Best San Francisco Geography Lesson

Getting to the topmost point of dog-friendly Corona Park takes some effort -- a steep hike westward on16th Street until it nearly dead ends, followed by a couple of dozen steps uphill. But once you've made it up the hill and climbed one of the easily scaled rocks at the apex of the park, you'll get an amazing 360-degree, bird's-eye view that's a San Francisco geography and urban planning lesson all in one. From that height, the city, which normally appears as a tangle of one-way streets and dense layers of colorful Victorians perched on hillsides, follows some urban planning logic. When you can see the neat grid of SOMA and the Financial District, the rise of Twin Peaks, and the curve of the waterfront, the geography and geometry of the city suddenly make visual sense.