People & Places >>

• Best View
  Golden Gate Ferry
  Most of the advertised great views only provide, well, one great view. Ferryboats, on the other hand, offer an ever-changing selection of photo ops and panoramas that you don't have time to get used to. Our favorite is Golden Gate Ferry's Sausalito-San Francisco run, preferably on a sporadically... More >>
• Best View, Sans Tourists
  San Francisco Art Institute
  On a quiet stretch of Chestnut, where North Beach's brio accedes to Russian Hill's bankbook, you'll find the San Francisco Art Institute. Step through the portal, stop to admire the goldfish pond, then veer left and continue past the art-laden walls to the open-air piazza at the rear of the... More >>
• Best Lunchtime Napping
  Alice Street Community Gardens
  Hidden amid high-rise senior centers a short walk from Moscone Center lies a tiny, green oasis. Alice Street Community Gardens -- nestled at the end of the one-block Lapu-Lapu Street, off Harrison between Third and Fourth streets -- offers the SOMA wanderer a leafy respite from the glass and... More >>
• Best Place to Feel Transcendent
  Grace Cathedral
  Towering 174 feet above the crest of Nob Hill, this hushed, dramatic place of worship is Episcopal in origin but inclusive in its welcome. Wander about and marvel at the building's majestic flourishes: Beniamino Bufano's huge, outstretched black and beige St. Francis of Assisi; the 15th-century... More >>
• Best Alleyway
  Macondray Lane
  Charming lanes, staircases, and alleyways are tucked away in odd corners all over town, but Macondray Lane is especially enchanting. It links two of Russian Hill's steepest blocks with meandering tranquillity, offering the urban stroller winding brick-and-flagstone pathways limned in gardens and... More >>
• Best Muni Adrenalin Rush
  48 Quintara
  In many ways, Muni's buses are not unlike those ancient, rickety Coney Island roller coasters. Not just because of the dips and twists of the city's plate-tectonics-ravaged terrain either. Like those old coaster cars, Muni's aged buses rattle just enough to raise doubts about whether they could... More >>
• Best Local Self-Publishers
  Lisa Miya-Jervis, Andi Zeisler, and Ben Shaykin - Bitch magazine
  Working from a small Mission office space, the founding staff of Bitch magazine -- Lisa Miya-Jervis, Andi Zeisler, and Ben Shaykin -- are considered gurus in the world of independent publishing. For nearly six years, they've been writing, editing, marketing, and distributing Bitch, a magazine... More >>
• Best Place to Park Your Car for a Looong Time
  Upper Noe Valley
  On certain hills southwest of Noe Valley, the streets are so steep that no street cleaning truck will venture up or down. No parking meters foul the sidewalk; no painted curbs obscure the welcome gray. Though the DPT's evil one-person ticket-machines still patrol the area, their occupants don't... More >>
• Best Place for View Hounds
  Corona Heights Park
  Shaped like the satanic hand-sign guys make at Metallica concerts, the rocky outcropping called Devil's Chair sits atop Corona Heights Park between the Castro and Buena Vista Park. Below it to the south is the Randall Museum; to the north, a fenced-in off-leash area for dogs. High atop the rocks... More >>
• Best Place to See the Logic Behind Critical Mass
  Bridge on 18th Street over 101
  Stuck in your car behind a wall of bicyclists on the last Friday of the month, you might be inclined to think, as one SF Weekly letter writer did, that "Critical Mass [seems] like little more than a monthly festival for hating cars and drivers that was deliberately intended to screw up traffic... More >>
• Best Historical Locale
  The Original Shoreline
  In the early 1850s San Francisco had multiplied itself 75 times since gold was discovered, had burned to the ground six times in two years, and was already the fourth-busiest port in the nation. In a crowded and impatient mood, the city unceremoniously filled its chief anchorage, shallow Yerba... More >>
• Best Destination for Swingers
  Huntington Park
  California Street between Mason and Taylor With swings, as with many things in San Francisco, you have to hit the upscale neighborhoods to find quality. Surrounded by the stately Grace Cathedral, the stately Union Pacific Club, and the stately (are we being clear here?) Huntington Hotel,... More >>
• Best Street Name
  Dashiell Hammett Alley
  Many a prominent San Franciscan has earned the ultimate honor of his or her own thoroughfare. There's Isadora Duncan, mother of modern dance, tucked away near her birthplace at Geary and Taylor; realist novelist extraordinaire Frank Norris presiding over his favored milieu, Polk Gulch; jazzman... More >>
• Best Mockery of Our Social History
  The Gap at Haight and Ashbury
  Flower power wilted long before the Gap opened its doors on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. But the store's low-key khakis can't camouflage the fact that this national chain is woefully out of place on the landmark corner once synonymous with counterculture. A neighborhood boycott has been in... More >>
• Best Meat Market
  The Muni 1 California Line
  Certain Muni lines are so unique in character they practically spawn cults. The 38 Geary is well known for being the city's workhorse, snapshot-of-the-city line -- it's all business as it stretches from one end of San Francisco to the other. The 7 Haight draws a patchouli-meets-pin-stripes... More >>
• Best Unlikely Vista
  Miniature Train Ride, Oakland Zoo
