People & Places >>

• Best Paperless Office
  Mayor Willie Brown's Office
  Newly released statistics from the paper industry indicate that, despite the cyberinformation revolution, the world is using more paper than ever. Sad for trees, but it makes sense: With today's cheap printers any geek with a modem can print out the Bible, the Koran, the complete works of... More >>
• Best Source of Information on What Willie Brown Is Really Up To
  Nob Hill Gazette
  Those lucky enough to have addresses within spitting distance of Huntington Park get a little extra gift on their apartment doorsteps among the usual pile of Chinese food menus and Independents: the wonderful Nob Hill Gazette, a monthly tribute to old money, young debutantes, and the Bay Area... More >>
• Best Organized Anarchy
  Critical Mass
  There's no denying it. Despite all the transit-first doublespeak peppering official conversation and letters to the editor, the jig is up: Nothing holds a firmer grip on the character of San Francisco than the four-wheeled terror. Which makes this fun hour-or-two-long ride across the city during... More >>
• Best City Transportation Improvement
  Valencia Street Bike Lane
  With all the talk about making it easier and safer to get around San Francisco -- allowing more time for pedestrians at stop lights, extending Caltrain to the Embarcadero and Muni to Mission Bay, and giving Muni a new board of directors -- there's one proposal that has lived up to its promise:... More >>
• Best Local Newscaster
  Sal Castaneda
  A recent survey of local television news broadcasts said what's been on most viewers' minds for ages: The local TV news is a putrid, sensationalistic, dumbed-down, underreported wasteland that substitutes fluff for issues, idiotic anchor chitchat for ideas, and stuff that's caught fire for hard... More >>
• Best New Tech Space
  Argonne Child Development Center
  The most exciting high-tech work space planned for San Francisco is really rather low-tech, explains architect Dennis Budd, of 450 Architects. For one thing, the workers won't do terribly much with computers -- they're 4 and 5 years old, after all. The building is a preschool employing the... More >>
• Best Dismembered Piece of Hearst Legacy
  Scattered Remains of the Santa Maria de Ovila Monastery
  No, we're not talking about the stranger-than-fiction final days of the Examiner. To see the most tragic bit of old Hearst wreckage it's necessary to take a walk in Golden Gate Park, where, at the main entrance to the Strybing Arboretum and Botanical Garden, stonemasons have cut ancient blocks... More >>
• Best Urban Hideaway for Tranquil Reflection
  Lobos Creek
  The city brings to mind a lot of things, but sitting alongside a quiet creek isn't one of them. Too bad. Perhaps if there were more creek-sitting, there would be less crankiness among the black-clad, overcaffeinated, driving public. Well, it's a thought, anyway. As best we can determine, Lobos... More >>
• Best Urban Adventure
  Help a Friend Move Out of the Tenderloin After Midnight
  The law of friends, it seems, is threefold: There will be friends; those friends will move; and when they do, you must help them. It's usually a simple proposition -- unless the friend lives in the Tenderloin, and the only free time she has is after 12 a.m. Pimps, drug dealers, and other... More >>
• Best Sign That Discriminates Against Vehicles
  "Trucks not advised on Broadway"
  Where do those poor trucks go for advice, anyway? More >>
• Best Place to Day-dream About Faraway Places With Strange-Sounding Names
  The Middle of the Golden Gate Bridge
  First thing you do is check the "Ship Traffic" column in the daily newspaper (usually in the business section). Pick a cruise liner or container ship to your liking -- hm, the Maersk bound for Japan sounds good -- catch a bus to the toll plaza, and position yourself in the middle of the span in... More >>
• Best Jann Wenner Memory Under Glass
  Everybody knows what you do if you wind up at the Fillmore and get bored with the opening band -- you head upstairs and take in the great concert posters that grace the walls of the upper balcony and dining area. From Jefferson Airplane to Wire, Bob Marley to Counting Crows, there's ample,... More >>
• Best Good Guys
  St. Anthony Foundation/ Glide Memorial Church
  Sometimes, life in our capitalist society can be as forgiving as a sock full of nickels upside the head, and as a result of bad luck, bad choices, or, most important, no money, people find themselves on the streets. In San Francisco, those streets are often in the Tenderloin, where dozens of... More >>
• Best Private Library
  Mechanics' Institute Library
  Recently the $100 million new Main Library released a report admitting that, yes, a floor is missing -- and also that it's frustratingly hard to locate books in this white elephant monument to socialite Charlotte Swig Shultz. (Of course, the city paid $250,000 to learn what most library-users... More >>
• Best Guilty Indulgence
  Parking on the Sidewalk
  Yes, it's illegal to park on the sidewalk. But there's something so bold, so daring, so straightforward about it: After all, if the essential parking requirement is open pavement, the city has plenty of that. Sure, some neighbors may yell at you, or leave notes on your car condemning it as a... More >>
• Best Hospital at Which to Have a Myocardial Infarction
  California Pacific Medical Center
  No reservation necessary -- just show up at the emergency room and say, "Chest pain" The most satisfying way to arrive is by hooting ambulance. Any time is fine, of course, but if you want to really stress-test the staff try midnight on a Friday night. We chose New Year's Eve, and were only... More >>
• Best Place to Avoid While Driving Blind
  The Presidio
  No, you shouldn't drive drunk. But if you do anyway, you really, really, really shouldn't drive through the Presidio, where the United States Park Patrol runs regular sobriety checkpoints. Recently, a friend of this newspaper was dragged from his car after consuming two glasses of wine, plus an... More >>
