The Monkey visits one of the most-photographed views of San Francisco, from Alamo Square Park toward the 1890s Victorian homes of Steiner Street (nicknamed Postcard Row) with the backdrop of the San Francisco skyline.
This area was also home to the fictional Tanner family of U.S. television's sappy sweet Full House. Check out the Monkey's photo with the cast in the Fake Monkey pictures section.
The Monkey uses his natural climbing abilities to pose for a photo atop a street sign on Russian Hill. The North tower of the Golden Gate Bridge is visible in the distance. Impressive panoramas are not hard to come by given the quantity of hills within the city limits.
Less than two and a half kilometers from the shores of San Francisco lies Alcatraz Island. Positioned in the middle of San Francisco Bay, the site was first built up in the 1850s as a U.S. military base. Surrounded by cold water with strong currents and the occasional maneating shark, it quickly became clear that the military base would make for a good prison. Confederate soldiers from the Civil War and Native Americans captured during the U.S. expansionist wars were among the first unfortunate souls to end up behind bars here.
Later, in 1933 the Department of Justice inherited the island from the army and began constructing the maximum security prison that earned the nickname "the Rock." Designed as a super-prison for the Depression era's worst criminals, the only redeeimg feature of the prison for its inmates was the view of freedom in nearby San Francisco (not dissimiliar to the closer view below right). Among the 1545 inmates that served time in Alcatraz were the Chicago Mafia boss Al Capone, bootlegger/bankrobber/kidnapper George "Machine Gun" Kelly, murderer Robert Franklin Stroud (whose research into birds, though not at Alcatraz, earned him the moniker "the Birdman of Alcatraz") and robber/kidnapper Alvin Karpis, who ran with the Ma Baker gang immortalized by 1970s disco stars Boney M. A famous political prisoner was Morton Sobell, who was tried alongside Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the McCarthyite witch hunts of Communists during the 1950s. Of the 36 prisoners to attempt escape, all were believed to be unsuccessful, being either shot and killed, drowned, recaptured, or unaccounted for.
Among the unaccounted for escapees were three inmates who did make it out of the prison and off the island in 1962 (whether they survived the swim to the mainland is unknown). At any rate, the fact that three inmates did escape the security apparatus highlighted the degraded condition of the prison, leading to its closure that same year. With the island abandoned, it seemed to drift into myth until a number of Native American activists, citing a law that allows unused federal land to be siezed by indigenous peoples, occupied it on three separate occasions, in 1964 and twice in 1969. The occupiers demanded a title to the land, and that a Native American university and cultural center be set up there. After a 19 month stand-off, a force of federal agents stormed the island and arrested the activists. The occupation was successful in raising public consciousness of Native American grievances, which led the federal government to turn over other lands to a variety of Native American groups. Today, Alcatraz Island is administered by the National Parks Service, with the prison now a museum.
Another view from Russian Hill, near the street sign above. Here the Monkey can see the protected harbor of the Aquatic Park with its tall ship. The island in the distance is Alcatraz (more on that at left).
The Monkey gets to grips with game at the Musée Mécanique at Fisherman's Wharf. At this hands-on museum you can play with a number of antique games and musical toys.
The Monkey at the epicenter of the 1960s counterculture mecca—the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco. Developed from the late 1870s as a middle-class suburb of connected to the city center by a cable-car, "the Haight" was hard-hit by the Depression, with many residents leaving the area. This led to low rents that attracted a young, bohemian crowd in the late 1940s and 1950s. Setting up bookshops and cafés, the community began to blossom, reaching its zenith (perhaps) in the mid-1960s with the explosion of the counterculture, that loose grouping of hippies, students, anti-war activists, civil rights campaigners, gays, feminists, and others of a roughly leftist bent who made the Haight their unofficial capital.
The Haight's psychedelic music scene, with local acts like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and Texas transplant Janis Joplin, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, the liberated, free love attitude and the consumption of LSD all culminated in the 1967 Summer of Love and its Human Be-In in nearby Golden Gate Park.
Since then, the Haight has seen its Victorian homes bought up and gentrified, the AIDS crisis has put a damper on free love, a Gap store has opened at the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, and the hippies have cut their hair and become online stock traders. But despite all that, the old neighborhood still has its charms.
The Monkey enjoys the view back toward the city from one of the piers that encircle the Aquatic Park.
Schleppie uses his chameleonic powers to blend in with a rock, while the Monkey wears a flower in his fur to celebrate the fact that he's gone to San Francisco. That rock is red franciscan chert, and used to be at the floor of the ocean! This view, from the windy hill known as Corona Heights, looks toward downtown over the Castro district, arguably the gay and lesbian capital of the world.
From the 1970s onward, San Francisco's tolerant attitudes helped foster the blossoming gay scene in the city, with its bookstores, bars and bathhouses. The wild times of the 1970s that put San Francisco's scene at the center of the gay map were stifled by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and today the community is still coping with the health crisis. The Castro-based Names Project has been a leading agitator on behalf of the victims of HIV/AIDS, continuing to remind a forgetful public and government officials that "AIDS is not over." See Grace Cathedral on the next page for a discussion of its famous AIDS Quilt.
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