DISTRICT 8

• The Downtown area is crowned by the golden dome of the newly restored City Hall in the Civic Center complex, one of the finest collections of Beaux Arts buildings in the country. This is the cultural heart of the city, where you can catch local rock band Metallica at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium or the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall (or, as recently occurred, a concert featuring both). The new Main Library is nearby, as are dozens of theaters with shows ranging from Rent to The Merchant of Venice. The Civic Center Plaza is filled with local color, from the weekend Farmers Market to the frequent weekday demonstrations and protests. The 1932 War Memorial Opera House on Van Ness is home to the San Francisco Opera and Ballet. The Van Ness commercial corridor offers fine dining for performing arts patrons, as well as convenient access to furniture stores, movie theaters, banks, and car dealerships.
• The Financial District, predominately a commercial center of historic banks built on Gold Rush fortunes and high-rise office buildings which shot up during the boom of the 1980s, offers its workers a smattering of upscale apartments and condominiums — and the demand is growing. Four-star, expense-account restaurants and hotels, as well as services of all kinds, are never more than a block away. Green space can be found if you're persistent: Jackson Square Park, near the Embarcadero Center, is the perfect place for a refreshing, sunshiny picnic lunch. And hidden between the famous TransAmerica Pyramid and another highrise, you'll find TransAmerica Redwood Park, a tiny sanctuary where busy stockbrokers take a breather to watch Chinese grandmas practice their Tai Chi.
• The palatial mansions of the Big Four railroad magnates (Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington) on Nob Hill were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Now, "Snob Hill's " luxury hotels carry on their legacy as an enclave for the rich and famous. The City's historic cable cars, built in 1878 to make these neighborhoods accessible, are still carrying standing-room-only loads of tourists and locals up and down the steep hills. A few elegant mansions remain, along with several Julia Morgan Arts and Crafts-style homes, luxury apartment buildings, and assorted smaller single-family residences. Huntington Park, donated to the neighborhood by Collis Huntington in 1915, provides a playground and benches for the wealthy and not-so-wealthy alike.
• In a 1940 column, Herb Caen said North Beach had "1001 neon-splattered joints alive with the Italian air of garlic and juke-box wail of American folk songs." In the '50s, Caen coined the term "beatnik" to describe the counterculture writers and artists who hung out at North Beach coffee houses and listened to Allen Ginsburg's first reading of "Howl" at the City Lights Bookstore. Today the Italian restaurants and the music and the bookstore remain, and there's still lots of local color at Washington Square park in the middle of this historic neighborhood. Quaint single-family homes and apartments are coveted here for their great views and proximity to jobs and nightlife.
• Home to Lombard Street, "the crookedest street in the world," Russian Hill has been the setting of countless books and films. Homes in the Vallejo Street Crest District at its summit, a National Register of Historic Places site, were designed by Arts and Crafts-era architect Willis Polk. Several other Craftsmen homes remain, along with an eclectic assortment of 19th-century Italianate residences, apartments, condos and single-family homes tucked into irregular lots on the hillsides. The neighborhood has several lovely parks, plenty of good restaurants, and shopping on Polk and Hyde streets
• 19th century lookouts stationed in a semaphore on Telegraph Hill let those on the waterfront below know what kind of ships were coming into the Bay. In 1933, the city built the famous landmark Coit Tower on top of the hill with a bequest from the estate of Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a poker-playing, cigarette-smoking millionaire who liked to hang out with the neighborhood's volunteer firefighters. Once you've gotten your fill of the Works Progress Administration murals inside Coit Tower, and the spectacular 360-degree views of the city from Pioneer Park at its base, take a walk down one of the several stairways that line the hillside. You'll get a close up view of the homes perched precariously on the slopes as well as the lush gardens carefully maintained by the residents. Perhaps you'll even catch sight of the famous flock of parrots that lives in the trees of Telegraph Hill.