Hey! Watch where you’re stepping in San Francisco. You could be passing by the key to some fascinating history. Travel writer Rich Grant makes sure we don’t miss a thing.

Every day in San Francisco, tens of thousands of people step on them without any idea they are trampling on markers for one of the great city walking tours of the world.

Scattered throughout San Francisco are 170 bronze medallions, each about a foot and a half in diameter. They have been cemented into sidewalks along a curving 3.8-mile trail that traces the history of San Francisco, from its Gold Rush days to the great 1906 earthquake and beyond. Arrows on the markers indicate what direction you should head to find the next marker, which is usually about 200 paces farther on. It’s part history lesson, part treasure hunt, as you follow the trail passing the place the Gold Rush started, through Chinatown, along what was once San Francisco’s original coastline, and into neighborhoods filled some of the city’s best historical architecture. Along the way there are 20 historic sites, five museums, the faded exteriors of once elegant brothels and some great historic saloons to provide refreshment.

Like any good treasure hunt, you need a map.

You can download one for free, or better yet buy one for $9.95 through their site or at several bookstores they list. For someone new to San Francisco, the trail can show you one of the best ways to get around the city and visit all major sites with a minimum of time slogging up and down those infamous hills. Since the trail follows the old shoreline, much of it is level, connecting to historic cable cars or street cars to get you back to the starting point. For old hands who know San Francisco well, it’s still a fun way to reconnect with the city’s crazy history, discover some new bars, and learn a lot of trivia that will make you a hit at the next cocktail party.

Such as, why is it called the Barbary Coast Trail?

The story goes back to 1849, when hundreds of ships sailed ‘round the horn filled with prospectors eager to search for gold. The California Gold Rush was so great, that at one point, the population of San Francisco doubled every ten days with more than 600 ships docking in Yerba Buena Cove, right about where the Transamerica Pyramid is today.  

Many of the ship crews deserted, joining the prospectors in the mad rush to the hills. With no crew, ships were abandoned and left to rot along the shore. Others got a new crew in waterfront saloons by drugging unsuspecting patrons or physically knocking them out. Either way, the poor soul would wake up with a hangover on a ship bound for China. This processing of “shanghaiing” sailors became so infamous, that the San Francisco waterfront was compared to the Barbary Coast of Tripoli, a place known for centuries as a pirate den.

Sites you will find following the markers:

Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, 56 Ross Alley. Tucked into a side alley in Chinatown, and open seven days a week, this “factory” started in 1962 and still uses antique equipment to make up to 10,000 fortune cookies a day. Hot cookie dough is baked fresh on a cast iron rotating griddle wheel, then while still hot, carefully folded by hand with a fortune tucked inside. There are strawberry, chocolate and green tea flavored cookies, and they are happy to welcome visitors and show you how fortunes are made. Photos are fine if you tip $1 or buy some cookies (try some of them flat before folding  —  they taste a little different and are easy to carry around).

Old Ship Saloon, 298 Pacific Ave. Buried beneath this old brick building is the Arkansas, a three-masted bark sailing ship that grounded at this position in 1849. Two years later, an enterprising Englishman, Joe Anthony, cut a hole in the side of the ship and opened the Old Ship Ale House, selling as their sign said, “Gud, Bad and Indif’rent Spirits.”  By 1859, the above ground portion of the ship was taken down and a brick building constructed above the hull, keeping the name, the Old Ship Saloon. Until the 1900s, it was an evil shanghaiing den run by Henry Klee; in the 1940s, it was a bordello for GIs shipping off to the Pacific; and today, it is a gentrified bar for well-dressed young executives. But the sign on the east side still reads, “Old Ship Saloon, Henry Klee Prop.,” a small indication of the horrors that once befell young seamen who stumbled in here.

The Original Barbary Coast Shoreline in Hotaling Alley There’s a squiggly line down the alley between the Hotaling Buildings (463-445 Jackson St.) that designates the original shoreline of Yerba Buena Cove, the harbor of San Francisco when these buildings were constructed in the 1860s. Amazingly, the alley points directly at the TransAmerica Building, giving you a clear idea of how much of San Francisco is landfill.  

