Personal Posts by Gaelen Gates

After living in the Bay Area for 33 years, I’ve entertained a lot of guests, so I thought it would be helpful to make a list of ideas for out-of-towners. I’ll try and update this with new ideas when I get them. A Google Doc with links in it can be found here, the links didn’t copy over when I cut and pasted it.

• San Francisco City Guides do donation-based walking tours all over the city, you can find the schedule here. They are run by a non-profit and the guides are volunteers, they are usually very good.
• Rent a bike and ride over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, have lunch, take the ferry back (you can bring the bike on the ferry). You can also just take the ferry both ways.
• You can also just take the ferry round trip to any destination, it has really nice views of the bay. It’s public transit so it is relatively cheap.
• Take a one-hour Bay Cruise that goes around the Bay for sightseeing and has better views than the ferry.
• Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. If you have a car, it’s much easier to drive to the Marin side and park there. Check the website because the parking lots are sometimes closed.
• Visit the Clare-Lilienthal House to see a Victorian mansion preserved with period-appropriate decor. You have to join a guided tour, they only take place on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
• Musee Mechanique has a unique collection of vintage, coin-operated mechanical games.
• Go to the SF Museum of Modern Art, eat lunch in Yerba Buena Gardens if the weather is nice.
• Visit the Legion of Honor for mostly 16th-20th century European paintings and sculpture in a beautiful building.
• The Exploratorium is more kid-oriented and has hands-on science displays that are really interesting.
• I haven’t personally been to the Walt Disney Museum (run by his family) in the Presidio, but I know it’s popular.
• Rent a bike and ride through Golden Gate Park along JFK Promenade from east to west, then south through Sunset Dunes Park. Stop at the Rose Garden and the Bison Paddock along the way.
• There are a lot of beautiful mosaic tile staircases that aren’t necessarily worth seeking out on their own, but check to see if one is nearby a place you are already visiting. If you visit the one in Glen Park, the Burnside mural and stairs, see if you can find the tile with our names on it (for donating to the project!).
• Visit the beautiful plant collection at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park.
• Take the ferry to Alcatraz. Note that the ferry tickets must be booked a few weeks in advance.
• The two best places for views in the city are Twin Peaks and Bernal Hill. Twin Peaks can be a pain to get to if you don’t have a car. Bernal Hill is closer and accessible via multiple bus lines, and you can check out the cute neighborhood of Bernal Heights on Cortland Ave. Stop in the backyard of Wild Side West for a drink in the early evening.
• Riding in a GoCar (little open-air motorized trike) is pretty fun. They do guided tours, or you can go on your own with a GPS-guided route.
• Walk south down Valencia Street in the Mission for shopping and look at the murals in Clarion Alley, turn east and walk down 24th Street, with detours along Balmy and Orange Alleys for more murals. Dolores Park is great for people-watching if the weather is nice.
• Walk along the Land’s End Trail for spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge.
• Visit the Cable Car Museum.
• Have lunch at The Ramp in Dogpatch, then walk through Crane Cove and Bayfront Parks. There is some nice shopping walking south along 3rd St.
• Walk up the Filbert Steps to Coit Tower and then check out the WPA murals inside. If you want, watch the documentary “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” which is about the origins of our little green parrots and the original home in the area.
• Go roller skating at the Church of 8 Wheels.
• Visit the historic ships at Hyde Street Pier.
• Walk along the Embarcadero and stop at the Ferry Building for lunch.
• Check out the sea lions at Pier 39.
• Visit the California Academy of Sciences, where they have a walk-through butterfly aviary, a planetarium, and a good aquarium. They have 21+ nights 6-10pm every Thursday.
• Combine the Japanese Tea Garden with the SF Botanical Gardens, both are right near the California Academy of Sciences.
• If there is a special exhibit that interests you at the DeYoung Museum, it might be worth visiting, but the permanent collection isn’t that great.
• The Asian Art Museum has one of the largest and most extensive permanent collections of Asian art in the world.
• Walk around the North Beach neighborhood, which is “Little Italy.” The show “Dear San Francisco,” in a theater there, is supposed to be a very entertaining circus-oriented performance, but I’ve never been.
• Presidio Tunnel Tops Park has great views (and you can walk about 15 minutes to Crissy Field Beach, which does too, and you can watch people kite surfing).
• The Wave Organ is a cool acoustic sculpture out on a jetty, it has good views of Alcatraz and downtown.
• If visiting during Easter, the sunrise service at the giant cross on top of Mount Davidson is a popular experience.
• City Kayak does kayak tours of the Bay, which are fun if the weather is nice. They leave from along the Embarcadero near Oracle Park.

