Editor’s note: There are no secret places, secret spots, or secret sights in San Francisco. All the city’s outdoor places, spots, gems, treasures, stairways, parks, gardens, and POPOS have not only been written about, they’ve been written about over and over. Want proof? Google “secret san francisco places” and set aside the entire day to tally up the dozens of redundant citations.
So my new periodic column in The Frisc — Get Out Now! — is not about San Francisco secrets. Instead, it’s about outdoor places you may have heard about but have probably never visited. For locals, these are three-star destinations, to use the classic formula pioneered by Michelin Guides. That is, if you live here in the second most densely populated city in the U.S. (after New York), the outdoor places I write about really are “worth a special trip.”
So consider this an urgent text message. I’m in your face shaking you by the shoulders, shouting, “Three stars! Three stars! Check it out!” The good news: If SF is home, you can make these pilgrimages to outdoor awe and delight without ever leaving town.
San Franciscans and tourists alike flock to wee Telegraph Hill, and who can blame them? That mini-mountain may rise just 284 feet above sea level, less than a third as high as Mount Davidson — at 925 feet, the city’s loftiest peak — but Telegraph is adjacent to hopping North Beach, practically on the shore of our resplendent bay, and boasts a booster in stately Coit Tower, which adds 210 feet to the summit.
Unlike most so-called “luxury” condos claiming “panoramic views,” Telegraph Hill offers the real thing: From the tower, you can gaze in every direction, 360-degrees around, the true meaning of panoramic. Plus, it’s got WPA murals and the Filbert Steps. No question: Celebrity Telegraph Hill deserves its enduring fame.
In contrast to Telegraph, it’s the rare visitor who has heard of Tank Hill. And though the name may be vaguely familiar to most San Franciscans, few locals have actually bothered to check it out for themselves. This, friends, is a regrettable error of omission.
For as its neighbors and farther-flung cognoscenti like me know, Tank Hill is easily accessible on foot, quintessentially San Franciscan, and simply stunning. At 650 feet, the peak — more accurately, the eastern end of Clarendon Heights — is smack dab in the middle of the city; often empty; offers breathtaking, even dizzying, views; and has a story to tell about water, war, and beloved open space in our teeming burg.
The views are commonly described as “bridge to bridge,” but this doesn’t do them justice. In fact, they extend from the open Pacific beyond the Outer Richmond to Bayview Hill, that stand-alone knob near Candlestick Point in the southeast corner of the city.
All told, this 227-degree arc takes in the jutting coast of Point Reyes, Point Bonita, the Marin Headlands, Mt. Tamalpais, Angel Island, the towers of downtown, the East Bay Hills, at least a dozen San Francisco neighborhoods, and yes, both the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Of course, there are other gobsmacking vantages in our topographically rich town, but people! Why not collect them all?
Tank Hill’s sweeping vistas are reason enough to visit, but its close-ups of adjacent neighborhoods are also compelling, letting you (naughty voyeur!) peer down into private realms of invisible-from-the-street roof decks, back-of-building stairways, and fenced backyards.
Cole Valley, at the foot of Tank Hill’s north slope — more like its north cliff — comes into vivid focus from this singular prospect. It’s a sweet, prosperous neighborhood, but also cloistered, tightly embraced on three sides by imposing ridges and promontories. Cole Hole might be a more apt name for this deep, taut, and tidy little district.
Ferries and mules
Tank Hill acquired its name in 1896 when the Spring Valley Water Company, the dominant supplier of “liquid gold” to the burgeoning city at the time, leveled most of the summit, poured a giant circular foundation, and built a large round tank to store drinking water.
As with most fast-growing cities, finding and delivering fresh water was an early and ongoing challenge in San Francisco. Just after the Gold Rush, Marin County was the main source, requiring an elaborate relay involving tank steamers to ferry water across the Bay and mule-drawn carts to deliver it to customers. That supply-constrained, labor-intensive solution could not last long in a city that grew almost tenfold in 40 years, from about 35,000 in 1850 to nearly 300,000 in 1890. (Passionate, always-informative local historian Gary Kamiya tells more of San Francisco’s early water story in a 2016 “Portals of the Past” column in the Chronicle.)
