The Richmond: San Francisco's Foggy Avenues and Asian Food District

The Richmond District stretches from the panhandle of Golden Gate Park to the Pacific Ocean in a grid of avenues and cross streets that houses one of the most culturally diverse middle-class neighbourhoods in any American city. The Outer Richmond along Clement Street and Geary Boulevard has been San Francisco's primary Asian commercial corridor since the Chinese community began settling here in the early 20th century, the neighbourhood's relative affordability and its distance from the tourist districts making it the preferred destination for successive waves of Chinese, Russian, Southeast Asian, and Central American immigrants who built the businesses and institutions that sustain the neighbourhood's extraordinary food culture today. The result is a stretch of independent restaurants, grocery stores, and specialty food shops that rivals anything in the city for culinary authenticity and value.

Clement Street in the Inner Richmond is the neighbourhood's social spine — a street of continuous small businesses where dim sum restaurants operate beside Russian bakeries, Vietnamese pho houses, and the Irish pubs that serve the remaining Irish-American population that settled this neighbourhood in the early 20th century. The mixture of cultures and cuisines reflects the Richmond's history as the second Chinatown for the population that could not afford the original, and the subsequent addition of communities from across Asia and the former Soviet Union who found the neighbourhood's established immigrant infrastructure welcoming. The Green Apple Books on Clement Street, one of San Francisco's finest independent bookshops, anchors the street's cultural life with readings, a used book section of extraordinary depth, and the community of regulars that sustains independent bookselling in a city that has lost most of its book culture to online commerce.

Ocean Beach — accessible from the western end of the Richmond's avenues — provides San Francisco's most dramatic coastal experience. The Pacific here is wild, cold, and frequently dangerous for swimming, its powerful rip currents and breaking shore pounds creating conditions suitable only for experienced surfers in the right gear. The beach's 4-mile length, backed by the dunes of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, provides walking in any weather — the fog that rolls in from the Pacific most summer mornings makes the beach particularly atmospheric, the sound of the surf and the visibility of fifty feet creating an experience of sublime marine indifference to the city's concerns. Sutro Baths, the ruins of the world's largest indoor swimming pool complex built in 1896 and destroyed by fire in 1966, provide a haunting archaeological site at the beach's northern end.