OUTSIDE OF SF

• You can do tandem paragliding from Mussel Rock Park (about 10 minutes south of the SF border), usually from around October through March/April.
• Companies do half-day bus trips to Muir Woods National Monument (about an hour north) to see the giant redwoods. Reservations for parking are required (and book up in advance) but walk-ins do not require reservations.
• There are companies that do one-day bus tours to Yosemite, but this is a LONG way (3+ hours by car), maybe desirable for people coming from out of the country.
• Filoli historic mansion and gardens is a beautiful place to visit, down Highway 280.

UNSOLICITED ADVICE

• DO NOT drive. SF is a pain in the neck to drive in, parking is impossible, and your car will get broken into. If you’re in the middle of a road trip, plan to store your car in a secure garage and use public transit to get around.
• Put the Clipper Card app on your phone, it can be used on all transit in the city.
• Avoid hotels west of Taylor St. downtown, and south of Market St. in the 6th-9th St. area. There are some cheaper hotels there, but the area is pretty grungy. Not unsafe, but you will see a lot of homeless people and drug use. For more affordable hotels, stay near the airport (or anywhere to the south within walking distance of a BART station) and take BART into the city. It’s very quick and trains run frequently.
• San Francisco is cold and windy all the time, especially in the summer. Nicest weather is March-early May and Sept.-Oct., but it’s never that warm. It’s always cold at night.

Yesterday we attended the last day of the FOG Design+Art Fair at Fort Mason, sort of a mini-Art Basel bringing together gallerists from around the world for an incredible sampling of current and emerging artists. I was a bit skeptical of the $40 entrance fee because I’m cheap, but it was well worth it, and we’ll be back next year. A sampling of some of the works that caught my attention are below.

Paintings by Sesse Alangwe:

Fiber works by Sheila Hicks, who currently has an exhibition at the SFMOMA:

“Woman with Ice Cream Cone” by Kota Ezawa, which is painted on 4 panels to create a 3-dimensional look:

A giant photograph of the ALICE CERN particle accelerator, similar to one that Adam worked on in grad school (here he is posing with the photo):

A series of drawings painted over photographs of hands, tiled “Cat’s Cradle #6,” by Asher Liftin:

Three-dimensional pieces incorporating leather and velvet, by April Bey:

Beautiful portraits made with machine stitching by Gio Swaby:

A diptych titled “In the Cut” by Lisa Jo:

Smaller works by Ruth Asawa:

I know I’m in the minority, but I liked the center-running bike lanes on Valencia, and I was always worried the parking protected bike lanes weren’t going to work because of the significant amount of bike traffic during the morning commute. Unfortunately, I have turned out to be right.

The main issue with the parking-protected bike lanes is that they’re too narrow. During the morning commute (8 to 9, approximately), there are a lot of bikes going north on Valencia, and they’re a mix of “regular” bikes, the clunky rental e-bikes, and regular e-bikes. All three of those move at markedly different speeds, and when we’re all trying to get to work, we can’t just all choose to move at the slowest speed in the group. That means bikes have to pass each other quite a bit.

Most sections of the lanes are too narrow to pass safely, and even when passing in the wider sections, there is a significant contingent of men on road bikes who get aggressive when passed. That means the only opportunity to pass is at intersections, where to do so you basically have to swerve out into car traffic coming from multiple directions.

To make things worse, when everyone is stopped at the light, rather than just letting the e-bikes wait in front so they can get out of the way, some non e-bike riders will insist on getting out in front of the e-bikes, forcing everyone to execute the difficult passing maneuvers again. I found myself going as fast as I possibly could just to stay ahead of the people I had already passed, which makes it more dangerous if some clueless pedestrian wanders into the bike lane on their way from the sidewalk to their car without looking, which happens at least once a day and is another problem with the parking-protected bike lanes.

With the center-running lane, the north and south directions were side-by-side, so you could clearly see if it was safe to pass by briefly moving into the opposite-direction bike lane. As an added bonus, there were almost never pedestrians blithely wandering into the bike lane without looking.

This is all less of a problem during the evening commute, when people tend to leave work at different times, so the lanes are not as crowded. So my new route is to add about 8 minutes to my commute and take Cesar Chavez to Folsom in the morning, then return home on Valencia in the evening.

I’m always shocked when someone who lives in San Francisco tells me they’ve never been to the Alemany Farmers' Market. It’s the biggest, cheapest, and most fun farmers' market in the city. I haven’t been to one anywhere in the Bay Area that compares.

You can find every fruit and vegetable that’s in season, and discover new varieties you’ve never heard of – the one that was new to me today was the “Snow Leopard Melon.” Vendors are often happy to talk about what they have on offer and give you a free sample.

It takes place every Saturday morning, year-round, and is usually still selling until around 1pm. Late-comers have slimmer pickings, but can often get fantastic discounts as farmers try to unload the remainder of their stock that would otherwise have to be thrown into the trash or trucked back to the farm.

