![]() Be sure to leave some time for Green Apple Books. Take some time to explore the quirky retail ranging from discount Chinese import stores and Asian grocery stores to fun design stores like Park Life on Clement between 3rd and 4th Avenue. There, between Arguello and about 10th Avenue, you will find one of the most interesting urban stretches in America, with great shopping, excellent cafes, more enticing Asian restaurants than you could visit in a month let alone an afternoon-even one of the city’s best Irish bars. After spending a few minutes communing with the bison, you can either continue heading west and spend the rest of the morning exploring the coast, including Ocean Beach, Land’s End and the Great Highway, or you can go further south into the Outer Sunset District.Īfter a relatively active morning of exploring Golden Gate Park, the Sunset District, and the beach, you’ve earned a restful afternoon, so stroll over to Clement Street. These formidable beasts, who are usually sleeping or grazing, seem both out of place in the middle of an urban park, and a fitting and acute reminder that tech money, real estate booms and social revolutions aside, San Francisco was, and always will be, part of America’s west. Shortly before Golden Gate Park begins its lazy descent to the beach and the Pacific, a fenced-off pasture is home to a dozen or so bison. Golden Gate Park has numerous museums, gardens and performance spaces, but the most intriguing, even bizarre site in the park can be found where 37th Avenue would intersect Golden Gate Park if the avenues cut through the park. ![]() The park is roughly the same size and shape as New York’s Central Park but, particularly on a weekday, much less crowded. Get your food to go and enjoy a morning and early afternoon of walking or cycling beginning in Golden Gate Park, a few blocks south of the House of Bagels. Get the onion flats, a bialy and sourdough hybrid that when fresh out of the oven, holds its own with anything the best bagel places in New York can produce. Like many Jewish San Franciscans of her generation with roots in New York, she would not dream of serving smoked salmon, or hosting an event of any kind, with bagels from anywhere else in the Bay Area. My mother has been getting her bagels there since 1971 and claims, with no supporting, or contradictory, evidence, to be their longest continuous customer. Because of its location on a modest block in the Richmond district, it is not a well-known spot among the younger tech crowd, but older San Francisco Jewish families know it well. It is a real bakery that has been serving the best bagels in the Bay Area for more than half a century. San Francisco is not known for Jewish cuisine, but the House of Bagels is an exception (and not a sad New York knock-off). At 14th Avenue, head north for a couple of blocks to Geary, San Francisco’s largest and busiest east-west thoroughfare. Balboa is an unremarkable western San Francisco street, but the large homes, more modest flats (in San Francisco there are flats, not apartments), and ground-floor businesses boasting everything from test prep for kids to Korean BBQ capture the gestalt of the changing Richmond District. ![]() If biking isn’t your thing, western San Francisco is accessible by foot and also by the best public transportation of any part of the city, as buses or streetcars run on most of the major east-west boulevards.Īfter deciding on your mode of transport, continue on Balboa Street until you get to 14th Avenue. A few doors down is Le Velo Rouge, a vaguely French-feeling cafe where you can get a cup of coffee, use the free Wi-Fi, and people-watch the mix of young parents, tourists from Golden Gate Park, and the occasional USF student from up the road. For $40 you’ll get a good bike for the whole day. Bike rentals there, are, by San Francisco standards, very affordable. San Francyclo, a neighborhood bike shop on the corner of Golden Gate and Arguello, has friendly staff who are always happy to fix a flat or offer advice on how to avoid the worst of San Francisco’s hills, but they open a little later, at 11 a.m. ![]() by stopping at one of the many bike shops on Stanyan Street, at the eastern border of Golden Gate Park, and rent a bike. If you feel up to it, start your morning at around 10 a.m. To make the most of a day in the western half of San Francisco, leave your car elsewhere because nothing can ruin a day of natural beauty, oddly alluring neighborhoods, quirky wildlife, and fantastic food like spending hours looking for parking.
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