While I have been to San Francisco many times now, but I didn't have any photograph of City Hall which was good enough motivation to plan a visit during my recent trip. During one of the weekends, we walked around the city and started with a round of City Hall and the Institute of Arts, which is just in front of City Hall. This post shares some tips to plan a visit to City Hall, what all you can do around this beautiful building and things to be cautious about.
This time, I planned to walked around the city and for the whole day, we didn’t use any kind of transportation. Our first plan was to visit City Hall and then head towards Lombard street before our final destination around Pier-39. We walked towards City Hall from San Francisco Caltrain station. It was a Sunday and we realized that farmer’s market is also setup near City Hall. We crossed through this farmer market and finally reached closed to this beautiful building surrounded with a few lawns and the play-areas for kids.
It was around 11am when we were at City Hall. While walking towards it, we came across various traffic light signals where we noticed group of people whose presence was little uncomfortable. We felt a little unsafe and would recommend to be cautious when you are walking around the streets of San Francisco, especially when you are visiting these place first time and following Google maps. I wish google maps were intelligent enough to tell you the safer streets to follow. If you are in a group and careful, there shouldn’t be much issue.
San Francisco City Hall is managed by government of City and County of San Francisco, California. The structure's dome is taller than that of the United States Capitol by 40+ feets. The present building replaced an earlier City Hall that was destroyed during the 1906 earthquake, which was two blocks from the present one. It was bounded by Larkin Street, McAllister Street, and City Hall Avenue , largely where the current Public Library and U.N. Plaza stand today.
There are few symmetrical groups of trees in front of San Francisco City Palace. There were no leaves in the month of feb but I was trying to imagine how beautiful they would look with hairs on top of their heads. There was some sort of lighting around these trees and probably the place looks even better in evening. There is always next time, but I will certainly not walk to this place in dark. San Francisco downtown is not very safe when it's dark, especially when you are not familiar with the place and walking alone or in smaller groups.
Above photograph shows an Art gallery where an Art show was going on and it was about south Asia. That sounded interesting and we spent 45 minutes watching various historical sculptures and creations from countries like India, Burma, Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand etc. There were some interesting details put on boards along with the art-pieces and these details increased our engagement at the exhibition.
We spent some time walking around the place and enjoyed it’s grandeur. Also, we went close to the area where kids were playing and it was impressive to see such great infrastructure for kids in public areas. Varun was imagining such places in India and how hard it would be to maintain them.
City Hall was closed on Sunday and that's why it was relatively peaceful. Last time I visited it during the weekday and it was very crowded.
It was a sunny day, so some of the folks were enjoying sun on this lush green grass. We were fresh by the time we visited City Hall, so we didn't made good use of these lawns. Towards the end of the day we spent some time around green lawns near Ghirardelli square on Pier-39.
Above photograph was clicked closed to the San Francisco City Hall. There is this fountain close to the Institute of Art and the place where farmer's market takes place during Sundays. Overall we had good day around this part of San Francisco City and then we headed towards Union Square as we wanted to visit Apple store for buying an iPhone.
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