The Embarcadero: San Francisco's Waterfront and Ferry Building

The Embarcadero waterfront stretches along San Francisco Bay from the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street north to Fisherman's Wharf, its promenade reclaimed from the elevated freeway that shadowed it until the 1989 earthquake provided the impetus for its removal. The transformation of this waterfront from an industrial port into a public promenade with bay views, outdoor art installations, and access to the Bay Trail has been one of San Francisco's most successful urban interventions — a piece of city-making that connects the financial district, the waterfront parks, and the historic piers in a continuous accessible route. The historic Ferry Building, a magnificent 1898 Beaux-Arts structure with its 75-metre clock tower that survived the 1906 earthquake while the rest of the waterfront burned, has been restored and reinvented as the finest food market building in the United States.

The Ferry Building Marketplace hosts the city's most distinguished permanent food vendors alongside the Saturday farmers' market — widely considered the finest in California — that transforms the Embarcadero Plaza into an outdoor festival of Northern California's agricultural abundance. Acme Bread, Cowgirl Creamery, the Hog Island Oyster Bar, Blue Bottle Coffee's original retail counter, and a dozen other exceptional producers operate from the restored terminal hall in an environment that has become the model for ferry building food markets worldwide. The Saturday market adds the oyster shuckers, the mushroom foragers, the citrus growers from the Central Valley, and the artisan cheese and charcuterie producers who bring Northern California's extraordinary food system into direct public encounter.

The bay itself provides the Embarcadero's most spectacular experience. The Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco to Oakland across the bay, illuminates nightly with the Bay Lights installation — 25,000 LED lights arranged across the western span in a work by Leo Villareal that has transformed the engineering structure into a work of monumental public art. Ferry services from the Ferry Building connect to Sausalito, Tiburon, Angel Island, and Oakland in journeys that provide extraordinary bay views. Alcatraz Island, its prison facilities now a National Park site, is accessible by ferry from Pier 33 for the most atmospheric tour of a historical site available in any American city — the combination of natural beauty, architectural drama, and the weight of its history as America's most notorious federal penitentiary creating an experience unlike any other.