In addition to fruits and vegetables, you can get fresh bread, eggs, mushrooms (the generous bag of “ugly” Lion’s Mane for $20 is a steal!), orchids and other plants, cut flowers, fresh juice, honey, and olive oil. It’s worth a trip, even if you don’t live nearby, although DO NOT drive unless you plan to park several blocks away and walk over. The parking lot and intersection right in front of the market are a disaster if you’re in a car. The 23, 24, 8, 44, and 67 bus routes all stop nearby, and there is plenty of bike parking near the bathroom building.

Back in the Before Times — and this time I’m talking about back before the turn of the millennium — we used to have bike messengers downtown (San Francisco, but I assume most other cities).

In the 80s and 90s, it used to be considered a relatively punk job, if you had to have a job. Your typical bike messenger had a lot of tattoos, a non-conforming haircut, and was kind of an asshole. Different groups had their own zines. They helped get Critical Mass off the ground. Some of them rode fixies. They ran red lights and sometimes rode on the sidewalk. They were almost all male. I’ve dated more than one person who used to be a bike messenger. It was… a type.

You used to see them zipping all over the city, and at lunch time, congregating in a few specific places, like that building that used to be a Shaper Image (the photo below is from foundsf.org):

This was back in the day when many documents required “wet-ink” signatures, and part of the job of any law firm’s staff was calling up a bike messenger to have documents delivered several blocks away. It was an essential service.

But then then the use of Docusign became widely accepted, even with financial services companies and other old-school holdouts. There was a pandemic. Electric mopeds became available and affordable. Here in 2025, I no longer see bike messengers downtown (or at least, they’re not congregating in places where I might see them).

What I do see is a lot of people on electric mopeds with the square boxes on the back. I believe they’re mostly delivering food. They don’t seem to hang out together or have a culture, although they do still run red lights and ride on the sidewalk.

Part of my desire to re-start a text blog was to write down things that might be forgotten by history, that I personally experienced. So that’s what this post is, I guess. I was there when bike messengers were cool.

UPDATE: It appears the San Francisco Chronicle has picked up on this too.

The Olmec were an ancient civilization in Mexico that thrived from around 1200-400 BCE. They were one of the first major civilizations in the region, and are considered the mother culture of many later cultures, including the Maya and Aztecs.

They also made giant stone heads. I’ve always been a big fan of the modern-made example located at the City College of San Francisco, which is near our house, and which I run or walk the dogs past several times per week.

This one is called “El Rey” and was made by Maêsiro Ignacio Perez Salano in 2004.

It’s been a prominent landmark in my life for almost a decade. One of my favorite times was when someone put a mask on it at the beginning of COVID!

Anyway, the school is in the process of demolishing the Diego Rivera Theater, to which “El Rey” sits adjacent. It was cool a few years ago watching them move the giant “Pan-American Unity” mural out of the theater and into the SFMOMA, so I wasn’t too surprised when one day I saw them wrapping up “El Rey.”

Pretty soon they had moved it off its pedestal and onto a flatbed trailer. I was bummed to say goodbye to it!

But the good news is that it was only moving across Frida Kahlo Way, to its new home at the recently-completed CCSF STEAM building!

For some reason, as of this morning, it has been re-covered by a tarp, maybe in preparation for a formal grand unveiling. At any rate, I’m glad I’ll be able to look upon this friendly face again soon!

I bike to work on my fantastic Gazelle Arroyo C5 ebike, which I love, and my commute involves riding the length of Valencia Street. Unlike a lot of people, I actually like the center bike lane, primarily because it makes it much easier to co-exist with acoustic bikes. Side-running bike lanes are often too narrow to feel like I can pass safely, but with the wider center lane, there are plenty of breaks in traffic from the other direction to allow me to pass.

But I digress. The people who disliked the center bike lane have succeeded in getting the city to switch to side-running, parking-protected bike lanes. Which is fine! But right now, SFMTA has completely BLOCKED the center lane, preventing bikes from using it, before creating the side lanes.

This creates a fun phenomenon I call “Every Day is Critical Mass!” The bikes are mixed right in with the cars, which feels like it should be more dangerous, but which I actually prefer. Because the acoustic bikes max out at 12-13mph (and the lights are timed anyway), and the cars can’t pass them, the entire flow of traffic is limited to that speed.

This has sufficiently annoyed drivers that I’ve noticed there are fewer and fewer cars on Valencia. It’s mostly just bikes, and I’ve noticed pedestrians even wandering out into the street more. I took this on my morning commute:

Which brings me around to the title: This is great! We could have this forever, a beautiful, vibrant, car-free Valencia. It would be wonderful. We could add benches and other features. Food trucks in the middle. It could become a hub of activity, like the ones in Montreal. The merchants will of course whine and complain, even though it will increase their business, but if they live in San Francisco they can take it up with their elected representatives, and if they don’t live in San Francisco they can STFU because it’s actual residents who should guide city planning.

I know it will never happen. But it’s so obvious that it should. Take a ride on Valencia in the next couple weeks and experience it for yourself!