Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  Although almost nothing of the original structure survives, the Palace of Fine Arts, even in its current form, is the only standing memory to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 which brought San Francisco back from the ruins of the devastating earthquake almost a decade earlier. Built by Bernard Maybeck to resemble a crumbling Roman temple, it offered spectators a quiet, cool place for reflection and observation beneath its encompassing rotunda. So popular was the place with visitors and the public that even before the end of the Exposition a committee (the Palace Preservation League) was established to ensure its survival afterwards. They were successful. After the Exposition left town the nine other palaces (dedicated to Education, Liberal Arts, Manufactures, Agriculture, Transportation and other industries) were torn down, but the Palace of Fine Arts stood very much as it still stands today. None, however, were built to last beyond the event and by the mid...

  If San Francisco is an East meets West of architecture, culture and even history, Muir Woods is, if only superficially, a taste of the northeastern forests for the West Coast. This is, of course, biologically untrue. The park’s proximity to the Pacific Coast gives it a perpetually wet undergrowth. Nonetheless, the western counterparts of many of the familiar plants and animals that inhabit our woodlands will make East Coast visitors feel at home. Pileated woodpeckers make both coasts their home, Sonoma chipmunks are, unlike their eastern cousin, limited to a very small range (specifically the chaparral regions north of San Francisco), instead of white-tailed deer the forest boasts the larger eared mule deer, and the western grey squirrel fills the niche of our most populous native rodent, the eastern grey squirrel. Black bears have since been extirpated from the area (though a healthy number still exists throughout California), but a lone wanderer was spotted around the park in 2...

  If Alcatraz was a wake up to the media’s softening of the penitentiary (it was not, in short, a facility that toughened men but, rather, one that broke them) Fisherman’s Wharf is everything we collectively imagine San Francisco to be at its best before we reach it. There’s the bay, the sketchiness that over a hundred years since the Red Light district shut its lights off for good can only be described as charming, the kitschy arcades, candy shops and, of course, the sea lions. Walking from one end to another takes you through an assortment of eccentrics, bohemian artists, vendors and wanderers. In other words, classic San Francisco. It’s loud, it’s tacky, but, in its own unique way, Fisherman’s Wharf is as much a part of Americana as is Coney Island. From here too one can hop a ride on the city’s iconic trolleys, a ride which no trip to San Francisco would be complete without. We caught our ride a few das later nearer our hotel in Union Square. True to the nature of the cit...