• Best Radical Group
  League of Filipino Students
  You'll see their fliers around town, or you can find them at their Web site: The League of Filipino Students supports a youthful national liberation movement in the Philippines that is fighting to extricate that Third World economy from the claws of multinational corporations, the World Trade... More >>
• Best Indication That the City's Gone to the Dogs
  Near-Perpetual Center-Lane Parking on Valencia (and Guerrero)
  OK, we can forgive people for shamelessly parking in the middle of the street on Sunday mornings. After all, God doesn't wait for you to find a spot. But the center lane on Valencia? This is a turning lane, people, not a parking lot for SUVs and Jettas. Where is the sign that says, "Asshole... More >>
• Least Appropriate Vehicle for San Francisco Driving
  Ford Excursion
  Hey! You freaking moron! Your hideous $45,000 behemoth belongs in a Monster Truck Rally with tons of mud, mud, mud -- not on city streets! You can't park in any normal-sized space! In Chinatown and North Beach, people have to pull half off the road so you can pass in the other direction! No one... More >>
• Best Four-Block Stretch of Movie Locations
  Sacramento and Mason to Jackson and Taylor
  With its photogenic hilltops, sparkling views, Barbary Coast-beatnik mystique, and atmospheric fog, San Francisco's a great place to make a movie, as generations of filmmakers have discovered. Begin your minitour of local cinematic haunts in front of the Fairmont, the setting for the 1967... More >>
• Best Nouveau Rabble-Rousing
  720 York (at 19th Street)
  The shiny new live-work complex at 720 York St. has arrived: No sooner did its wealthy owners move in than neatly typeset protest signs went up in its streetfront windows. "No to Downtown Office Space," they scream. A large banner proclaims that the new-media-cyber-stock-poof offices cropping... More >>
• Best Pandemonium
  Ruby Skye
  As anyone strolling down Mason Street on any recent weekend has probably noticed, Ruby Skye ("appropriate fashionable attire required") is the new destination of choice for the city's "hip" crowd. Which, as anyone familiar with this scene is aware, means extremely long lines that can be avoided... More >>
• Best Place to Drink for Free
  Any One of the Numerous Dot-Com Parties
  The best dot-com parties are usually held Wednesday and Thursday evenings and wrap up early enough that the hangover isn't too brutal the next day. Crashing one is easy if you're properly armed -- a dot-com friend's business card will usually suffice. Or, if you're frightened by the drama of... More >>
• Best Smell at a Bad Dot-Com Party
  Lord knows the dot-communists have taken their share of flak for their perceived lack of style and social adeptness. But then, lord knows, some of them have earned it -- like the pear-shaped, pasty-faced, sneaker-and-oxford-wearing geekerati (and those were the women) who attended a certain... More >>
• Best Dot-Com Party Thus Far
  Tixtogo on Treasure Island, Oct. 28, 1999, www.acteva.com
  Of course, dot-com launch parties, thrown for sites selling everything from natural foods to soft porn, get more and more lavish all the time. But none has yet topped Tixtogo.com's party celebrating the launch of its new name (Acteva) last fall. In and around an old Treasure Island hangar were... More >>
• Most Geriatric Radical Group
  Revolutionary Communist Party
  The few persisting members of the once-mighty Revolutionary Communist Party can be spotted from time to time in odd nooks of the city flogging their gun-logoed paper, the Revolutionary Worker ($1). Yes, it still features a 25-year-old picture of RCP Chairman "Bob" Avakian, a Trotskyite who fled... More >>
• Most Bourgeois Radical Group
  The Workers World Party
  These Trots have more fronts than Julius Caesar had knife wounds: Out of their office at Mission and 21st they run an International Action Center, a National People's Campaign, and a bunch of other stuff depending on what's hot and what's not. For many years they were the folks who got the... More >>
• Best Place to Watch the Moonrise
  Broadway between Jones and Taylor
  The one factoid of importance we gleaned from four years of college was that the full moon always rises as the sun is setting. How convenient, to have the big yellow-orange (even blood-red!) sphere emerging from the east as dusk falls, the sky turns violet, and the lights come up across the... More >>
• Best Community Newspaper
  New Mission News
  Editor in Chief Victor Miller has been making a living publishing the New Mission News newspaper since 1980. Month in and month out, the tabloid is stacked in North Mission cafes, restaurants, and stores ranging from 16th to 24th Street. Miller, who likes to masquerade as a miserly curmudgeon,... More >>
• Best Dead Newspaper (3 Comments)
  SF Frontlines
  SF Frontlines disappeared from city streets late last year, unlamented, unmourned, and basically unnoticed. In a town that desperately needs legitimate newspapers, it was a partial shame to see the provocative Frontlines pull the plug on itself. Toward the end, piles of the tabloid could be seen... More >>
• Best Historical Street Corner
  Clay and Grant
  Grant Avenue is not only the city's oldest street, but its sand, mud, and asphalt have hosted a good chunk of San Francisco's livelier moments, particularly on the block around Clay Street. Half a block north from Clay, near 827 Grant, Capt. William Richardson pitched a tent in June of 1835 that... More >>
• Best Bus Line (1 Comment)
  22 Fillmore
  San Francisco's eclectic nature is showcased on a ride up, down, and over a wide array of city terrain. The route starts at the Marina Green's bay shore, proceeds across tony Cow Hollow, and staggers uphill into the even tonier splendor of Pacific Heights, where the vistas out the bus window are... More >>
• Best Local Example of Art Deco
  Muni's Streetcars, Market Street, et al.
