Walking tour, Cable Car Museum, Painted Ladies & Golden Gate Park

 Hello everyone,

We had a bit of a sleep in today. Thankfully, Rob is feeling a bit better. We started our day by walking down to Union Square for our walking tour of the downtown area, Chinatown and the Financial District.

Our guide's name was Philip, and he was originally from Macedonia but has lived in San Francisco for the last 12 years. We were the first to arrive, but the group quickly grew to about 30 people. We learned quite a few interesting facts about San Francisco in the 2.5 hours walking around. He was a great guide.

San Francisco boomed in 1849 after gold was discovered, and this is why their football team are called the "49ers". Like many other cities along the west coast of the USA, San Francisco was named by Spanish explorers after a saint. Many others are the same along the coast here - San Diego, San Jose etc. From 1846-1848, the USA and Mexico were at war over territory. In the end, the USA won and purchased territory which are now five of the US states: California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. They also gave Mexico an extra $15 million, worth $1.5 billion back in those days. Since when does the victor ever pay the loser money? Suspicious.... just 12 days after the deal was done, "coincidentally" gold was found in California and the gold rush began. The reason the Golden Gate Bridge is named so is because the entrance to the bay was considered the gateway to the goldfields. Apparently when the bridge was originally built, some architects wanted it painted in yellow and black stripes. Can you imagine - disgusting Richmond colours!!

California was the fastest accepted state in the history of the USA, because it's population boomed so much post gold rush that it needed to be recognised quickly. Usually when states were being created, two were created at a time - one union, one confederate. California was an excepted and thus got to "choose" its side. It chose the union side.

We headed down a laneway that previously was the red light district in San Francisco. In the 1800s when San Francisco was booming, it was part of the "wild west", it was so secluded and far away from other parts of the USA that there were few rules and crime was rife. Many people would leave the ship crew they were a part of here in order to search for gold, and as a result, many people were "shanghai-d", meaning they were drugged and kidnapped, placed on a ship and bound to serve that captain without a choice to replace those that deserted. Very scary!! The reason many that had signed up for a job on a ship left was because by discovering gold in California, in one day they could make as much money as they would in one year in a well paying job. Crazily, back then at one point the ratio of men to women in San Francisco was 70:1 at one stage due to many men searching for gold. Nowadays it is still 3:1.

Then we headed into Chinatown, which takes up a massive 24 blocks in San Fran. These days, 40% of the population here are Chinese people, and the Chinatown area is the biggest one outside of Asia. Here we saw some students preparing for a dance involving dragons and drums. We also learned why Chinatown began here, and subsequently became a popular area in cities all around the world. When the railway linking the east and west USA was being built, originally the work force were Irish. However, the Irish workers contracted cholera and many died. Instead, 50,000 labourers were brought in from China as it was quicker to get them from China than Europe at this point. Before the Panama Canal was built, the distance from Europe to San Francisco by ship was the same length as the entire equator. When the Chinese arrived here, they did not contract cholera because any time they consumed water (for rice, tea etc.) they would boil it. Their work cost 1/4 of the price, and they took 1/2 of the predicted time to build the railway. However, after its completion, a Chinese exclusion act was created and the Chinese were kept in a fenced ghetto in this area. 'Chinatown' was a derogatory term used to describe this place, which changed dramatically after the 1906 earthquake. Over four days, this earthquake destroyed 90% of the city, 490 blocks worth. The devastation was six times that of the damage caused by the 1666 Great Fire of London, and the impact of the earthquake 12,000 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Many fires raged in the days after it because the water mains were destroyed during the earthquake. The ghetto burned to the ground, and Chinatown was later rebuilt the way it is today. The buildings were constructed by American architects with the help of Chinese people and photos they had in their possession. Today it's a thriving, popular area.

Our guide then gave us fortune cookies, which apparently were invented here! And we also found out that Bruce Lee was born here. We finished up Chinatown with a visit to a park that reminded me a lot of Shanghai. There were lots of people gathered around playing card games, doing tai chi etc.