The surrounding neighborhood is one of the city’s oldest and most historic. Domenico Ghirardelli started his first chocolate factory here in 1857 at 415 Jackson; William Tecumseh Sherman worked at a bank at 498 Jackson before going east to fight in the Civil War; Mark Twain was among the many writers who worked in the 1852 Belli Annex building at 722 Montgomery Street; and heavy-weight champion Jack Dempsey once worked as a bouncer at the Comstock Saloon, (155 Columbus Ave.), a one-time rough sailor bar that opened in 1907 and still serves beer over the original wood bar. Trail markers walk you past all this, pointing out things like the bas relief of dancing nude nymphs that was the one-time front door of the Hippodrome, (555 Pacific Street), which, like most of the buildings here, was a saloon, dancehall or brothel.

Maiden Lane Coming off the east side of Union Square, now arguably the richest part of the city, this was formerly called Morton Street, and lined with wood shanties where prostitutes would hang out the street level windows, naked to the waist, and offer men the opportunity to touch one breast for 10 cents or two for 15 cents. The whole block burned to the ground in the 1906 earthquake and fire and in the clean up and gentrification of the city, was ironically renamed Maiden Lane.

The Wells Fargo History Museum Located on the site where Wells Fargo opened in 1852, the free museum is a hoot, with an original stagecoach. It took 24 days by stage to reach San Francisco from St. Louis! There are exhibits on the gold rush, stagecoach travel, the Old West, and Black Bart, the infamous highwayman who robbed California stagecoaches at least 28 times.

Vesuvio Café  255 Columbus Ave. It’s been called one of the top 10 bars in the world and is where Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Allen Ginsberg and thousands of other beats, hippies, artists, musicians and poets have hung out when not “on the road.” Today, it’s part museum, part art gallery, and 100 percent great bar, though there are as many tourists as beatniks. Even if it’s early for a beer, force yourself, just to see the walls lined with photos, quotes and art from the Beats, and share a bar stool with Jack. The alley outside is now named after Jack Kerouac and has murals and quotes. City Lights Booksellers & Publishers is next door. If you plan to continue your walk past this corner, City Lights can be as dangerous a place to enter as the old shanghaiing saloons. They welcome browsers and an hour or two can fly by quickly on their three floors of books.

The Largest Collection of Historic Ships in the U.S. For most of its history, San Francisco was above all else, a port, and this history is preserved at the Hyde Street Pier where there are six historic ships, including the largest floating wood vessel in the world, the Eureka, and the three-masted Balclutha, an 1886 sailing ship that appeared in the film Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable. The Balclutha sailed the 17,000-mile journey from California to Europe seventeen times. It’s great fun to walk the deck and stand behind the ship’s wheel, with the skyline of the city before you. Across the street at 499 Jefferson St., the Maritime National Historical Park Visitor Center is really a free museum with photos, maps, and three-dimensional exhibits that bring back the Barbary Coast. One huge map shows where more than 50 ships are buried under the streets of San Francisco. The trail markers continue along the waterfront to the often overlooked Maritime Museum, housed in a building that looks like a cruise ship complete with portholes for windows. Inside are model ships and huge blowups of historic sailing photos.

A Sour Dough Bread Museum Boudin Bakery is the oldest continuously operated business in San Francisco and has been making bread the same way since 1849, with flour, salt, water and a chunk of the original 1849 mother dough, a mixture of wild yeast and lactobacillus that can only survive in the fog-cooled climate of the bay. The resulting crusty bread with a chewy texture is an icon of the city. You can watch them shape the bread for free in their observation window, but more fun is to take the Bakery Museum Tour, which has a 40-foot catwalk above the production line and tells the history of the bread. In the early days, bread was delivered each morning door-to-door. Subscribers put a nail in their front door and the bakery delivery boys would slam the fresh loaf onto the nail. Louis Boudin saved the business in the 1906 earthquake by filling a bucket with mother dough and bringing it to safety. A gift shop and restaurant allows you to buy the bread in a variety of shapes – the most interesting being a turtle or a crocodile.

A 70-Year-Old Fish Story  
When Europeans came to San Francisco for the first time in 1776, they found Ohlone Indians living on the bounty of the bay, which teemed with oysters, shrimp, salmon, mussels and Dungeness crab. In the 1850s, Italian fishermen used small lanteen-rigged boats called “feluccas” to fish the bay, but as docks went in along the Barbary Coast, they were forced in the early 1900s to the current Fisherman’s Wharf area. Here, they switched to diesel-powered Monterey fishing boats, and by the 1940s they had overfished the bay. Commercial fisherman generally go outside the Golden Gate today.

