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Ross Alley in Chinatown, between Jackson and Washington Streets

Historians like to quibble about names. Ross Alley is recognized as the first alley in San Francisco—that is, the first Alley. (All the previous alleys were called “Street.”) There have been long stretches of time, however, when Ross Alley was called by other names.

To this day, many still call it Lu Song Hang, or Lu Song Alley.

At one time, it was also popularly known as Spanish Lane, and known more recently, by neighbors, as Mexican Alley. Both of these names come from the alley’s 19th century history as a street of brothels, many of which for a time offered Latina prostitutes. The alley’s bagnios, as brothels were called, were not the small, crude cribs of Jackson and Washington Streets, where prostitutes openly displayed their “wares” to potential customers in the street. These were mostly classy joints, with liquor bars and waiting rooms, ornate furnishings, and full entertainment for “gentlemen.”

Ross Alley gradually gave way to SROs (single room occupancy hotels) after prostitution became illegal, but it continued to be part of the underworld for some time, and had hidden brothels for many decades. In the 1920s, while police were occupied with bootleggers, they were also trying to control Chinese Tong gangs. After Police Chief White eradicated the Barbary Coast mayhem, Tong entrepreneurs continued to run opium dens, gambling parlors and brothels staffed by Chinese slave girls, shipped in by the Tong gangs.

Rookie officer Dan McKlem began his career in Chinatown in 1925 under the new Chief Daniel O’Brien. He explains, “Your effectiveness depended on your contacts with the Chinese. They had to take a liking to you or they wouldn’t give you the time of day. And even then, there were some things they just wouldn’t tell you.…I remember in the last of the Tong Wars there was a guy named Wong Quong, who was killed on January 6, 1926, in Ross Alley. We knew he’d been killed because of a war, but we could never figure out just who did it. The Chinese were a secretive lot anyway, by and large, but none of them could talk about a murder like that. They would have been violating the code.”

This was, of course, before anyone Chinese was welcome on the police force or in any part of the power structure. Immigrants were commonly seen as “them.” Today, San Francisco’s Police Chief, Heather Fong, is of Chinese ancestry.

Ross Alley is now used for film shoots (such as Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom, Karate Kid II, and Big Trouble in Little China). It’s also home to one of the few producers of real-live, human-handled fortune cookies (since 1962). There’s also a barber (since 1963) who has reputedly shorn such luminaries as Frank Sinatra, Matt Dillon, Peter Ustinov and Michael Douglas.

710 Montgomery Street

“The Black Cat was by far the best place for a wild drunk that an adventurer could hope for, but the place changed hands and the new owner encouraged the fruit and the place went to hell.”
— Henry Evans in Bohemian San Francisco (1955)

The Black Cat Café was a bar, a dance hall, and a revolutionary seed in the lumpy cultural soils of San Francisco. At a time when the Castro District was a blue-collar, family-oriented neighborhood, the legal right to operate a “gay business” was won for the first time right here at 710 Montgomery Street. The straight owner fought all the way to the California Supreme Court (1951) to keep his liquor license.

This is where the drag queen Imperial Court, still active today, was birthed. This is the Bohemian Bar in Kerouac’s book On the Road. This is the place where writers and artists, bohemians and beatniks gathered, partied and schemed for thirty years.

The Black Cat Café opened in 1933 in the Canessa Printing Building, now home to Bocadillos with the Canessa Gallery Artists Resource upstairs (708 Montgomery).

In 1942, the number of homos suddenly increased in San Francisco, thanks to a new policy that men loving men is unacceptable in the armed forces. The ban was against men who “habitually or occasionally engaged in homosexual or other perverse sexual practices.” And so it was that thousands of gays were discharged from service and put ashore here in San Francisco where the war economy was booming and the locals were generally welcoming—certainly more so than families back “home” across small town America.

