These pages are concerned with San Francisco's neighborhoods and neighborhood life.  They are not necessarily a tourist guide, although they have information a tourist will find useful.  The city has over 40 business districts, focal points of neighborhood life, most of them with their de rigueur coffee houses and pair of hole-in-the-wall bookstores and breathtaking views "that tourists never see"... as if San Francisco cabbies don't know where the views are and bring tourists to the neighborhood.  Neighborhoods have their proponents for why the weather on this side of the peaks is better (cooler, warmer, less foggy) than that side, but all San Franciscans can agree that their neighborhood is not replicated in any other city anywhere. 

What is it about San Francisco?

It's the houses, it's the hills and it's the cool air.  As world cities go, San Francisco is young; but most
of its houses east and north of the peaks -- which is to say most of residential San Francisco -- were built before 1920.  It is a city of old, ornate Victorian and Edwardian houses.  Even the ocean-facing Sunset district, built in a contemporary style that preserved the Victorian look of the old neighborhoods, was finished in the years following World War II.  Thus San Francisco was filled in nearly 50 years ago.  As of this writing in 2002, the only remaining tract space to become available since the post-war years is on manmade Treasure Island in the middle of the bay on land that was decommissioned by the U.S. Navy in 1997.

As for the hills, all of San Francisco is either hilly or within walking distance of streets with steep hills.  The only flat part of the city is a crescent south of Market that bends around to the west and south to the Mission district.  A cable car system, implemented in 1873 by Andrew Smith Hallidie ("HAL-uh-dee"), a Scottish-English immigrant, overcame the odious climb (and for horses treacherous in rain) up the California Street hill downtown, or Nob Hill as it became known, supposedly for the nabobs who built mansions at the top although this etymology is challenged by many historians who say the hill is named simply for its shape.  This development spurred settlement away from the South of Market tracts.

For most of the year, San Francisco has a crisp climate with daytime temperatures in the 50s and 60s (10s centigrade).  Nights are frost-free year round.  Like Los Angeles to the south, rainfall is concentrated in the winter months.  (In fact, this is true of the entire West Coast from Baja California to the Alaska Archipelago.  The amount of rain increases as you go north, and becomes spread out over a longer season.)  Rainfall in most years is nearly zero in the summer and early autumn months.  September is the warm month in San Francisco.
 
 
 

Sometimes I sneak into the city -- the City -- the way tourists seldom come, by leaving the Junipero Serra Freeway (I-280) in Daly City and taking Mission Street. There are only four highway approaches into San Francisco: this one, the Bayshore Freeway (US 101), and the two bridges. Before the bridges were opened in the 1930s, and long before the populating of the Peninsula, most visitors to San Francisco got their first close glimpse of the city from shipboard, either on ferries coming from Oakland or on ships sailing into the Golden Gate from the Pacific.

In Daly City on San Francisco's southwest border, one observes better than anywhere else around San Francisco Bay what makes San Francisco like no other city in the world by seeing the abrupt transition from without to within. Narrow wooden houses with prominent bay windows begin to be bunched together, with only air gaps between them, if that much, and with high first stories built over partially subterranean garages. The public buses become electric trolleybuses, and everywhere streets go straight up hills. I know it's a cliche, but Toto, we ain't in Daly City any more, dog!

Now, let's figure out where to surf next. You can go to a 3-D topo relief map of San Francisco which is a 310-kbyte JPEG file.  Or you can go to a miniaturized replica of this map divided into zones (or areas in the next revision of this site) without the relief detail that allows you to home in on a neighborhood of interest. The zone/area information is also available in text-only form below, where San Francisco's nearly square shape has been used to advantage.  The first time you go to the Zone map, please allow sufficient time for the program to load.  A suggestion: you can leave the Topo and Zone map pages open while you navigate around the rest of the site, which will save you the bother of downloading them again.  Using the text map below will take you to the same pages as the Zone map.  Or you can just take the tour beginning here.  Follow the blue arrow that says Next page or skip around the remainder of the neighborhoods in this zone  by selecting Next Zone.  (Eventually, you will return to this page.)  If you use the Zone map to go to a page, clicking on one of the right-pointing arrows will pick up the tour at that point. 

The tour starts with the last place most San Franciscans would probably start and proceeds slightly more predictably from there.  I'll leave it to you to discover where the tour goes.  I may change the order!
 

Ways of distinguishing
San Francisco from Daly City