Haas-Lillienthal details

My sincere thanks to the San Francisco Heritage and City Guides for saving this precious piece of the city’s history and for allowing visitors a look inside this beautiful late-Victorian era house. Here are a few images from my visit last month, giving just a small idea of the gracious living in one of the few mansions to survive the […]

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Atherton House

One of the historic homes I went searching for in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood was the Atherton House at 1990 California Street. I didn’t know anything about the house’s history, but that — and the scaffolding obstructing my view — didn’t stop me from admiring the place from the sidewalk. Built between 1881-1882, the house was added to the […]

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Church doors

If I had planned ahead better, I may have booked a tour of the inside of Grace Cathedral. This Gothic beauty sits atop Nob Hill in San Francisco. Despite its elaborate style, this church building is relatively modern; the earlier cathedral, built a bit lower down on the slopes of Nob Hill in 1862, was destroyed by fire in 1906. […]

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Ornate survivors

I have heard the story of San Francisco’s great earthquake and fire in 1906 countless times, but walking around certain parts of the city can still bring the history back to life in unexpected ways. Visiting the California Academy of Sciences in 2016, I entered the earthquake simulator and experienced first the shaking of the Loma Prieta quake in 1989 […]

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Worth stopping for

Our recent 5-day trip over to the Mendocino County coast didn’t exactly go according to plan. We had a series of things go wrong: heavy traffic both going and coming back, road construction all up and down Highway 1, gusty winds, and a bent rim on our rental car. But the trip wasn’t all bad. We took a drive north […]

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