Tank Hill water came from another source, the northern Santa Cruz Mountains of San Mateo County. The Spring Valley Water Company pumped it to a then edge-of-town reservoir at Laguna Honda, and from there up to the new storage tank. The damming of the Tuolumne River and tragic flooding of magnificent Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite in 1923 soon consigned this system to a supporting role, but it was still functioning on the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Wasting no time, civil defense authorities all along the west coast took measures to protect infrastructure and key assets from the threat of enemy bombers. Among other precautions, San Francisco officials planted eucalyptus trees to camouflage the water tank, which was as conspicuous on the bare hilltop as a “kick me” sign on the back of an unsuspecting partygoer. The bombers never arrived, and in 1957, 12 years after the war ended, the city removed it. Today, the eucalypti and circular concrete foundation are all that remain.
Well, not all. Sixty indigenous plant and animal species call Tank Hill home. In the spring and early summer, visitors may find native wildflowers, including checkerbloom, wild pansies known as Johnny-jump-ups, Douglas iris, stonecrop, farewell-to-spring, and our state flower, California golden poppies. Kestrels and red-tailed hawks are frequently in residence, as well as western meadowlarks, alligator lizards, and other birds, reptiles, small mammals, and insects.
Tank Hill’s most reliable, durable, and impressive natural feature, however, is the jagged outcrop of Franciscan chert that frames views on the northern edge of the site. Chert may be a prosaic monosyllable, but this sedimentary rock boasts an anything-but-prosaic natural history.
The story begins with radiolaria, marine plankton that have lived and died by the gazillions in deep ocean waters for hundreds of millions of years to the present day.
Their microscopic skeletons, falling constantly to the ocean floor, created a sediment that over the eons geologic forces have thrust into our drier realms. According to the National Park Service, Bay Area chert may have originated in the north equatorial upwelling zone at the latitude of present-day southern Mexico between 100 and 200 million years ago. Seen under a microscope, the mineral skeletons of radiolaria, composed mainly of silica, are beautiful: lacy, lovely, and slightly bizarre, like antique Chinese ivory puzzle balls.
Deal of the century
The city of San Francisco bought Tank Hill and the entire Spring Valley Water Company in 1930 as part of its initiative to create the San Francisco Water Department. In 1960, three years after the tank came down in 1957, the city sold the site as surplus property for $230,000. Following construction of an entire neighborhood in lofty Diamond Heights nearby in the 1960s, developers proposed building 20 houses on Tank Hill in the following decade.
By then, however, the pendulum had swung. San Franciscans were much less inclined to accept diktat from City Hall and the monied interests that dominated local politics. Too much had already been lost, including the Embarcadero under the shadow of a double-decker freeway in 1958, since liberated by the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989, and the biggest Victorian neighborhood in the city, the Western Addition, through massive and now much regretted redevelopment in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
Public consciousness was changing beyond the city’s borders, too. In 1968 the federal government established Redwood National Park in response to decades of public lobbying, helping save the last five percent of old-growth coast redwoods in California. State voters in 1972 approved the California Coast Commission Initiative to protect the state’s seaward edge from rampant development.
Closer to home, San Franciscans passed Proposition J, the Open Space Acquisition and Park Renovation Program, in 1975 to set aside a portion of property tax revenue to purchase open space, among other park-related purposes. In 1977 Tank Hill neighbors convinced the city to use Prop J money to buy it back from developers. Forty years later, the $650,000 allotted for this purpose — about $3 million in today’s dollars — is a contender for Deal of the Century.
There may be bipeds who would not be awed by the views, natural history, and multi-faceted story of Tank Hill. If you believe yourself to be one of them, you’re probably right. For everyone else, I repeat: Three stars — worth a special trip.
How to get there
There are two ways to reach Tank Hill, both requiring a steep but very short uphill walk on rustic wooden stairs or an unpaved single-track trail. The stairs aren’t hidden, but they are inconspicuous. Look for them on the south side of the hill just east of the intersection of Twin Peaks Boulevard and Clarendon Avenue, almost directly across from a street called Crown Terrace.
At the top of the stairs, continue walking northward, away from the stairs, till you come to the big round tank foundation. From there, you can see the jagged chert outcrop and other view perches. You can also ascend Tank Hill from the east end of Belgrave Avenue on the upper rim of Cole Valley. The trail begins where the street ends.