tourist (or a local) going to the Academy of Sciences, I recommend that you go early to the museum, leave at lunchtime and walk over to either Kiki's (a casual Japanese restaurant) or Nabe for lunch, then go back to the Academy. You will enjoy Kiki's or Nabe's a lot more than the food at the Academy (the food at the Academy isn't bad but it's expensive)."

The Kiki restaurant is probably more along our price line, especially for lunch, but they don't have sukiyaki!  Do you think that was a purely American invention of the 1960s??   Hold on, here's a list of restaurants from Yelp that have sukiyaki listed in the reviews.  I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to walk by the restaurants and choose them by their looks.  I'm afraid Yamato Sukiyaki is no longer in business.

Our Week in Baltimore

This last week Penny and I attended a Road Scholar program at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore covering Chopin, Liszt and Vladimir Horowitz.  We were the youngest among the attendees, the oldest being 95 but not looking it at all.  I thought it was a rather rigorous schedule, attending two classes in the morning and then spending the afternoon visiting the Peabody Library and the Walters Art Museum, learning about the history of the piano, attending a Master Class in voice and a symphony rehearsal.  And then after dinner we would attend two recitals, one at 7:15 and the other at 8:30 pm.  I was pretty tired at the end of the day but all those folks older than us kept right up with the program.  The food wasn't gourmet (we ate at the dining hall) but the coffee was awfully good and we needed a lot of it to keep us going.  The highlight of the program was hearing the Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Opus 109 three times.  Or was it four?  When I left on Friday I had a lot of music in my head and only wish I could separate the tunes and assign them to the right composer...

We didn't take too many photos of the Peabody but were able to get out on Thursday afternoon to visit Baltimore's Inner Harbor and Fell's Point, and eat out at an Italian restaurant where Penny was able to get her crabcake (the dining hall only had codcakes).

Penny and her crabcake at Dalesio's

Doorway with crab in Fell's Point

Bertha's Mussels where we ate once with the kids

Somehow I pictured Bertha as heavier.

a street in Little Italy

Another doorway in Fell's point

They all had wreaths

a street in Fell's Point

Fell's Point

Can you see the UnderArmour factory across the harbor?

Resident sea gulls in the Inner Harbor

Sanitary Plant and Museum

Coast Guard boat in the Inner Harbor

Coast Guard boat

Marsh restoration...

Taking Photos

Dragon Paddle Boats

Penny lost her hat on the bus and had to buy a new one at H&M

All sorts of things to see in the Inner Harbor

Ripley's Believe it or not

Historic schooner in the Inner Harbor

Half our class

Enjoying the dining hall.  The coffee was wonderful!

The food could have been worse and we did have a selection

The other half of the classroom

Neurosurgery rare books exhibit in the Peabody Library

The classic cast iron balconies in the Peabody Library

Quite spectacular

Even the door handles were beautiful.

Typical bay windows in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood

Mt. Vernon Church near Peabody Institute

I'm not sure what they were celebrating here

Francis Scott Key died on the the site of the church

You can see that the blue/green stone was not discolored like the other stone.
Do you think it has copper in it that acts as a fungicide?

Lots of historic houses in Mt. Vernon

George Peabody

Entrance to the Peabody Institute of Music

Our much photographed church

The side door to the Peabody

This is the Peabody Inn -- dorm for graduate students