San Fran Voice

It’s that time of year again; every single weekend in San Francisco is going to have at least one event which draws both tourists and locals to one of our many diverse neighborhoods.  From the small street fairs to the specialty food tastings to the holiday activities, people who want something to do will not be lacking for events.  But, as a local, it can get kind of tiresome.  You want to check everything out, but you quickly tire of the constant activity, the crowds and the inflated prices on everything.

There’s something to suit everyone in this city, but these are the Top 5 annual events in San Francisco that locals don’t ever want to miss and tourists should find it worth their while to plan in advance for checking out:

1.      Bay to Breakers.  It’s a foot race from one end of the city to the other but you don’t have to be interested in runners to love it.  First of all, the sheer numbers are worth seeing; 65,000 people participate in this run and more than that head out to watch it.  Second, being a spectator is an event in and of itself.  There are costumes (and considerable lack thereof), kegs being pushed down main streets, craziness frolicking in the middle of urban life …  It’s unlike any event you’ve ever seen before and something you can really only experience in San Francisco.  This year, it happens on May 20^th.

2.      Fringe Festival.  Live theatre is one of the most interesting forms of art in San Francisco.  Big productions come here but we also get the opportunity to experience a really vast array of different local theatre events, from stand-up comedy to full-on productions.  The Fringe Festival happens in September and carries on for two weeks, featuring nearly 200 performances all throughout the city.  Some of them are even free things happening on the city streets.  There’s something for everyone and it gives both locals and travelers a chance to get an inside look at the local theatre scene.

3.      Stern Grove Festival.  Speaking of performance art, if you’ve got any interest at all in being entertained and very little money to find that entertainment, San Francisco is the place for you.  One event for such folks is the Stern Grove Festival which runs all summer long, bringing free music and entertainment to Golden Gate Park.  This year, there will be free music every week from June 17^th to August 19^th.  It ranges from Huey Lewis and the News to the San Francisco Symphony.  It’s in the most beautiful part of San Francisco – a park that’s so large it’s got buffalo, polo fields, lakes, botanical gardens, museums and more.  And it’s free!

4.      Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival.  If the normal treats at Ghirardelli Square aren’t reason enough to go check out this “tourist trap”, this weekend-long September festival should be.  Vendors with all different kinds of treats are set up one after another in this Bayside location.  You buy tickets that let you get samples of every different chocolate treat under the sun.  It’s an all ages event with live music and there’s lots of neat stuff in the neighborhood (Hyde Street Pier, the bay beach, random street performers) so you can justify playing tourist while you’re there.  This year, it takes place on September 8th and 9th.

5.      Pride.  It’s cliché, I know, but San Francisco has one of the biggest Pride celebrations in the nation and if you’ve got any interest in getting together to celebrate diversity and the community presence of a GLBT population, here’s where to do it.  There’s a downtown event and there’s the PINK party in The Castro which is supposed to be more of a locals thing but isn’t necessarily.  Admittedly, I’m divided on this one – drinks in the bars are watered down and the streets are packed from side to side as everyone tries to get a glimpse of gay boys acting naughty in the windows of Castro apartments.  But, at the same time, there’s lots of playfulness in the city on this day.  Insider tip: try to find out where the Castro house parties are at (hint: Craigslist!) because that’s where the real low-cost fun is at.  This year, Pride is on June 23^rd.

When I first moved here, a new friend was trying to give me directions to somewhere or other in San Francisco and I was completely baffled by his instructions, so finally he laughed and said, “Just meet me at Union Square and I’ll take you over there”.  When I said, “um, okay, where’s Union Square?” he just about dropped the phone because he thought that he had given me one of the most obvious landmarks in the city to make the plan easier for me.  We laugh about that now because the idea that I didn’t know Union Square is strange and yet makes sense.

You see, the main reason that you would go to Union Square, especially as a tourist which is more or less what I still was at the time of the conversation, is for the shopping.  You go there because they have the multiple story Macy’s and the Loehmann’s discounted brand name store and the Victoria’s Secret with the terrific window displays and the trendy clothing at H&M.  They have all of the brand name stores that you see in magazines and don’t get to experience if you don’t live in a city, stores like FCUK, Armani Exchange, and Jessica McClintock, stores that are familiar if you’re a shopper.  But I’m not much of a shopper and I’m much more likely to end up hitting thrift stores in The Haight or The Mission than purchasing anything from Louis Vuitton so it makes sense that I had only a vague idea of where San Francisco’s major shopping area was located.

At the same time, it’s strange that I couldn’t identify where Union Square was located since it’s close enough to so many of the things I was living close to at the time.  Union Square itself is an urban park which is home to the Theatre Bay Area half-price tickets booth and the See’s Candies that I’ve never even stopped at.  It is bordered on one side by Stockton, just south of the Stockton Tunnel, so I pass by it every time I take the 30 MUNI bus from North Beach down to Market Street.  It is bordered on another side by Powell Street which is the street that my Mason-Powell cable car heads down to get to the cable car turnaround at Market.  So basically, if I was taking any form of transportation that I knew at the time, I’d pass Union Square and probably should’ve known where it was.

