The Bold Italic

Grandview Park, also called Turtle Hill, is the small rise you have noticed poking over the Sunset on your way to the ocean. Small is the entire point.

Every route here got rated on scenery, difficulty and how badly you will be dodging tourists. That last one matters more than people admit.

Somebody set up a full picnic in Dolores with a cutting board, a cheese knife, and a small cured meat situation, and the rest of us ate chips out of the bag like animals.

There is always one guy at the beach bonfire who brought the wrong wood and is very defensive about it.

Someone abandoned a couch on the sidewalk with a handwritten sign that said FREE, GOOD COUCH, and by the time I walked back it was gone and the sign was still there.

There are more than 220 parks inside city limits and most of us keep going to the same one and complaining that it is crowded.

Which SF building would you demolish tomorrow?

Runners battle injury, chafing and, worst of all, boredom. The cure is a new route, and this city has more of them than you are using.

Someone on Muni was explaining her job to her mother on speaker and by the end of the ride the whole car understood it better than her mother did.

Some spots take too long to reach on foot and are miserable by car. On two wheels you can go road to trail and stop whenever you feel like it.

Which Muni line have you given up on entirely?

Mary Ellen Pleasant was born in Georgia in 1814, most likely into slavery, and worked the underground railroad before she ever reached San Francisco. The city's smallest park carries her name.

A man read an actual physical book at a crowded bar for two hours, alone, unbothered, and I have thought about his confidence every day since.

The Farnsworth Lane Steps in Parnassus Heights are a passageway most people walk past for years without once looking up them.

Lombard is not the crookedest street in the city. Vermont Street on Potrero Hill is tighter, and nobody lines up to photograph it unless it's Bring Your Own Big Wheel day.

Filbert, Jones, 22nd Street. There is a definitive ranking of which blocks are actively trying to end you, and now it exists in one place.

Everyone in the sauna is discussing a Series A. There is no escape. The heat is not the problem.

No special gear. No hydration tube. Gym sneakers are entirely acceptable. Six trails within reach of a car and a free morning.

Ina Coolbrith was the first poet laureate of California, ran the Oakland library, mentored Jack London, and has a park on Russian Hill barely anyone visits.

Hills are what this city is known for. Underneath them there is still a waterworld of ponds, creeks and streams that got built over and kept running.

The trolley problem comes from the philosopher Philippa Foot. We gave it a cable car and a set of San Francisco things you would rather not lose.

A woman jogged past me on the Embarcadero going uphill, on the phone, having a totally coherent work conversation.

The Cleveland Cascade was a cascading fountain in 1923, styled after old Italian architecture. The water was shut off in the 1950s and it sat dry until neighbors came back for it in 2004.

A neighbor rang the doorbell with a bouquet a few days after she let slip that her mom had died. There is a guy named Earl on the block who bakes bread and gives it away.

The cross on Mount Davidson is 103 feet of concrete because arsonists kept burning down the wooden ones. Since 1997 it has been a memorial to the Armenian Genocide.

A whole train car once dropped their phones at the same moment to help a woman who had passed out.

We are the Winchester Mystery House of cities. Bricked-up passageways, sunken ships, railcar tracks that end in a parking lot, and a park paved with graves.

You have probably eaten this family's food without knowing it. Sweet Maple, Kitchen Story, the boba shops, the Millionaire's Bacon. Now there is a cafe in the Central Sunset.

Six eucalyptus trees and a plaque on Octavia Street, just over an acre, sitting behind a cast-iron fence you have walked past a hundred times.

A separation, a crashed startup, and a garage full of old computers he could not persuade himself to dump. The fire settled the question.

They were part of a migration most San Franciscans have never heard of: Russians who fled the 1917 revolution east into Manchuria, then had to leave a second time.

Coppola bought the tower in 1973 with Godfather money and put a cafe on the ground floor in 1999. There is a machine by the door that prints you a story.

Jack Early Park is a flight of stairs between two apartment buildings leading to a plant-lined platform with room for three people. Four if you are good at Tetris with human bodies.

A dog who can weave through legs and catch a frisbee farther than a baseball field will eventually draw a crowd. Then the crowd needs somewhere to sit.

He bought Andy's Donuts at 22, a 24-hour Castro spot that Harvey Milk used to haunt. When he opened his own place the name was taken, so he added the other half of his story.

Tartine took over a corner on Guerrero that had already been a neighborhood bakery twice before. Two people from culinary school, one on pastry and one on bread.

Public Works has grade calculations for nearly every street in the city and has never once put them in order. Somebody else did the collating.

A two-month-old kitten in a harness, with the energy of a freshly awoken three-year-old on espresso. The Richmond District never stood a chance.

Every gay bar in America had blacked-out windows, because being seen leaving one could cost you your job, your apartment or your family. Two women changed that on the corner of Castro and 17th.

Order the Bloody Mary. It arrives with a Guinness float and bacon from the shop across the street, and you drink it ten feet from an actual fire.

San Bruno Mountain State Park sits a five-minute drive past the city limits, and the parking lot is somehow never full.

Sit near the front. The driver has some sense of what is going on around them, which is more than you will have in about ninety seconds.

The dramatic corner everyone pictures when they think of Zuni was a cactus shop called the Red Desert until about 1987. The restaurant started in one narrow storefront next door.

What is a San Francisco tourist thing that is genuinely worth it?

Islais Creek appears on some of the first maps ever drawn of this place, and by 1850 its water was irrigating crops. Then the Gold Rush put a railroad trestle over it.

A cute cable car is coming and it is going to end something you love. You have to pick. Play it in the header.

Someone got on the J with a surfboard at Church Street. He just stood there holding it like a very large tray.

After the 1906 quake, people left the city for the Oakland and Berkeley hills and built houses nowhere near a streetcar. The staircases they cut to reach transit are still there.

The gutters and retaining walls in Buena Vista Park are built out of headstones. Hundreds of them. You have probably walked over the names.

A rider since 1978 watched a couple move car to car, calmly pouring gasoline on the floor of each one.