Russian Hill: San Francisco's Crooked Street and Literary Heights

Russian Hill rises steeply from the northern edge of the city's flat downtown grid to one of San Francisco's highest residential peaks, its streets climbing through a neighbourhood of exceptional architectural and literary heritage. Lombard Street's famous one-block section of eight hairpin curves — the "most crooked street in the world" in tourist marketing, though in fact Potrero Hill's Vermont Street is more sinuous — descends through a garden of hydrangeas between houses whose owners manage the relentless stream of visitors with the stoic acceptance of people who chose to live on a tourist attraction. The actual residential streets of Russian Hill above and around this spectacle offer some of the city's finest walking — the staircase gardens of Macondray Lane, the hidden parks, and the streets that provided Armistead Maupin with the setting for his Tales of the City novels that captured 1970s San Francisco with a warmth and precision that time has not diminished.

The neighbourhood's literary associations run deeper than Maupin. Jack Kerouac lived on Gough Street while completing On the Road; Ina Coolbrith, California's first poet laureate, operated her famous salon here in the late 19th century, hosting Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and a generation of Western American writers. The San Francisco Art Institute on Chestnut Street, founded in 1871 and the oldest art school west of the Mississippi, anchors the neighbourhood's creative heritage with a campus that includes Diego Rivera's remarkable 1931 fresco, one of only three he painted in the United States. The Institute's roof terrace provides a view of the bay, Alcatraz, and the Marin Headlands that rewards any visitor who makes the climb to Chestnut Street.

The residential character of Russian Hill along Polk Street — which runs north from downtown through the neighbourhood to Aquatic Park — provides San Francisco's finest example of a neighbourhood commercial strip that serves its actual population rather than tourist trade. The concentration of independent restaurants, wine bars, cheese shops, and the hardware stores and dry cleaners that sustain daily life gives Polk Street a texture that Valencia Street in the Mission and Hayes Street in Hayes Valley have partly lost to self-consciousness. The walks from Russian Hill down through Macondray Lane to Taylor Street, or along the staircase gardens to the bay at Aquatic Park, provide the experience of navigating a city that was built before the automobile, its physical challenges producing the views and the discoveries that make San Francisco's topography one of its defining pleasures.