Bus 45
March 21-23, 2004
San Francisco is
a collection of wildly different neighborhoods. One of the best ways to see
the diversity is to hop on one of the many buses that crisscross the city.
Muni bus 45 is one that I sometimes take to get to the Sun drop-in office in
the South of Market area. The bus starts at the Presidio park, a few blocks
up the hill from the Palace of Fine Arts, runs along Union Street through Cow
Hollow and across Russian Hill, turns onto Stockton Street at the border of
North Beach, continues through Chinatown to Union Square, then runs along 4th
Street through South of Market to the Caltrain Station.
Cow Hollow
There haven’t been cows
in Cow Hollow for a long time. Instead, it’s now the transition zone between
the mansions of Pacific Heights and the yuppie apartments of the Marina. Union
Street serves the shopping and dining needs of both with small, mostly non-chain
stores and restaurants.
Russian Hill
Russian Hill is mostly residential, with
neighborhood stores sprinkled throughout. Views towards the Bay and Alcatraz
are a highly valued feature.
North Beach
The traditionally Italian neighborhood
has become a major tourist stop with restaurants and coffee shops, strategically
located between Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf.
Chinatown
Chinatown is centered around two main streets: Grant
Street is the tourist drag where all manner of Asian trinkets are sold by the
truckload, while Stockton Street provides groceries and services to the Chinese
in Chinatown and throughout the city. As a destination for Chinese immigrants
Chinatown has lost relevance – it may still be the first stop for the poorest
immigrants who find work in its back alley sweatshops, but much larger populations
of well-off Chinese can be found in the Richmond and the Sunset.
Union Square
If San Francisco has a center, it’s Union Square. However,
Europeans who expect to find City Hall and the main churches on its edges will
be disappointed – City Hall is about 1 km southwest in the largely deserted
Civic Center, and the cathedral 1.5 km due west near Japantown. Union
Square is devoted to brand-name shopping, high-end hotels, and Broadway-style
theater.
South of Market
The South of Market area near Union Square has evolved from
a crummy warehouse district to a center of commerce (the Moscone conference
center), arts (the Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts), and entertainment (the Sony Metreon complex). While many of the dot-com
companies that filled the area in the 1990es have disappeared, the construction
of lofts and high-rise condominiums still continues. Unfortunately, the six-lane
roads that served the warehouses still cut through the area, along with the
elevated freeway on which traffic crawls towards the Bay Bridge; otherwise
SoMa might have a good chance of becoming a decent neighborhood.