I Left My Heart in San Francisco

I had a great workation with the family in San Francisco this week. Feel free to peruse my photo collection.

Haight-Ashbury

Yes, that’s right. The place where the Summer of Love was born. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane.

I was delighted to stumble upon Borderlands Books, a bookstore that’s legendary among science fiction and fantasy writers. It was first of several iconic bookstores we visited.

Golden Gate Bridge

I had crossed the Golden Gate Bridge a couple of times back in 2018, but this was the first time I walked across. Its grandeur as an engineering marvel cannot be overstated.

Alcatraz

The notorious prison is now a national park, full of ghosts and nesting sea birds. Because I was wearing my Chicago Cubs cap, one of the rangers took me aside and showed me Al Capone’s cell, #181. Six years after the prison was closed in 1963, a group of Native American activists took over the entire island and occupied it for 19 months.

If these walls could talk…

Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf

Sea lions moved into Pier 39 back in the 1990s and they’ve been there ever since.

Chinatown

Of course, there was dim sum to be had, and pork egg fu young.

Japanese Tea Garden

In the middle of Golden Gate Park lies a gorgeous garden setting created my Japanese immigrants, before it was yanked out of their hands when they were put in concentration camps in WWII. Its gorgeous, but what it lacks, I felt, was the many centuries of history that imbues such gardens in Japan. This one has lived only a century.

Muir Woods

The grandeur of nature in its most profound display. Holy crap.

The pale streaks in some of the images are not ghosts. They are an artifact of a cracked camera lens on my phone.

Lombard Street – The Crookedest Street in SF

The streets in San Francisco are insane, as you may have seen in movies. The grade on Lombard St. is like 27%, so steep that on the other side of the hill they turned the street into switchbacks.

Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum

Ah yes, some fun tourist kitsch. But no less cool for all that. And a surprising number of figures, way more than I have photos of here.

Murals

San Francisco murals and street art are just breathtaking, from Castro to the Mission District to Balmy Alley.

City Lights Books and the Beat Poets

A literary pilgrimage of sorts. How could an occasional poet visit San Francisco and not walk in the steps of the beat poets, visiting the Vesuvio bar and City Lights Books and sitting in the same chair as Kerouac, Bukowski, Ginsburg, Burroughs?