This area, by contrast, was full of radicals. Many lived and worked across the street in the Montgomery Block building where the Transamerica Pyramid now stands. It was commonly known as “The Monkey Block.” Meanwhile, next door, at 716–720 Montgomery, were the studios of artists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Ralph and Peter Stackpole.

Truman Capote, while hanging out at The Black Cat, denied he was a writer with a drinking problem by explaining he was, “a drinker with a writing problem.”

José Sarria, a.k.a Madam Butterfly, Empress José, The Widow Norton

In the 1940’s a waiter at the Black Cat, José Sarria, served up a series of flaming Sunday afternoon “drag operas” and “drag balls.” Sarria performed for fifteen years to full houses of 250 or more, using his role as Madame Butterfly to sermonize about homosexual rights.

Sarria was the first openly gay man to run for City Supervisor, polling some 6,000 write-in votes (1961).

Sol Stoumen, proprietor

In 1949, Sol Stoumen, the straight man who owned the Black Cat, faced down a police attempt to close the bar on the grounds that it attracted gay people. The Supreme Court ruled that a bar could not be closed simply due to the clients it attracted.

Stoumen’s San Francisco Tavern Guild was likely the first gay business association in the country, battling police harassment and ushering in the eventual acceptance of gay establishments throughout town.

Halloween 1963

The Black Cat flourished until 1963 when its liquor license was finally revoked by the state the morning before the bar’s annual Halloween party. The boisterous Witches Night celebration was held anyway, with only fruit juice and soft drinks sold at the bar. The place closed down permanently the next day.

Within a week after the demise of The Black Cat, SF police had closed five other gay bars. By 1964 only eighteen remained of the 30 gay and lesbian bars that existed the previous year.

In 1964, after the bar’s closing, José Sarria crowned himself Empress and Dowager Widow of the self-proclaimed Emperor Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

Missing photo

caption: “God Save the Nelly Queens” being sung by Empress José Sarria and his fans.

Have you ever thought out why it is that San Francisco has such a large population of homosexuals? Sure, it’s historically been a tolerant town (probably due to the gold-seekers and other adventurers and wayfarers). But why gay people in particular, rather than other oppressed populations in need of safe homes? Why not runaway children or middle America refugees? (Wait a second…hmmmm)

Turns out, though, that the sudden increase from a moderate to a high number of homos in this town happened in 1942. That was when the U.S. military services acknowledged the existence of a “perversity” called homosexuality for the first time, and enacted a policy that men loving men is unacceptable in the armed forces. (I seem to recall having seen somewhere that these folks actually train men to do the extreme opposite to other men.).

The ban was against men who “habitually or occasionally engaged in homosexual or other perverse sexual practices.” What a painfully clear proof this is, that killing people for economic or political ends is not considered perverse by the U.S. government.

At that time, the Pacific Theater of Operations was in full swing in World War II. The hub of these operations was the network of bases operating on San Francisco Bay. Any male soldier known, or in some cases merely suspected, to love men was put ashore and given a less-than-honorable discharge. Put ashore in San Francisco, that is.

And they stayed.

Think about it: If you were publicly and openly pronounced gay in 1942, would you venture back home to small town America (where most of these boys were from)? Likely as not, you wouldn’t even be welcome back “home,” so you’d be fabulously pleased to stay with your buddies in this tolerant port town, and you’d put down roots.

Here’s my report about San Francisco. I wrote it for my niece, Marina, who asked me to correct her report. Nerd that I am, I corrected it but required she read my report, too. Mind you, this is a challenge, since she lives in Germany and is just learning English.

As I explained to her: Everything in this report is true. Some is strange. Maybe you’ll be surprised.

For 4,500 years, the land that is today called San Francisco was home to a few small Ohlone Indian families. There were probably never more than 2,000 people in those village families, and usually a lot less than that. In all those years, the only big change we know about in their culture was when the bow-and-arrow replaced spears. There is almost no other place in the world with such a long time period having one stable culture.

