If you can get past the bourgie factor and/or you work down the street like I do, you will come to love this place. It has some of the best food in the city, a Blue Bottle coffee, and an observation deck from which you can watch the ferries come and go, emitting their weird beeps and disgorging tourists. The people who work here are great too (whether or not I dated a baker from the Acme Bread kiosk because of a Craigslist missed connection will be left to history).

Many galleries and events and a restaurant

Some areas of San Francisco are so steep that the sidewalk literally is a stairway; other times it’s just more interesting to have a stairway between streets… or a slide. I once saw a grown man with a briefcase matter-of-factly go down this slide and continue on his way down the hill. Why not?

You have a lot of hills to choose from in San Francisco but in my opinion the best (and most varied) views are from Bernal Hill. Bonus: from my kitchen table I can watch tiny blobs moving around on this hill-- slow blobs are people, fast blobs are dogs.

One day when I was walking around in the hills behind my house, I happened upon this bizarre street. It was as though someone had taken postmodernism and tried to make it into a block of houses. Each one has its own internally complete theme, involving strange colors and sculptural elements attached to the outside walls (gold eggs, wisps of wrought iron). This led me on subsequent walks to name them: the Corbusier House, the Barn, the Preschool Blocks house, the House of Wicca… and so on.