  Back in the '20s and '30s, municipal streetcars around the country morphed from earlier, clunkier models into sleek, moderne conveyances reminiscent of the Zephyrs, Chiefs, and other streamlined express trains then crossing the country. A few years ago, Muni acquired a number of these vintage... More >>
• Best Panhandling Pitch
  Last December we were strolling around Union Square with a few friends when we were sidetracked in front of Neiman-Marcus by two people bearing camera equipment and a microphone. "Would you mind telling our viewers your feelings about the holiday season?" asked the guy with the mike. Three of us... More >>
• Best Local WPA Project
  The Murals at Coit Tower
  FDR's Works Progress Administration not only gave people from every walk of life jobs during the country's worst financial depression, it left us with several notable public works that continue to delight 65 years later. From 1933 through 1934, a dozen WPA-sponsored artists converged at the base... More >>
• Best Route When Crossing the City on Foot
  San Francisco is one of the tinier cities extant -- 49 square miles -- with neatly delineated aquatic borders, so traversing its seven-mile girth is not only feasible, it offers a saline-to-saline sense of geometric order and accomplishment. Begin at Pier 17 (Front and Filbert) and climb west up... More >>
• Best Place to Imagine Pre-Euro San Francisco
  Baker Beach Once you've gotten yourself to the beach (see "Best Route to Cross the City on Foot" above), avert your eyes, if you can, from the gorgeous deep-orange bridge to your right and take in the unspoiled expanse of seashore, headlands, and ocean stretching before you. Peer at Mile Rock... More >>
• Best Two Blocks of Urban Ambience
  Hayes Street between Franklin
  and Octavia A stroll on lovely Hayes can accomplish many miracles, including enlivening the lovelorn and clearing most things dot-com from one's consciousness. Hayes Street doesn't have the bridge-and-tunnel or tourist traffic of more established Haight, Fillmore, and Union, which makes for a... More >>
• Best Place to Shadow Sam Spade
  The Hunter-Dulin Building
  This dazzling Prohibition-era office building, with its gorgeously ceilinged lobby, green marble pillars, and Mayan élan, was built in 1926, two years before the detective-hero of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon set up shop several floors upstairs. After admiring the interior, cover... More >>
• Best Place to Pretend You're Peter Graves
  San Francisco International Airport
  Say what you will about drafty old roll-up-the-sidewalks-at-midnight SFO, it has a certain undeniable international-intrigue cachet that conjures up flutes, bongo drums, and blaring brass sections. Position yourself in a chair by the flight desk and check out the luggage-burdened passers-by: an... More >>
• Best Free Vegetarian Meal
  Quong Ming Jade Emperor Palace
  Located next door to the Chinatown Branch Library, the temple is owned and operated by the Quong Ming Buddhism and Taoism Society, which purchased the building in 1995 from the Korean Baptist Church. Inside, it's filled with golden Buddhas, Chinese gods, burning candles and incense, and altars... More >>
• Best Exotic Blossom
  Puya alpestris
  Rising eight feet above a fibrous, palmlike, olive-green base, this succulent's petals are of an unearthly green-to-aquamarine shade; its stamens are a brilliant poppy-orange. When bumblebees drop by to sip a little nectar, the pollen collects in their rear-leg sacs, turning the sacs the same... More >>
• Best Place for a Garden Party
  Trocadero Clubhouse
  A delightfully green and lovely place in the center of the Sunset, only a heartbeat from the congestion that is 19th Avenue, Stern Grove is a pleasant surprise in the urban landscape. The interior of the grove, home to summer concerts and croquet, is a meandering grassy meadow shaped by rock... More >>
• Best San Francisco Geography Lesson
  Corona Heights
  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... More >>
• Best Corkscrew Drive
  Vermont Avenue at 20th Street
  It appears from a distance that Vermont Street ends next to the minipark at 20th Street; once you're there, however, you'll see that this point actually marks the beginning of the street's curvy descent down the back of Potrero Hill. One of San Francisco's best-kept secrets, Vermont features a... More >>