We ended our tour in the Financial District. Philip told us that San Francisco has now overtaken New York and is the most expensive city in the USA. A one bedroom apartment in the worst area of town costs $3000 per month ($4500 Australian). Apparently this is due to the peninsula limiting the expansion of the city. In the last year, San Francisco also had four "unicorns" emerge. These are startup companies that quickly become worth over $1 billion. In 2019, these were Uber ($62 billion), Air BnB ($32 billion), Yelp ($16 billion) and Lyft ($2 billion). That's a total of $112 billion between 30,000 share holders, which means that there are more billionaires made each year in this city than there are apartments built. House prices here increase by 10-15% each year. Speaking from a tourist point of view, I agree - it is sooo expensive doing anything here!

Our favourite fact came right towards the end of the tour. There are 48 hills in San Francisco, but there used to be 49. The 49th hill was used to create landfill around the Embarcadero/Ferry Building area to increase the land size here, and 20% of the San Francisco CBD area today is landfill. Back in the early days of San Francisco, there was a weird rule that if you docked your ship in the bay, you could claim the land under that ship as your own for free. So people docked their ships, decided to remain here for good, and turned their ship into storage or a hotel. After the 1906 earthquake, these ships and buildings were ruined. But the owners were able to still claim this land as their own. They then worked with the government to have a 40m deep sea wall built to make the ground more stable in case of another earthquake, and built whatever they liked on top of that land. So this means that today in San Francisco, when you walk around this area you are walking on top of the ruins of 47 old ships! How cool is that!

We really enjoyed the walking tour, and next had a coffee before heading to the free Cable Car Museum. Here we learned how the cable car system has worked here in San Francisco since 1887. The cable cars run from 6am to 1am, and strand alarms let the workers know when a strand is loose or damaged. These are then fixed overnight and 30m of cable is spliced to join it back together. The system here is the only working cable car system remaining throughout a city in the world, and the cars travel at about 15 km/h all day. 

Originally, horses pulled the cable cars here. However, they were expensive, got tired and their poo made the street stink. After witnessing a bad accident in the wet one day, Andrew Hallidie started planning to have a cable car system installed here. He worked for a company already that made wire cables, and had implemented a similar system in the goldfields. 

The cable cars work by the driver using a 'grip' to grab onto the cable like a giant pair of pliers. This reaches into the channel on the street and clamps onto the cable. The more heavily the grip clamps the cable, the faster the cable car will be pulled along. We watched a video that explained some interesting turns and releases that drivers need to complete.

In the museum, we could see some old cable cars as well as the giant cables being wheeled around huge pulleys. We could even go to an underground section to see them being fed out into the street. For the four lines, the cable lengths are as follows: Powell 3km, Mason 3.5km, Hyde 5km and California 7km. There used to be many more lines than this, but again after the 1906 earthquake many of them were destroyed and not restored. In the 40s, the cable cars were nearly eliminated all together, but the public banded together to save them and today they survive as a symbol of the city and a huge tourist attraction.

Next we had lunch at Lori's Diner, where we had eaten on our 2005 trip. Based on the photos I had on my phone, it has been redecorated since then, but is still a replica 1950s diner and we thought it was really cool. I had a burger, Rob a toasted sandwich, and we each had a drink. My coke float was delicious and full of a lot of ice cream!

We then caught an Uber to the Painted Ladies, the seven beautiful Victorian homes in a row that San Fran is famous for. There was a crazy naked guy in the park which gave us all a laugh, but then we walked around and took in all the gorgeous buildings. My favourite was the blue one, but Rob liked one separate to the main seven that looked like a haunted mansion. From here we could also see the beautiful City Hall building.

Then we got another Uber to Golden Gate Park. My memories of this park from 2005 consist of us walking around for hours in the pouring rain unable to find our hire car. Once we arrived, I could see why. The park was HUGE! We walked around the Japanese Tea Garden area where the museums were, and then did a lap of the lake. We watched the ducks diving for food, saw some cheeky geese and just enjoyed walking around at a leisurely pace.

Our last stop was the Fairmont Hotel. I had seen online that they build a two storey gingerbread house in their foyer, so we wanted to check it out. It was amazing! The hotel have been creating this masterpiece every Christmas since 2008, and this year's was the biggest yet. It included 8000 gingerbread bricks, 450 hours of labour creating the gingerbread, and 772 hours of labour by the engineering department to build, light and animate.

We had a rest at the hotel, then walked to the Ferry Building to buy some market food for dinner. We enjoyed the Christmas lights on the building, and the twinkling lights on the Bay Bridge behind it. On the way home we bought some fruit at the supermarket and saw two homeless people in a really bad fight with security!

Love to all
Claire
Xoxox