San Francisco

Cruise Travel, Oct, 2001 by Theodore W. Scull

The "City By The Bay" Has Long Been America's Gateway To The Pacific

The long, white, moist tongue slips under the Golden Gate Bridge, retreats for a time, then returns as a blanket of mist enveloping the entire structure, leaving just the tops of the two red towers exposed. Fog often comes knocking, created by the cold waters of the northern Pacific Ocean clashing with the warmer air onshore, giving the "City by the Bay" a most alluring atmosphere.

On a sparkling day in June some 30 years ago, I sailed from San Francisco's Pier 35 out past Alcatraz, still a federal prison then, and under the arcing suspension bridge aboard an Orient Line ship carrying migrants, tourists, and returning residents bound over the Pacific to Sydney, and an equally splendid harbor. Both ports demand to be seen from the deck of a ship, even for SF if it's only aboard the local passenger ferry to nearby Sausalito.

San Francisco consistently ranks near or at the top of everyone's must-see list, and the city gets only better with each passing visit, as one learns to delve beyond the superficial carnival atmosphere of Fisherman's Wharf, Ghiardelli Square, and those "cable cars that climb halfway to the stars."

There are other wharves, and one at the foot of Hyde Street displays the city's considerable maritime heritage with an historic fleet including a tug, sailing ships, and a huge sidewheel ferry that once provided a more leisurely cross-harbor link. Another wharf farther west, Pier 32, is home to the Jeremiah O'Brien, one of the last two (of 2,700 built) operating Liberty Ships from World War II. Pier 35 is the cruise terminal, and Pier 39 is for shopping and for the Blue & Gold Fleet departures for San Francisco Bay cruises plus the boat to Angel Island and Alcatraz.

Beyond the overcrowded cable cars, surface and subsurface streetcar lines fan out to the Pacific Ocean beaches, the excellent zoo, many Queen Anne Victorian neighborhoods, leafy parks, and Twin Peaks, often draped with its own foggy decor. These cars, operated by Muni, or the Municipal Railway, are great fun to ride, and some lines connect at their far ends allowing for circular trips. Market Street and a new waterfront line running from the handsome Ferry Building around to Fisherman's Wharf operate with vintage trolleys painted in original Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Boston, Brooklyn, and Baltimore city transit colors. The Muni sells useful passes good for one, three, or seven days of unlimited trolley, cable car, and bus riding, eliminating the need to scrounge for change each time you board.

San Francisco has lofty perches for scanning the harbor--Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, and more recently (since last March), the upper bleachers of Pacific Bell Park, where for San Francisco Giants home games, you may hear the voice of popular baseball announcer Jon Miller not only giving a play by play but also identifying the ships that pass. The stadium, just south of Market Street, has more than 41,000 seats, but you can also watch the game for free through a row of portholes from the bayside Port Walk promenade.

Most container ships, bulk carriers, and tankers slide under the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and dock in Oakland, or head up to Richmond, or occasionally all the way to Sacramento, leaving the San Francisco waterfront for mostly recreation, retail stores, offices, and the fleet of ferries that take residents home to Tiburon and Larkspur and tourists to Jack London Square, Sausalito, Angel Island, and Alcatraz.

A cruise (Blue & Gold Fleet) to the former maximum security prison, now a national park, is both haunting and beautiful. The park rangers' interpretation will bring to life the stories of Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, the Birdman, prisoners on death row, those who escaped the island but never made it to the mainland, and the everyday routine of being an inmate or a guard (correctional officer). You reach the island by boat, and then standing on the shore, contemplate a swim to freedom across the swirling 53-degree watery gap east to Berkeley, north to Marin County, or south to the city. No prisoner, to anyone's knowledge, ever escaped from the prison and safely made the swim to the mainland.

It's much easier to get to Berkeley, home of the University of California, by (Bay Area Rapid Transit), a subway line that dives under the Bay from Market Street and swings left to arrive at the famous hot bed of liberalism--for some, perhaps, ever further to the left when thinking of the university's powerful, radical reputation back in the 1960s and 1970s. But like any important big-city campus, Berkeley has its great bookstores, avant-garde shopping, only-in-California crafts, cafes for debating the current state of the world, and restaurants to suit all budgets and tastes.

Marin County's nearby community of Sausalito is a short ferry ride (Red & White Fleet) from Pier 41 across the Bay, and then a long linear walk to see the contrasts in waterfront living from multi-million properties with kill-for-views back to the city to clapped out ferryboat conversions that look like they might come apart at any moment, when in fact some of them have been grounded there for years. At the far end, the Army Corps of Engineers houses a working model of San Francisco Bay and Sacramento River Delta showing the intricacies of tidal flows and myriad waterways that lead inland to the state capital of Sacramento and beyond, north into the Napa Valley wine country, and south well past the international airport.