Travel to San Francisco – Amateur Traveler Episode 159 Transcript

page 2 of 15 of Travel to San Francisco – Amateur Traveler Episode 159 Transcript

Chris: And when we say Lands End, Lands End as I’ve just learned in this week’s episode of the Sparkletack, you used to have to get on a carriage and over a toll road to get out to see the Cliff House over there, so we’re way at the western edge of Golden Gate Park, for instance.

Richard: Exactly. It used to be that everything – well, used to be, there wasn’t much there at all – but it used to be that everything to the west of Van Ness Avenue was more or less sand dunes, and the city proper, when people talked about San Francisco, or Yerba Buena as it was called back in the day, they were talking about the northeastern quadrant of the city, and the rest of it was just mostly barren wasteland and they’d really never expected that it was even settleable, so the Cliff House out at Lands End, out at this far, far point, on some rocky cliffs overlooking the Pacific and some little islands out there, really seemed like the other end of the world. You still get that feeling a little bit when you drive out there.

What I like to do, is drive up along the Great Highway, which is the extreme West Coast, it’s a long flat straight boulevard, it drives past the Sunset District, it drives past the edge of olden Gate Park with those two beautiful old windmills out there, and the old – oh, what’s it called?

There’s a WPA Project building out there – the Beach Chalet, that’s full of WPA era, 1930’s era murals, there’s a little museum and gift shop there and a brew pub and restaurant upstairs. That’s a place I like to stop on the drive, and take people upstairs, have a grilled mushroom burger with avocado, or whatever they’re serving, a pint, and look out at the view, at the ocean, and enjoy the murals, the hand made, hand hewn beams, the ceramic dolphins or what have you that are stuck into the walls there, and just enjoy that spot. I understand that that building went through some hard times, as buildings often do, was a biker hang out and there was, you know, broken glass and graffiti – it was a place of ill repute for a good long time, but recently cleaned up, and it’s the great first stop.

Chris: That one I don’t know. I know the, when we say WPA, the Works Progress Administration from the New Deal, from FDR, I know the murals they did also in Coit Tower, are the ones that I’m more familiar with.

Richard: Exactly, yes. Same era, and, in fact, it’s a nice thing to bring up, because if you’re interested in that kind of thing – and who isn’t?! – there’s stuff like that tucked away really all over town, in fact, the murals from Coit Tower, I believe, were the first example of artists being hired by the Government to do work in the country. It was something that…

Chris: Oh, I didn’t know that, ok.

Richard: …a San Francisco artist, whose name escapes me, somebody will remember and comment on the Post probably, had been down in Mexico with Diego Rivera, and had seen what the Mexican Government was doing in getting artists involved with governmental projects, and he thought, “Hey, this is something that could work out where I’m from.”, and he ended up being responsible for importing Diego Rivera and Freda Kahlo to the 1939 World’s Fair out at Treasure Island, and there’s some art that Diego did out there, that is now at City College. The work that he actually painted in front of people, a giant mural, is now on display at City College in San Francisco, and that’s something that anybody can visit as well.

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