The first Europeans in San Francisco came to set up a military fort and Catholic mission. San Francisco Mission was founded by fanatical Spanish priests in 1776. They were fanatical because the boss priest, Junipero Serra, was from a family that had been force-converted to Christianity by the Spanish Inquisition. His parents were born Jewish. He wanted to show that he was not like his parents and so he became a fanatic and whipped himself often to show how spiritual (and Catholic) he was.

The Mission was founded at the same time as the United States was being founded on the other side of the American continent. The mission was mostly a failure, and the Ohlone Indians were mostly destroyed by the Spanish through slavery and disease.

A town called San Francisco did not exist until 1847, when the Mexican town of Yerba Buena was renamed. Why was it renamed? Because California had just been taken from Mexico to become part of the United States. The American mayor wanted it to become the famous city on the west coast of America. There were no western American cities at all yet! The population was only 500 at that time. Gold was discovered in the mountains and the city grew quickly. In ten years the population was more than 50,000. Now, in 2010, San Francisco has about 800,000 people in the small-sized city of only 125 square kilometers and 7,400,000 people in the urban area.

The Golden Gate bridge is one informal symbol of San Francisco. When it was built in 1937, it connected the city with the redwood forests.The bridge encourages people to go north and cut giant redwood trees, pretty much the largest living things in the world, then make them into houses in the city. Before the bridge, the small gap in the mountains where San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific Ocean was also called the Golden Gate.

The other informal symbol is the cable car. All the cable cars around the city are pulled by three long cables that move under the street at exactly 15 kilometers per hour. To move up a hill or stay slow on a downhill track, the driver uses a grabbing clamp to hold the cable. To stop on a flat place, the driver releases the cable.

Pier 39 is the new tourist location that replaced the active fishing community at Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a tourist nightmare where people can buy Amischeissdreck* [*slang word for ‘American crap’]. It was all made in China and Indonesia and…very little of it is made in the USA but it’s all the very same stuff that’s sold in every tourist city of America.

There is one good thing about Pier 39. Luckily, some very large wild animals, sea lions, decided in 1988 to begin relaxing there. They broke the docks. People chased them away. But then the people realized the sea lions would attract more tourists to buy more dreck, so they built a strong dock for the sea lions to rest in the sun. Now the sea lions rest there for many days before swimming back to the ocean to eat 20 kilograms (about 50 pounds) of squid every day (urp: bad breath!) and then they go make babies on island beaches.

The sea lions still come rest at Pier 39, and they’re still wild animals with no cages and no food from humans. It’s a rare chance to see large wild animals in a city.

When you visit, bring warm clothing, especially in summer. The weather is windy and cold in summer, because of fog from the cold ocean. The ocean is too cold to swim in. The water temperature is 12 degrees (54 Fahrenheit) all year, and the air is often that temperature in summer. In winter, it’s sometimes colder than that, but usually not. In summer some neighborhoods are warm and some are cold. If you go behind a hill, the wind stops and the temperature rises. If you go behind the tall Berkeley Hills, only ten kilometers (six miles) from the city, the temperature goes up 15 degrees (about 30 degrees Fehrenheit).

The city of San Francisco has many neighborhoods that are more interesting than the tourist areas. Each neighborhood has a different personality. The people in San Francisco are very friendly and everyone smiles at each other, except some of the European visitors forget to smile. There is typical American corruption in local politics, but most people don’t care because people in San Francisco are rich. Only rich people can buy a house in San Francisco today. Poor people are too busy finding a way to live.

People from all over the world live in San Francisco and many languages are spoken on the street, even far away from the tourist areas.

San Francisco became a city because of one early boom (the Gold Rush). It stays a boom town because of fast-growing money-making industries like the internet boom, a world-wide boom that began in San Francisco. San Francisco attracts many young people who want to be involved in the famously creative culture or to chase dreams of fast money. Most people in San Francisco have only lived in the city for a few years. Finding anyone who has lived here for more than a decade is rare. This is the irony of the place that was once the most stable culture that humans have ever known.