  9777 Golf Links Road, Oakland, (510) 632-9525, www.oaklandzoo.org The underappreciated Oakland Zoo has an even less appreciated feature -- the C.P. Huntington, a miniature replica of a Civil War-era train, which circumnavigates the grounds of the zoo. The idea of a mini-choo-choo is fun enough... More >>
• Best Place to Park Downtown
  Sutter-Stockton Garage
  It's not easy to admit you actually like a parking garage in San Francisco, but, well, you've got to commit to something. And as parking goes, the Sutter-Stockton Garage does a nice job. For starters, it never seems to fill up. Really. Even on a busy weekend afternoon, when you have to wind all... More >>
• Best Window Gorilla
  Alex's Odds and Ends
  Naked, he's just a gorilla in an easy chair, but proprietress Alex Heimerl dresses her wood-carved, 18-inch simian in joker's masks, tutus, Viking helmets, Mardi Gras feathers, milk mustaches, and Native American beads. For a long time last December he posed as the mauling victim of a... More >>
• Best Bureaucrat
  Carl Friedman, Director of Animal Care and Control
  If you live in San Francisco and are interested in animal welfare issues, you have the ear of Carl Friedman. "You pay my salary, so the least I can do is be accessible," says the affable Friedman. The head of a city department who personally returns calls almost immediately? Who answers e-mails... More >>
• Best Private Library
  The Mechanics' Institute Library
  The Mechanics' Institute Library looks the way a library should look. It takes up two floors of the Mechanics' Institute building downtown, each floor tiered with a mezzanine or two of books on every conceivable subject. The setting is hushed, pristine, and ambient with brass rails, burnished... More >>
• Most Unlikely Social Event
  A Dot-Com Launch Party
  Can we reminisce about those good old days, back in '99 and '00? On any given day of the week, a dot-com launch party -- or two -- awaited your presence (even if you had to give a fake name at the door). There were huge crowds, live music, and incredible cuisine (foie gras, ahi, baby greens,... More >>
• Three Best Launching Pads
  Although San Francisco is a marvelous and cosmopolitan city, sometimes the call of the open road is so overwhelming you just have to dig out the passport and get out of town. The question is, how? Which modes of recreational locomotion are suitably anticipatory, bon voyage-friendly, and... More >>
• Four Best Hotel Lobbies
  To the tourist it's a place for arguments over check-in times and attempts to pronounce "concierge," but to the resident connoisseur the hotel lobby is an architectural constant as open to contemplation and criticism as a public statue or the latest skyscraper. We expect our hotel lobbies to be... More >>
• Best Sound Effect
  The Foghorns
  San Francisco is blessed with several unique sound effects ideally suited to its sweeping views, tactile mists, and multicultural fragrances. Strolling over Russian Hill you can experience many of them at once: the hum and clang of the Hyde Street cable car; the flatted wail of the Chicago-bound... More >>
• Three Best Murals
  Murals are the grandest and most effusive of art forms -- and the oldest, if the evocative beauty of the cave painting is any indication. A good mural can tell a story, evoke an era, or embolden a landscape with panoramic brushstrokes. San Francisco is blessed with several fine examples of... More >>
• Best Grumpy Old Man
  Rob Morse
  Well, here we are, six months after the merger of the Chronicle and Hearst-owned Examiner. The two decks have been shuffled, and who should emerge as the ace columnist but Rob "Man With an Opinion" Morse. Apparently, Chron management feels this horseshoe-jawed Mill Valley resident should be the... More >>
• Best Graveyard
  Washington Square
  In 1900 the Board of Supervisors declared cemeteries illegal within San Francisco's city limits (with the hallowed exceptions of Mission Dolores and the Presidio), resulting in wholesale excavations of city graveyards at Geary and Masonic, Powell and Lombard, 19th and Dolores, and Franklin and... More >>
• Best Flora
  Blooming Wildflowers at Menzies Native Plant Garden
  From late March to early June this feral retreat blooms with poppies, irises, blue and yellow lupine, Mariposa tulips, California lilacs, and much, much more -- a veritable Monet's garden of native wildflowers. The Technicolor splendor levels off a bit through August, and the autumn and winter... More >>
• Best Way to Rekindle Your Love Affair With San Francisco
  Take a Trip to New York
  The Big Apple has a lot to offer, no doubt about it. The nightlife never ends, you can get quality meals after 10 p.m., the arts are world class. And an East Coaster in both birthright and heart is warmed at the sight of brick and stone buildings again. But the unending concrete has a way of... More >>
• Best Reason to Leave San Francisco
  The Intolerance
  S.F. may posit itself a liberal, open kinda town, but the last year or two has proven otherwise. The city no longer welcomes all: It's them vs. us, artists vs. dot-commers, bohemians vs. yuppies, anti-dog people vs. dog owners, "true" (we use the word lightly) San Franciscans vs. newcomers.... More >>
• Best Urban Beach
  Dolores Park
  Warm, sunny days are so rare in San Francisco that at the slightest hint of elevated temperatures a swarm of sunbathers -- mostly male, mostly hunky -- descends on the upper slopes of Dolores Park. As the smell of coconut oil wafts through the air, chiseled gay men in teeny, tiny bikinis rotate... More >>