Though Fisherman’s Wharf has become hopelessly touristy, the walking tour still takes you to some delights, including views of old Monterey fishing boats that date back to the early 1900s and the outdoor stalls where you can get fresh crab, shrimp and oysters.

Stop by the Alioto-Lazio fishery, (440 Jefferson St.). This third-generation, 70-year-old commercial fish operation is run today by women. They have huge tanks of live crab and lobster, and exhibits telling the history of fishing. You can also sign up for tours where they explain the fine art of catching crabs.

Another, more haunting stop along the Barbary Coast Trail is the Musee Mecanique, a free arcade filled with antique mechanical arcade machines that still work. Some of them are gruesome, featuring simulated executions, and many are nightmarish, such as Jolly Jack, a disturbing looking puppet who, for a quarter, fills the room with a 90-second belly laugh. It’s like walking into an episode of Twilight Zone.

Leave Your Heart in San Francisco
The Barbary Coast Trail offers a slight detour off its coastal route for a walk around Nob Hill. To get here, you ride the Hyde-Powell Cable Car line. Tony Bennett first sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in 1961 in the Venetian Room of the Fairmont Hotel, and for the singer’s 90^th birthday, he was honored with a larger-than-life statue in front of the hotel. The hotel was finished and almost ready to open in 1906 when the earthquake and fire struck. Everything around it burned to the ground, the but hotel survived with some minor structural damage, and opened a year later with a lavish party that featured 30,000 oysters and fireworks. The hotel became a testament that San Francisco would come roaring back from the fire and be better than ever, and the marble lobby is a must see to enjoy the room visited by every president since Howard Taft. The Barbary Coast Trail swings by other mansions and hotels on top of Nob Hill, before putting you back on the cable car.

Ride Museums in Motion
San Francisco has the largest collection of operating historic cable cars and electric streetcars in the world, each one a mini-museum in motion. Of course the cable cars were invented here in 1873 and are powered by a huge underground cable that spins at a constant 9 miles an hour. The car latches on to the cable with an underground grip that is like a giant pair of pliers and is pulled along. NEVER call a cable car a trolley!  A streetcar (or trolley) runs on rails and has trolley poles on the roof that reach up to draw power from overhead electric wires. San Francisco’s historic streetcar line reopened in 1995 using historic cars (some 100 years old) from Portugal, Italy, Australia, Japan and across the U.S. to run up and down Market Street and along the Embarcadero. Together, with the cable cars, they form an “iron triangle” that makes it possible to get around San Francisco from Union Square to the Ferry Building to Fisherman’s Wharf, all by historic rail. Since the Barbary Coast Trail is 3.8 miles one way, it is designed to intersect with the cable car and streetcar routes at numerous points, making it possible to ride the rails back to your original start point. And there’s no better way to end a historic hike around this city than clinging to the outside of a cable car as it rattles and clangs its way over the hills.   

Barbary Coast Tip:

Using CityPASS to Do the Barbary Coast Trail Although the Barbary Coast trail is a walking trail, it is 3.8 miles long basically in one direction. Several of the attractions it visits are reached by cable car and the trail is designed to use cable cars and street cars as part of the adventure. At $7 a ride, the cable car can get expensive. A better alternative is CityPASS, which gives you unlimited rides for three days on all the cable cars and historic street cars, allowing you to hop on and off as much as you like.

Along the walking tour route, CityPASS also includes a one-hour bay cruise from the Blue and Gold Fleet out to and under the Golden Gate Bridge; admission to the Bay Aquarium with its sharks and jelly fish; and admission to Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum filled with magnets, pendulums, mechanical inventions, and dozens and dozens of things that move when you press a button. The pass also includes a ticket to the California Academy of Sciences and discounts on bike rentals and other attractions. Best of all, you just flash the pass to ride the cable cars. To avoid lines, instead of catching the cable cars at the terminals, walk a block or two up and stand at a regular street station. The cars always leave room for street passengers. You may have to hang on to the outside, but that’s half the fun. There’s never much of a line for the historic streetcars.  CityPASS is $89 for adults, $69 for children 5-11 at www.citypass.com/san-francisco.

— Story and photos by Rich Grant

Hungry for more? Get some more ideas for where to visit when you’re in San Francisco here, and specifically in Chinatown. And, get Rich’s take on other historical parts of our country, in this article about George Washington.