I love being asked why I’ve chosen to live in San Francisco. I’ve been heard to say, “Better than having snozen to die elsewhere!” (For you word algorithm geeks, choose : chosen ∷ snooze : snozen.)

But let’s take a step back and look at who we all are, living here.

It’s rare to find a crowd of humans in this city that’s made up of lifetime locals. When it comes to the subset most often of interest to me—innovators—it’s no different, and includes a big part of the population. Many native-born are generally glad to have hatched into a froth of creative innovation. Meanwhile in great numbers, people deciding as adults under their own power to live in San Francisco task themselves with the ambitious infusion of ideas. The result is a stimulating bubbly specific to San Francisco.

San Francisco is where “cultural creatives” flock, trying out their ambitious world-changing ideas. Whether by wonderful coincidence or some grand scheme, no other place is like it. Over the century and a half of its existence, people have chosen to move here—or stay here—to carry out lives notably different from lives led elsewhere. And I mean led.

But it isn’t mere coincidence. When I was picking where to live, I specifically decided to join the ferment. That decision coincides with a similar path taken by countless others because of attractive local features that predispose us in this geographical direction.

Sure, we’re responding to the schemes of many powerful people over the years—schemes like Brannan’s news sheets announcing the Gold Rush, distributed more on the East Coast and in London than locally as a way of attracting adventurers, laborers and a commercial market to make him richer, or schemes like De Young’s Midwinter Fair of 1894 to advertise the mildness of our inclement weather, with similar goals. But in the mix of motivators drawing ambitious and dreamy folks from far and wide, these grand schemes are minuscule compared to the collective effects of the compounded culture that has been created. And even smaller when compared to the grandness of the Bay Area’s natural environment that motivates exploiters and communers alike.

I’m suggesting that the two real magnets are the accumulated culture and the specific local nature.

As an example of the former, allow me to use my own reasons for having picked SF. I wanted to be someplace where I didn’t have to work as hard to make a big difference, and I wanted that difference to have its impact beyond my local space. In San Francisco, there are four potency enhancers for social justice efforts acting to multiply the effects of our creativity and problem-solving:

1) community moral support: people are open-minded and welcoming
2) being a hub: people come and go widely
3) being a fishbowl: people watch what we do
4) we publish

These are the cultural vestiges left by many generations of unusual San Franciscans. (And I don’t mean 25-year generations of birth cycles; rather, innovation and boom cycles come through in highly accelerated intervals, which is why it may take six birth generations to be a true New Englander, but only six years to be a San Franciscan.)

You can easily see that my personal concern with “accumulated culture” comes out of values expressed in the progressive social justice crowd. They are the crowd that caused me to migrate, in particular those who are wishing to invert the long-standing power structures of the world that strongly favor the unscrupulous, the profit-driven and the chronically wealthy (often one and the same).

But similar motivations to migrate have influenced those with other interests, even the many powerful supporters of the status quo who reside here, along with their regional counterparts in places like the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

The second magnet, drawing keen minds here, is nature. As any good magnet (or magnet metaphor), it not only draws, it repels. “Earthquakes.” That’s the one-word-answer so often given to the question, “Why don’t you move here?”

The drama of such natural forces, along with a slight but enduring “wild west” reputation, helps to maintain an active repellent. Only those seriously interested in being here choose to. A continuous influx of diverse adventurers dating to the Gold Rush dynamically form the mood of the population.

With newly measured global impacts from human activity, we live in a loudly ticking time of increasing awe associated with the reactive strength of nature. In San Francisco, the awesome power of nature has been, from its start, more apparent than in most well-known cities.

We’re surrounded by one of the richest ocean ecosystems, the Farallons Sanctuary. Our encirclement is completed by unevenly developed bays and assertive mountain ridges, ever visible except when obscured by the even more insistent blasting fog.

