234 San Francisco, CA: Beats

San Francisco is associated with Beat poets, and their flagship bookstore City Lights is still here. Some Beats claimed a Hopper influence. San Francisco is also associated with gay culture. I passed several shops where I could have bought a bridle similar to the one in Bridle Path.

I took an architecture tour to see the best sampling of this town's many Hopperesque homes. Hopper was 22 and just out of art school the year of the great San Francisco earthquake, 1906, that created room for such houses. Many of its old Victorian houses were built in New England and then shipped here around Cape Horn. The tour started from the Hopperesque Haas-Lilienthal House. . A nearby apartment building proclaimed itself "…an attitude not an address." Real estate is a major economic force here, where the attractive topography and weather attract people. From gold rush through banking to venture capitol dot-coms, San Francisco has never had much in the way of industry. It's not a very urban urban center; not Hopperesque in that way.