(5) San Francisco's landmarks

Like no other city in the U.S., San Francisco is known for its gay and lesbian communities. Gays and lesbians have become largely integrated and accepted in San Francisco's community since the 1970s, that is the time of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movements.
The symbol of Gay and Lesbian Pride is the Rainbow Flag, which was first used in 1978 in San Francisco. There are 6 colors on the flag: red=life, orange=healing, yellow=sun, green=nature, blue=harmony, purple=spirit.

The district in which the gay and lesbian communities live is the Castro - in the 1970s it became the largest GL neighborhood in the world. A famous gay person associated with the Castro was Harvey Milk, who in 1977 became the first openly gay city official in the country.

In the Castro you can see a higher-than-average proportion of men in the streets, and you notice that they care about the way they look - quite a nice view it was;). Since keeping fit requires appropriate facilities, Gyms are frequent at Castro Street:

Gays have been present in San Francisco ever since the 1840s Gold Rush, which turned San Francisco into a booming city. You can imagine thousands of fortune seekers, mostly single men, who arrived here when the news of the discovery of gold near Sacramento spread: the population rocketed then from 812 in 1848 to 20,000 in 1949. They were called "49ers". The community thus created was quite lawless, women were scarce, family and local community pressure was absent, plus, there was hardly anything to do in the town in free time apart from drinking. And drinking, as you well know, removes inhibitions;)

Another wave of gay freedom came with WWII, when San Francisco became an outpost for military operations on the Pacific.
After a period of severe police harassment in the gloomy 1950s, the political upheavals of the 1960s allowed Gays and Lesbians to enjoy relative peace and quiet.

Another interesting neighborhood in San Francisco is the Latino district Mission, originally called Mission Dolores. It was founded in 1776 by the Spanish colonizers. The Latino population in San Francisco grew significantly between the 1950s - as a result of the post-war boom in jobs in factories and shipyards - and the 1980s which saw a huge influx of immigrants from Central America due to the political turmoil in their mother countries. Here is a surprisingly quiet and very neat street in the Mission District.

The huge hamburger is a sign that San Francisco Latino people feel "vury Amurkin";) (S)

Latino people are God-fearing people, so Mission Dolores Basilica is a central point in the area. At the back of the Basilica there is a park offering beautiful greenery.

The western part of the city prides itself on one of the largest urban parks in the world - Golden Gate Park (405ha). You begin to grasp the park's size when you want to get to one of the hundreds of points of interest hidden in its greenery and you get lost instead. Here is the Conservatory of Flowers - a splendid example of SF's Victorian architecture.

Located in Golden Gate Park is the de Young Museum, which contains a major collection of American art. On the way to the museum's entrance you pass a huge stone. When you look carefully, you will notice a fissure in the stone and in the pavement - it was caused by the 1989 earthquake.

Michael de Young was a publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, who organized a midwinter exposition in the park in 1894. The museum was built as a memorial to the Expo and given the name after de Young's death in 1925.
Here is the Museum building:

When I visited the Museum, there was a special exhibition titled "The Glass Garden" by the artist Dale Chihuly. I loved it, (just take a look at his website - a marvel!)

San Francisco is best visible from the Bay - here is a view on Telegraph Hill - once an area where artists lived, now the most sought-for addresses, where houses cost millions of dollars because the view is so beautiful. The streets are not though - very steep, very densely covered with (quite narrow) houses.

Sitting at the top of Telegraph Hill is Coit Tower which was designed to resemble a fire hose (well...). Coit Tower has a very interesting history - it was named after a remarkable lady, Lillie (Hitchcock) Coit, who was obsessed with fires and firefighters. At the time (she arrived in SF in 1851), fires blazed very frequently, not to say regularly, in the city so she had a lot of opportunities to join the firefighter crew of which she was an honorary (and exotic) member and combat fires.

Brought up to be a lady, Lillie preferred to wear men's clothes, smoke cigars and play poker - the woman who made subversion her lifestyle (her contemporaries probably called her eccentric, you might call her a drag king;).
Coit Tower (64m) was completed in 1933. It was built for $100,000 left by Lilly after her death as a memorial to SF volunteer firefighters.

The walls inside Coit Tower are covered with murals in the tradition of Diego Rivera (better known probably as Frida Kahlo's unfaithful husband). The murals, which were created in the early 1930s, depict the laborers of SF and display leftist sympathies of their creators. They are very typical of the 1930s in style and contents.

And, finally, the view from Coit Tower - far ahead the Golden Gate Bridge is hiding in the fog. No wonder people are ready to pay millions to have it every morning - click on it to make it grow.