[I hereby propose a three-season vocabulary in San Francisco: ‘Chança rain season’, ‘Blasting fog season’, and ‘October’, which normally starts in September.]

We have wild mammals of nearly a ton swimming into tourist zones without hesitation. In an hour or two on bicycle we can reach dozens of canyons spread with unsurpassedly massive trees. We’ve got cliffs, dunes and springs undermining and overwhelming urban infrastructure without pause.

If that’s not enough, we have dynamic nature in our own bodies, brains and the artifacts of our everyday lives. This lends no extra power to the attraction reeling us to San Francisco, but much power to the importance of understanding our relationship to nature.

And that is what Thinkwalks is about. People came here. Why? How did this place come to be the city it is out of the nature it still is? The city is a design printed on natural fabric. Thinkwalks explore the strange interweaving of urban and natural history, with all its tangles and tatters.

For more than a decade, I’ve led occasional tours as a sort of hobby. In late 2009, I realized that in among all the cultural artifacts that are so important here, there is a natural dynamic most locals crave in their lives. Once I realized that, it was only a small step to shift my tours from their former focus on visitors to their obvious clientele: nerdy San Franciscans.

I fervently hope that the discoveries and discussions generated by Thinkwalks add to the opportunity to invert and subvert the destructive paradigm we face now. And I hope my small innovation has some impact on cultural priorities as we struggle against great odds to survive.

I may as well be explicit: please help San Francisco’s subversive values to endure as we face all disasters; please integrate humbling natural forces into your analysis of your role in the world; and most of all, please have compassion for one another in light of the lessons of chaotic history—a drama in which there is no separation between human and natural forces.

Liberty Hill is so steep, that at 22nd street, I feel as if I am going to bump my nose as I cross the intersection to walk up. Okay, so I have a big nose.

In the 1990s there was a “HILL” warning sign at the top of the block, before being replaced by a pictorial sign. If they bother to put a “HILL” sign on a San Francisco street, you know it’s steep!

But this block was even steeper than any normal sign could convey. Cars approaching from the level intersection at the top of the block would creep forward. Even tall drivers can’t see any pavement ahead of them where it drops away below the front bumper.

It was with a sigh of relief that we in the neighborhood noticed one day that the sign had been edited to give a more accurate warning. Someone had crossed out the word “HILL” and had sprayed “CLIFF.” Now, with that international pictorial sign we don’t know what to do!

When you take your next stroll along Divisadero Street, walk a little slower than usual. You wouldn’t want to scare the deer.

In fact, if you were coming here to hunt, as so many people have done over the last five millennia, you might consider covering your head with a deer costume, complete with antlers. It could allow you to settle in among the herd at close quarters and have your pick of the animals for your village’s upcoming feast!

According to all the journals and reports from early European visitors, wildlife were abundant to such a degree that it was sometimes possible to reach out and grab an animal: a quail, a fox, even a deer. But the people who called this area home for 4,500 years (or more) hunted carefully and with elaborate ritual that protected the many local species from over-hunting. The Yelamu family groups and tribelets that populated the seasonal villages at each end of Divisadero—Chutchui near the south end and Petlenuc near the north—followed a complex set of rules that included fasting, sweats in a lodge, abstinence, and appeals to family-specific and activity-based totem animal spirits before they could draw a single arrow across a bow.

The bow came into the lives of these people, often called Ohlone Indians, 1500 years ago. According to the physical anthropology available, the introduction of bow and arrow represents the only known major cultural shift in the extremely stable societies of Central California during the hundreds of generations during which they sparsely occupied this land. This represents a stability equal to or surpassing all other known examples of human societies, which usually shift dramatically after only a few generations.

The shift to arrows from the use of spears represents a major transition in the rigidly followed local rituals, but not as dramatic, of course, as the transition that occurred when European cultures arrived in the 18th Century. Both the Indians and the Whites used trapping and nets for quail, salmon and other birds and fish, but the Spanish, Russian, French and English who came ashore brought firearms.

