A kaleidoscopic tribute to San Francisco by a life-long Bay Area resident and co-founder of Salon explores specific city sites including the Golden Gate Bridge and the Land's End sea cliffs while tying his visits to key historical events. By the author of Shadow Knights. 30,000 first printing.

"[Nob Hill Gazette] contacted me and asked if I would write some articles for them on San Francisco history, and in August, 1998, "Bret Harte, and the Patronage of a Lady " was the first of those articles to appear in the Gazette pages. It is the first article in this work as well. Over the next fourteen years, the gazette has published fifty-five of my articles. With the editor's advice and guidance, there were historical pieces on authors, artists, merchants, philanthropists, neighborhoods, streets, and restaurants...stories in a periodical are usually ephemeral, so I have decided to select some of my favorite pieces and present them in a more permanent format with the addition of various graphics to enrich the prose" -- P. 5.

The critically acclaimed, national bestseller—a gripping story of the strife and tragedy that led to San Francisco’s ultimate rebirth and triumph. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, New York Times–bestselling author and Salon founder David Talbot tells the gripping story of San Francisco in the turbulent years between 1967 and 1982. The emergence of a diverse cast of characters—Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, Bill Walsh—ushered in a transformative new era in the city’s history. Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself—and then revolutionized the world. “An enthralling—and harrowing—account of how the 1967 Summer of Love gave way to 20 or so winters of discontent.” —The Washington Post “A sprawling, ambitious history . . . Talbot’s energetic, highly entertaining storytelling conveys the exhilaration of ‘60s counterculture as well as the gathering ugliness that would mark the city in the ‘70s.” —The Boston Globe “Exhaustive research yields penetrating character studies . . . In exhilarating fashion, Talbot clears the rainbow mist and brings San Francisco into sharp focus.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A gritty corrective to our rosy memories . . . enthralling, news-driven history . . . smart and briskly paced . . . I found it hard to put down.” —San Francisco Chronicle “An ambitious, labor-of-love illumination of a city’s soul, celebrating the uniqueness of San Francisco without minimizing the price paid for the city’s free-spiritedness.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Talbot presents gripping accounts of both crime sprees and football showdowns.” —Booklist

The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. Owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent. The Barbary Coast is the chronicle of the birth of San Francisco. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter’s Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.

Hundreds of public stairways traverse San Francisco's 42 hills, exposing incredible vistas while connecting colorful, unique neighborhoods, and veteran guide Adah Bakalinsky loves them all. Her updated Stairway Walks in San Francisco explores well-known and clandestine corridors from Lands End to Bernal Heights while sharing captivating architectural, historical, pop culture, and horticultural notes along the way. This revised and expanded edition has been thoroughly updated and includes two additional walks, new maps, and new color photographs. The two new walks presented are: The Blue Greenway Walking, a new history, which follows the Embarcadero and weaves along the present day contour of the Bay into the future parklands and new neighborhood of San Francisco; and Jazz Takes A Walk in the Sunnyside neighborhood where the undulating geology of San Francisco invites one to hear the dance in the walk. A comprehensive appendix lists every one of the City's 600-plus public stairways. Long-term residents and tourists alike have used the book for over 25 years to adventurously uncover San Francisco's unexpected details.

Reclaiming San Francisco is an anthology of fresh appraisals of the contrarian spirit of the city-a spirit "resistant to authority or control." The official story of San Francisco is one of progress, development, and growth. But there are other, unofficial, San Francisco stories, often shrouded in myth and in danger of being forgotten, and they are told here: stories of immigrants and minorities, sailors and waterfront workers, and poets, artists, and neighborhood activists-along with the stories of speculators, land-grabbers, and the land itself that need to be told differently. Contributors include historians, geographers, poets, novelists, artists, art historians, photographers, journalists, citizen activists, an architect, and an anthropologist. Passionate about the city, they want San Francisco to be more itself and less like the city of office towers, chain stores, theme parks, and privatized public services and property that appears to be its immediate fate. San Francisco is not alone in being transformed according to the dictates of the global economy. But San Franciscans are unusual in their readiness to confront the corporate agenda for their city.

The bestselling book from two prizewinning, critically acclaimed contemporary chroniclers of San Francisco-a rich, illustrated, idiosyncratic portrait of this great city. In Spirits of San Francisco, #1 bestselling Cool Gray City of Love author Gary Kamiya joins forces with celebrated, bestselling artist Paul Madonna to take a fresh look at this one-of-a-kind city. Marrying image and text in a way no book about this city has done before, Kamiya's illuminating narratives accompany Madonna's masterful pen-and-ink drawings, breathing life into San Francisco sites both iconic and obscure. Paul Madonna's atmospheric images will awe: his wide-angle drawings offer a new perspective on the “crookedest street in the world” and vistas across the city. And Kamiya's engaging prose, accompanying each image, offers striking vignettes of this incredible city: witness his story of “Dumpville,” the bizarre community that sprang up in the 19th century on top of a massive garbage dump. Handsome and irresistible-much like the city it chronicles-Spirits of San Francisco is both a visual feast and a detailed, personal, loving, informed portrait of a beloved city.