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We recently discovered San Francisco City Guides' free walking tours last fall, which have been around for 30 years. They offer seasonally-themed tours throughout the year, including their annual Scavenger Hunt in the fall, as well as regular tours in various neighborhoods every day of the week.
Check out what tours are going on today and this weekend on San Francisco City Guides' front page. We're dying to check out City Scapes And Public Places, which happens every Friday at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. And we're sure Gold Rush City is quite fascinating too.
There's a whole slew of tours happening over the weekend, including Mission Murals, Coit Tower Murals, Landmark Victorians of Alamo Square, and Japantown, Urban Renewal and Fillmore Jazz on Saturday. Sunday's walks include Theatre in San Francisco, Castro: Tales of the Village, Downtown Deco, and Golden Gate Bridge.
If you've been on any of the tours, let us know how they are!
We checked out the Nob Hill tour a few months ago, and learned all about the history of the railroad tycoons. Read more about it after the jump!
We discovered that the Mark Hopkins mansion had a whole cistern of water that no one knew about, which could have saved Nob Hill during the fires of the 1906 earthquake. We also learned about the feud between Charles Crocker and Nicholas Yung, an unassuming German undertaker, who wouldn't sell Crocker his house next to Grace Cathedral. Crocker had wanted to own a whole city block, and this guy kept messing with him, so Crocker built a 40-foot fence around the poor guy's house. There are two granite slabs on the sidewalk that mark where the fence was.
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A *free* walking tour? You mean, they won't charge me for ambling around in public places?
Awesome, I'm going on a walk.
I went on one of their tours recently. It was a tour of the former sites of brothels in the financial district. I enjoyed it, although that one didn't involve a whole lot of walking.
Benw, there's no need to be so mean and snide about such a great SF resource.
Feel free to wander around public places on your own. But if you join one of the SFCG tours, at least be gracious enough to acknowledge that the Guides are volunteers who spend hours & hours doing research at the library about their neighorhood so that their tour can be as fun and informative as possible.