The first encounters between these old and new hunting technologies, and their accompanying rituals, must have been astounding to witnesses. In one passage from Charles Darwin’s travel journals (I was so enthralled by it, I don’t mind that it represents an encounter in an entirely different—and seemingly more disputatious—part of the world), he writes:

An European labours under great disadvantages, when treating with savages like these, who have not the least idea of the power of fire-arms. In the very act of levelling his musket, he appears to the savage far inferior to a man armed with a bow and arrow, a spear, or even a sling. Nor is it easy to teach them our superiority except by striking a fatal blow.…

Captain Fitz Roy on one occasion, being very anxious from good reasons to frighten away a small party, first flourished a cutlass near them, at which they only laughed; he then twice fired his pistol close to a native.

The man both times looked astounded, and carefully but quickly rubbed his head; he then stared awhile, and gabbled to his companions; but he never seemed to think of running away. We can hardly put ourselves in the position of these savages, and understand their actions. …when a savage sees a mark struck by a bullet, it may be some time before he is able at all to understand how it is effected; for the fact of a body being invisible from its velocity, would perhaps be to him an idea totally inconceivable. … Certainly I believe that many savages of the lowest grade, such as these of Tierra del Fuego, have seen objects struck, and even small animals killed by the musket, without being in the least aware how deadly an instrument it is.

The technology was the least of the differences between early American and European cultures; as Darwin’s final sentence so completely illustrates, the two concepts of causality and even of death were essentially different.

Long after the few hundred occupants of the San Francisco Peninsula were supplanted, miserably, by the thousands of Europeans and Americans who came, hunting on Divisadero continued.

After the Gold Rush, for decades, a lodge stood near what is now the intersection of Fulton and Divisadero Streets. There’s a pet grooming service there now, Kate’s, across Fulton from Café Abir. The lodge, known by the more typical San Francisco term “roadhouse”, was called the San Souci, a misspelling of the French words for carefree. The valley it occupied was, for the better part of a century, named after it.

And, to my water-loving mind, most important, there appears to have been a San Souci Lake, as well. This lake, apparently spanning a triangular area for a couple blocks along what is now the low part of Divisadero, and sweeping toward the intersection of Baker and Grove, is mentioned in only one place I know of. Edward Morphy wrote a newspaper column in 1919 and 1920 called San Francisco’s Thoroughfares.

In early 2010, thanks to a Google Alert I set up on the terms “San Souci” and “San Francisco”, I got a ping about a newly (and badly) digitized copy of the collected Morphy columns. Luckily, one of the seven or so iterations of the phrase “San Souci” was digitized properly by the OCR software and set off the Google Alert.

In Morphy’s column, he describes a San Souci Roadhouse and Lake which was a favorite place to get away from the growing city of the bustling and lawless early days. He did not depict it as a hunting location. But given that other lakes among the dunes of San Francisco’s outside lands were documented as hunting grounds, it is likely that the lodge was used as a hunting lodge by some. Water fowl would not have been the only wildlife to stop by such a lake.

Please comment, especially if you have seen any other documentation concerning San Souci Lake (or Sans Souci Lake).

Most famous people were made so by stories, more than by deeds—that’s what fame is. In addition to the popular stories, there’s the law. Guglielmo Marconi, son of an Italian nobleman in Bologna, knew this as well as anyone when he decided to claim invention of wireless communications (1895). His triumph was that he made the claim—and the English patent—stick.

A group called the Marconi Memorial Foundation incorporated in the 1930s for the purpose of enshrining this magical story in stone, on the slopes of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill and in the nation’s capital.

The Foundation collected public subscriptions from the supportive Italian-American community at the base of the hill, and on April 13, 1938, received permission from the U.S. Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt to erect memorials designed by sculptor Attilio Piccirilli on public land in the two locations. One was placed in Washington, D.C. at 16th and Lamont Streets, NW, the other on Telegraph Hill Boulevard, here in San Francisco. The foundation spent $65,115 for the two memorials, by artist Attilio Piccirilli.

