Gold Rush Barbary Coast

The mural on the side of the building depicts the shoreline of San Francisco as it appeared before the nineteen oh six earthquake, when the water actually reached Montgomery Street. William Leidesdorff, the man who built the city’s first…

The Museum of San Francisco occupies a space within the Cannery at Del Monte Square, distinguished by its weathered red brick walls and the massive, exposed iron gears left over from its days as a fruit packing plant. It functions as a…

Portsmouth Square sits on a steep slope, marked by a dense thicket of elderly men playing intense games of Chinese chess while others practise tai chi in the morning light. This patch of concrete served as the original plaza for the…

The Transamerica Pyramid rises as a sharp white concrete needle against the San Francisco skyline, its four sides tapering toward a slender point. When William Pereira designed it in the late nineteen sixties, the city’s skyline was…

The Belli Building at seven hundred twenty-two Montgomery Street stands out with its bright, fire-engine red exterior and sharply angled brick facade. Built in eighteen fifty-one, it survived the nineteen oh six earthquake, a rarity for…

The Hotaling Building stands out with its sturdy brick façade and rounded windows, defying the steep terrain of Jackson Street. Built in eighteen sixty-six, it served as the largest whiskey warehouse in the American West. When the nineteen…

The Old Ship Saloon occupies the hull of the Arkansas, a three-masted ship that wrecked on a reef outside the Golden Gate in eighteen forty-nine. After the vessel was dragged ashore and embedded into the mud of the burgeoning waterfront,…