Now that I’ve lived in the city for long enough to have explored the ins and outs of it, I obviously don’t have to think twice about where Union Square is.  In fact, I’ve amassed quite a list of positive memories within the geographically small neighborhood.  I’ve ridden up the elevator of the Westin St. Francis to enjoy a stunning view of the bay with a new friend.  I’ve had the best midnight Thai food ever at a small place I stumbled upon on the way home from the underground MUNI station one night.  I’ve had very pricey but amazingly good frozen amaretto sours at Gold Dust Lounge, an older-crowd bar I never would’ve thought I’d have reason to stop in to.  I’ve been to art gallery openings and bookstore readings and small theatre plays.

In short, I’ve discovered that there is actually a lot more to Union Square than just the shopping, even though that’s the big draw that it has for many people.  You have to do some searching to find the non-tourist things in this neighborhood.  It would be really easy to get over-priced food and watered-down beverages in the area, to pay high covers for VIP sections of clubs that aren’t worth their cost and to get lost in the urge to spend too much on shopping.  But it’s just as easy to get cheap slices of pizza at Blondie’s and buy inexpensive trinkets from street vendors and enjoy the entertainment of neighborhood characters like the San Francisco Twins.  Union Square is the kind of neighborhood that is great for those who are just passing through and better for those who are in-the-know.

There are lineups all over the place for Coachella so you don’t need me to tell you who is playing at that Southern California music festival that’s drawing in the crowds this weekend.  But what you might not know or be able to find so easily online is that there are several San Francisco Bay Area bands that are representing us down there.  Yep, in a lineup filled with acts from more countries than I care to recount, the Bay Area has more than one voice.

Here’s a brief look at them:

• DJ Shadow – Bringing the DJ arts to another level.
• Kid Beyond – This electronic beatbox boy epitomizes unique modern approaches to music.
• Mike Relm – Psychedelic blues music, who could ask for anything more?
• Peeping Tom – With “experimental / ghettotech”, of course.
• The Coup – Taking seventies funk and merging it with right-now hip-hop, The Coup plays Coachella as part of a tour and won’t be performing in the city again until Rock The Bells late this summer.

There are going to be plenty of acts to see throughout the three days of Coachella, but if you’re heading down there, you should make sure to mark your line-up calendars with these five artists who are representing The Bay.

If asked to name the main street in San Francisco, a number of people would offer the automatic reply that it’s Market Street.  This isn’t entirely true but that’s only because San Francisco is a city filled with such distinct neighborhoods that there are multiple “main streets” in different sections of town.  Insofar as there can be a street that everyone kind of ends up at on a regular basis, Market Street is that street.

That Market is a main street is due in large part to the fact that it is the hub of much of the city’s transportation.  The BART trains and the MUNI lines which run underground are most easily accessible by heading to Market Street and picking one of the stations which are really only blocks apart.  The city’s famous F-line runs along Market Street.  The cable cars make their turnaround at the intersection of Market Street and Powell Street.  Numerous buses that lead towards all different areas of the city make stops along Market.  And taxis are easy to grab here.  And depending on where you’re coming from, if you’re planning to leave the city, you usually end up taking Market or crossing Market to get there.  It is the main vein that runs through the city in terms of transportation.

But Market Street is a street with many different personalities.  It passes through so much of the city, through so many different neighborhoods, that it is home to the craziest of characters, the most famous of local government officials and the plain janes that are taking care of their daily business.  Starting not too far from the Ferry Building on the bay, Market Street passes through the towering buildings of the Financial District and wends its way through a great deal of shopping.  You’ll pass some big stores including Old Navy and Ross, the multi-level Virgin Records, the name-brand bigger boutiques, and the Apple computer store which has the glass-like staircase and people parked at every gadget for trials.

Moving further towards the Pacific Ocean, Market Street will take you up towards the Civic Center, which is San Francisco’s government hub.  You’ll move past famous theaters and in to an area where strip clubs advertise “touch the magic” and porn stores flank cheap bars.  Then you’ll move into a more neighborhood-feel kind of place where there are piano karaoke lounges (Martuni’s for example) and local record stores.  In the mid-Market area, you come across a budding artsy neighborhood which is currently being called “The Deco Ghetto”.  Moving up in to Upper Market, you start to get into more of a Castro feel for life.  After Market hits Castro, it begins to become a winding road and eventually turns into Portola, taking you through residential parts of the city that you’d rarely visit as a tourist.

Just with this quick drive along Market Street to this area, you’ve seen the edges of a number of the places which make up San Francisco as a city. It may not be a “main street” in the traditional sense of the word, but Market Street is the portal to a number of San Francisco neighborhoods and the one street you need to know if you’re going to be trying to get around the city without a car.