Moon Metro San Francisco is now available as a Spot guide, a stunning new mobile format compatible with Treo Smartphones and other Palm devices. Moon Spot Guides detect where you are, remember what you like, and can guide you to the hip Thai restaurant around the corner or the Modern Art Museum three blocks away. Download a Moon Metro San Francisco Spot Guide now in digital form at Earthcomber.com.

Moon Metro San Francisco
2nd Edition
ISBN 1-56691-661-5
$16.95
Purchase here through Amazon.com or visit Booksense.com to find your local independent bookseller.

When engineers laid out the streets of San Francisco, they modeled the city after board-flat urban centers in America’s Midwest. They may as well have tried to fit a siren into a schoolgirl’s uniform. The regular grid pattern found on maps leaves visitors unprepared for the precipitous inclines and stunning water views in this town built on 43 hills.

Geographically and culturally, San Francisco is anything but flat, and what level ground exists might at any moment give way. While earthquakes remake the land, social upheavals play a similar role in reminding that the only constant here is change. In the 1950s, the Beats challenged postwar conformity and left a legacy of incantatory poems and independent bookstores. The late 1960s saw a years-long Summer of Love, which shifted consciousness as surely as quakes shift tectonic plates. During the same period, the Black Panther party was founded across the bay in Oakland, and other ethnic and cultural groups were redefining their identities against mainstream America.

Gay and lesbian liberation movements sprung forth in the 1970s, as did a renewed push for women’s rights. More recently, the dot-com and tech booms added their frantic energy to the mix. Waves of immigration also played their part in defining San Francisco. The region’s original inhabitants were Ohlone Indians, whose culture went into quick decline with the arrival of outsiders. In 1769 Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá stumbled upon San Francisco Bay while searching for Monterey Bay further South. Spanish and then Mexican settlers soon followed, and their influence on the area has been perhaps the most profound and lasting. The city itself (then called Yerba Buena) was founded by Spanish padres in 1776, just as the U.S. declared independence from England. Chinese began arriving in large numbers during the Gold Rush of 1849. More recently, immigrants from other Asian countries, the Philippines, Russia, and South and Central America have added to the city’s diversity.

Surrounded by water on three sides, San Francisco is a city of microclimates. Sweatered residents of the Richmond district may be huddled in cafés to escape the fog, while friends in the Mission sit on their stoops in shirtsleeves, soaking up the sun. Visitors may be surprised by thick fog in July and August, or with the warmest day of the year coming in early October.

Though San Francisco is the most-visited city in the U.S., it often seems like a provincial village, or a series of villages that share a downtown and a roster of world-class icons. Drive over the Golden Gate or the Bay Bridge as the fog is lifting, and your heart will catch at the ever-changing beauty of the scene. Stand at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid, hang off the side of a cable car, or just walk through the neighborhoods that make the city more than the sum of its parts. Despite the hills, San Francisco is a city that cries out to be explored on foot.

The fog rolls in and out; the city reels and rights itself through earthquakes and boom-and-bust cycles. For all its mutability and contrariness, San Francisco has staying power. In the realm of the imagination, it easily displaces bigger cities with more impressive credentials. Willfully young and a little raw, San Francisco nevertheless has a talent for living its moment fully—from Gold Rush to Flower Power to dot-com to whatever comes next. Catch this spirit, and you’ll learn to love the city that captivates even as it shifts underfoot.