The official recognition of Marconi as inventor of the wireless was snubbed by the Russians, who credited Russian scientist Aleksandr Stepanovich Popoff with the invention. When invited to attend a 1947 celebration in Marconi’s honor, the Russian Ambassador to Italy, a Mr. Kosilev, wrote, “We have to inform you that the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of wireless by the Russian inventor Popoff was celebrated in the Soviet Union in 1945 and was followed by a series of official functions and lectures at the Academy of Sciences in the U.S.S.R. For this reason it is not becoming that the U.S.S.R. should be represented at the Marconi celebrations.”

Heinrich Hertz created what was probably the first intentional radio signal, detectable up to six yards away. Sir Oliver Lodge is credited as having been first to conceive a radio receiver. In the early 1870s, Mahlon Loomis, a dentist of Washington, D.C., became the first to succeed at rudimentary radio communication. Popoff, while researching atmospheric electricity, gave a May 7, 1895 lecture in which he stated he had transmitted and received signals at a distance of six hundred yards, but he never developed the technology. Both Lodge and Popoff were too busy with fundamental research to pursue practical applications of their ideas.

Marconi, meanwhile, not only developed it, but he brought it to England where he perceived that the possibility existed for cornering the market on navigational radio. A patent was granted him in 1896. In 1897, Marconi sold international rights (except Italian) to a telegraph company. He spent the rest of his life propagandizing and suing (not always successfully) for recognition as “the father of wireless telegraphy.”

The Memorial to him, as it happens, is mostly ignored, by virtue of being opposite a great view (at the corner of Telegraph Hill Boulevard and Lombard Street).

Telegraph hill was named, not for radio telegraphy (wireless), but for the semaphore visual signaling device erected there at the instructions of ship Captain John B. Montgomery and used from 1846 until the turn of the century.

This is the quintessential Thinkwalk, mixing all themes from the other tours: creeks, urban planning, social history, murals and everything else! Curious neighbors, visitors and local cyclists alike will love this two hour tour.

The Wiggle itself is now so popular it’s rapidly becoming SF’s human-powered answer to the iconic U.S. highway Route 66. The popular Wiggle bike route, zig-zagging to avoid the hills, is also a walking route—and has been for almost 5,000 years.

When you follow the Wiggle bike route, through the Lower Haight, did you know that you’re moseying along:

• A dune field burying a rocky watercourse?
• An old Spanish trail? (Mission to Presidio)
• An ancient trail walked by Ohlone villagers?
• A remote and wild land called San Souci Valley?

This is the practical way to get from Market Street to the Panhandle and western neighborhoods, but it’s many other things, too! Come walk the Wiggle! Thrill nerdily to the natural and human history of The Wiggle!

Come see exactly where the dunes and hills were, one hundred fifty years ago, when the city boundary was extended to include this land. Locate where the spring emerged that caused Anza to pick this area for the Mission. Discover the history of Reservoir Street, which you never noticed before. Learn why the sewers are inviting big trouble. See maps and photos of a forgotten ravine.

While you’re at it, ask your bike politics questions of guide and researcher Joel Pomerantz, who co-founded the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, organized the Duboce Bikeway Mural, and has published and spoken widely on the topic of waterways in the city.

Joel, in a 1994 article, was the first to popularize the ridiculous moniker ‘the Wiggle’—so he can ridicule it all he wants! It took more than a decade for the term term to enter popular parlance. Now it’s posted on official street signs and covered in the NY Times and Wikipedia.

Donations are sliding scale (you decide what to pay).
$10 to $40 per person depending on your ability to pay.
Meet at the Bike Mural, Duboce Avenue at Church Street.

Please check tour dates, then invite your friends
(RSVP by phone or using the comment space at the bottom of this page. 415-505-8255).