Lonely Planet - San Francisco

8. Relive the sunmmer of love

It was the summer of 1965, maybe spring 1966, possibly October of 1967...as the saying goes, if you can remember it, you weren't there.

What witnesses can recall is that it was psychedelic, man, and people were giving it all away for free: music, love, food, truth, poetry and then-legal LSD. At some point the drugs got heavy, and so did the scene. As '60s Haight resident Hunter S Thompson said: 'With the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.' But like a very groovy tidepool, the Haight still has some love left in it. For decades, the Haight Ashbury Food Program has volunteering. Flowers are still left on the doorsteps of the Grateful Dead house and Hunter S Thompson's former abode, and there's free live music on the streets and at Amoeba Records. Collective eff orts still succeed here, including the Red Vic Movie House and Bound Together Anarchist Book Collective - and Green Party candidates are the incumbents.

There have been improvements since the '60s: the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics have helped kick tricky habits, there's free wireless at Coffee to the People, and although the Hippie Hill drum circle doesn't seem to have found rhythm 30 years later, no one seems to mind. Peace and love, people, peace and love.

9. Make your own great escape

Even before your ferry arrives on The Rock, you'll start plotting your getaway. The obvious gambit is laundry duty, and sneaking out in a load of sheets. But then what? If you're caught you'll get sent to solitary, a tiny cube where days are marked by a light shaft traveling across the wall. Or you'll be interrogated in the dungeon, using techniques only alluded to in the otherwise thorough Alcatraz audio tour.

Take off your headphones for a moment, and notice the sound of carefree city life traveling across the water. This is the torment that made perilous prison breaks and flying leaps into riptides worth the risk.

Makes you wonder about the people who chose to be here - prison guards and their families, but also the American Indian Movement activists who occupied the closed prison island from 1969-71 to protest US occupation of Native lands. The FBI eventually stormed the island, and in a later settlement the US government was obliged to open a museum on Alcatraz commemorating the protest. It's easy to miss at the dockside processing center, but the raised fist and 'Red Power' painted near the dock are unmistakable. Each Thanksgiving Day since 1975, an 'Un-Thanksgiving Day' ceremony has been held at dawn on Alcatraz by Native leaders and supporters who believe the best way to escape history is to confront it.

10. Discover your secret mission

Picture a neighborhood where you walk past dozens of murals to get to the corner store, where you walk right through another - and your school, your favorite takeout joint, even your garage door are works of art. The Mission has more than 200 murals, bringing vital living color to gritty city streets.

Legendary muralist Diego Rivera painted mural masterpieces in San Francisco in the 1930s and '40s, and reunited with his ex-wife Frida Kahlo here in 1940 - you'll notice the couple making cameo appearances in works by local muralists, giving credit where it's due.

The murals Rivera and his Works Project Administration?funded contemporaries created during the Depression were revolutionary in style and subject, risking public and corporate funding with monumental tributes to workers and bold critiques of big business.

Funding for such controversial art tapered off with the onset of WWII and the rise of McCarthyism - but in San Francisco, the muralmaking continued. In the 1970s, Balmy Alley became a site for sore eyes and inquiring minds, with works by muralist groups such as the Mujeres Muralistas (Women Muralists) and PLACA (meaning 'markmaking') challenging US policy in Central America. Today Precita Eyes restores these murals, commissions new ones by rising San Francisco artists, and leads tours that cover 75 Mission murals within an eight-block radius of Balmy Alley.

11. See Victorians gone wild

Can you blame turn-of-the century San Franciscans for wanting to bust out a little? They had influenza, fires, economic crashes and the 1906 earthquake to deal with - not to mention corsets and mustache wax. Yet as buttoned-up as ladies and gents of Victorian society appeared in public, their home decor reveals a Barbary Coast wild streak.

Today's real estate speculators consider Victorian tastes garish enough to bring down property values - hence most of the Victorian 'Painted Ladies' in swanky Pacific Heights have been repainted tame, saleable shades of white and taupe. But in the nonconformist Haight and the Castro, there are still many Victorians that stay true to their original outrageousness. Several houses around Alamo Sq Park feature lavish Victorian trimmings: high-contrast color palettes, stained glass windows, fish-scale shingles, gilded finials, and peaked roofs with carved wood 'gingerbread' trim. The famed Postcard Row on the east side of the park is cookie-cutter Victorian - for more outlandish Victorian photo ops, wander along the north side of the park and the blocks of McAllister and Golden Gate between Scott and Steiner.

Reproduced with permission from San Francisco Encounter ©2007 Lonely Planet Publications