Start the day with breakfast in the Garden Court of Trowbridge & Livingston’s spectacular 1909 Palace Hotel (Market at New Montgomery). Nearby is the Reid Brothers’ 1914 Call Building (74 New Montgomery) and the 1925 Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. Building (134 New Montgomery) by Miller and Pfleuger, one of the city's finest skyscrapers. Don't miss the exquisite bronze detailing in the lobby.

Willis Polk’s historic Jessie Street Substation (222 Jessie St.), designed in 1905, will be the new home of the Jewish Museum. The parking lot in front will be a plaza shared with the Mexican Museum, to be designed by Ricardo Legorreta, expected to open in 2006, and St. Patrick's Church (756 Mission), built in 1872 and rebuilt after the earthquake, one of the city's oldest churches. Note its Tiffany clerestory windows.

The gardens across the street at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission) are filled with public art such as Terry Allen's bronze "Shaking Man" and Huston Conway's Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Waterfall. The esplanade, completed in 1992 by MGA Partners with Romaldo Giurgola, sits on the roof of the expanded Moscone Convention Center, constructed in 1991 by Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum. Above the gardens are two outdoor cafes; stop for refreshments and view YBC’s contemporary architecture, including Zeum, an art and technology center, Sony’s Metreon, and, looming beyond, Mario Botta's magnificent Museum of Modern Art.

Walk down to the Embarcadero, which got a new lease on life with the removal of the elevated freeway damaged in the 1989 earthquake. Begin at A. Page Brown’s 1898 Ferry Building at the foot of Market, reopened in 2003 with restaurants, food shops and a farmers’ market three days a week. One block south is A.A. Pyle’s 1914 Agriculture Building, a Renaissance palazzo-style structure that once was the city's main post office. Across the street is the Audiffred Building (1-21 Mission), Hippolyte Audiffred’s 1889 tribute to his native France. The 1938 Rincon Center at Mission and Spear designed by Gilbert Underwood, also once a post office, contains remarkable WPA murals. Heading south toward the Bay Bridge, note Carl Werner’s 1924 YMCA Building (166 The Embarcadero) and the graceful, 1933 neo-Romanesque Hills Brothers Coffee Factory (2 Harrison) by George Kelham.

As you walk along the Embarcadero, note the Promenade Ribbon, a linear sculpture that eventually will extend 21/2 miles; the Historic Interpretive Signage Project of plaques and illustrated pylons; and the historic Liberty ship, the Jeremiah O'Brien. At Folsom St. is the new Rincon Park with “Cupid's Span,” a 60-foot sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen donated to the city by Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher. At Pier 40 is grassy South Beach Park and Mark di Suvero's 60-foot stainless steel sculpture “Sea Change.”

Rehabilitated into housing, the 1867 Oriental Warehouse (650 First St.) was the repository for goods shipped from the Orient. At the corner of Townsend and Second is Frederick H. Meyer’s 1920 Fire Department Pumping Station (698 Second St.). South Park, laid out in 1856 by George Gordon in the model of London residential crescents and leveled by the '06 quake, today is a quiet commercial and residential area. A few blocks away, at Fourth and King streets, is SBC Park, San Francisco’s new baseball stadium.

The Schmidt Lithography Co. at Second and Bryant and the plant across the street have been rehabilitated as the "Clock Tower" live/work complex. Note 85 Second St., a former Wells Fargo Express Building that survived the '06 earthquake. Return to the Palace Hotel for "tea" in the Garden Court.
Catch the historic F-Line trolley on Market. At Seventh St. and Mission is the 1905 U.S. Court of Appeals Building designed by James Knox Taylor. Albert Pissis’ now-empty 1892 Hibernia Bank Building (Jones, Market and McAllister) is the city's oldest surviving bank building in a strictly classical revival idiom.

The Civic Center, with its beaux-arts symmetrical layout, expresses San Francisco's consciousness of its position as THE metropolis of the West Coast at that time. Buildings include: Arthur Brown Jr.’s 1936 Federal Building; George Kelham’s 1917 Old Main Library, now home of the Asian Art Museum, renovated by Italian architect Gae Aulenti; the new Main Library, designed by James Freed & Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris in 1996; John Galen Howard, Frederick Meyer & John Reid Jr.’s 1914 Bill Graham Civic Auditorium; Bliss & Faville’s 1922 State Building; and Hood Miller’s 1997 Court House.

Facing the plaza is City Hall, the highest expression of the beaux-arts City Beautiful Movement in the nation, designed by Bakewell & Brown in 1915. Facing the Van Ness Ave. side of City Hall are Arthur Brown Jr. & G. Albert Lansburg’s 1932 Opera House and Veterans Building, and Davies Symphony Hall, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill in 1981.

Three public art installations grace the Main Library at Larkin and Grove: Alice Aycock's "Functional and Fantasy Stair, Cyclone Fragment," made of aluminum, painted steel, stainless steel and plaster; Nayland Blake's "Constellation," painted steel, mirrors and fiber optic lighting by Architectural Lighting Design and Ann Hamilton; and Ann Chamberlain's "Untitled," 50,000 hand-notated catalogue cards embedded in artisan plaster on the 3rd, 4th and 5th floor walls.

Moving with air currents and reflecting the changing light outside the library is Carl Djerassi’s 1982 gift to the city, “Double L Excentric Gyratory,” a stainless steel kinetic sculpture by American artist George Rickey.

"Constellation" at the Main Public Library

San Francisco City Hall

F-Line restored historic streetcar on Market Street