RON HENGGELER

Mile Rock, and the distant Point Bonita in the Marin Headlands as seen from Lands End in San Francisco

The Labyrinth at Lands End

The Labyrinth at Lands End is located on the windy and rugged northwestern edge of Lincoln Park, 15 minutes walking distance from the Palace of the Legion of Honor. The leveled cliff top where it resides was outfitted with huge cannon and anti-aircraft gun installations during World War II. The ruins of bunkers and pillboxes still dot the landscape all around Lands End. Parts of the Park Service utility road that winds its way along the cliffs at Land's End was originally the track-bed for Adolf Sutro's train in the late 19th century. The train delivered San Franciscans to the famous and much loved Cliff House and Sutro Baths. Nowadays, it is used by hikers, joggers, dog-walkers, raccoons, skunks, and coyotes.

The distant south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge as seen from Crissy Field in San Francisco's Presidio

One day if I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven, I’ll look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”

Herb Caen

“There is no stupidity great enough to ruin the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge. It has been the subject of terrible poetry and worse paintings, but it rises easily and grandly above the mundane, its towers poking through the fogs, natural and man-made.”

Herb Caen

Pelicans pass by the setting sun, with the distant Point Bonita as seen from the coastal cliffs near the Golden Gate Bridge

This is the season in which I like San Francisco best; although we’re normally a Californian city, there’s a certain dreamy quality to the place that’s often at odds with the matter-of-factness of sunny day after sunny day. After all, aren’t we supposed to be the cool grey city of love?

Laurel Wellman

“To a traveler paying his first visit, San Francisco has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.”

Friz Hugh Ludlow

You wouldn't think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at you shoes. . . The lobsters, clams, and crabs. Oh, Cat, what food for you. Every kind of seafood there is.

Dylan Thomas, in a letter to his wife, Caitlin

“When you drive in on a Sunday evening after a hot day in the country and catch that first glimpse of the white fog racing in shreds---as though torn from a giant Kleenex box! --- yes, flinging itself, Kleenix-like, through the cables of the world’s greatest if too narrow bridge, you know why you live here.”

Herb Caen

For all its contradictions. . . San Francisco remains a beacon, always with that dangerous streak of insanity, built in at birth.

Herb Caen

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane

“A city that is essentially gray, gray as the fog, the Rock, the bay and the hair of those who love it best.”

Herb Caen

On an average day, Golden Gate Park, aptly named, was home to 99 varieties of light. I counted them. I will mention a few--you can discover the others: the oblique light between eucalyptus leaves at sunrise. The light in the Garden of Fragrance, which is set up as a cornucopia for every sense but sight. The little chunks of colored light that fall on the ground between the light-thin profusion of orchids inside the Conservatory of Flowers. The light on the Hippie Hill, where the first Love-In was held. The light-turning-to-cloud in late afternoon as the Pacific breezes drive in the fog.

Andrei Codrescu

Pelicans and the distant Marin Headlands with the setting sun of the Summer Solstice 2015

“San Francisco is unique---a thing without a parallel, one that admits of no comparisons, for there is nothing like it in the histories of cities.”

William M’Collum, M.D.

Coming home from watching the sunset, we passed by The Holy Virgin Cathedral, also known as Joy of all who Sorrow. Located on Geary Blvd. near 27th Ave, it is a cathedral in San Francisco of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. It is the largest of the six cathedrals of that church which has over 400 parishes worldwide.