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Well, you have to pick your Muni lines. I try to avoid the Mission Street buses, and dislike the always packed Geary lines. But I\u2019ve come to like the 24-Divisadero.<\/p>\n
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For one thing, it goes through seven distinct neighborhoods: Pacific Heights, the Western Addition, NoPa, the Castro, Noe Valley, Bernal Heights and the Bayview. Not counting the gritty warehouse and factory area along a short strip of Industrial Street.<\/p>\n
For another thing, the buses are electric and clean, and run fairly often. The passengers are the usual San Francisco mix, all kinds, all races. There seems to be a baby boom in this part of the city, so the biggest problem on the 24 line is large baby buggies that jam up the aisles. I saw a\u00a0threepeat last week: three strollers, four babies. Nobody could move.<\/p>\n
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The 24-Divisadero rolls through Fillmore and Washington streets, a good spot for exploring Pacific Heights.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Carl Nolte\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
I\u2019d start my sightseeing trip in the middle of the 24 line, at Castro and Market streets in the heart of the Castro, a world-famous neighborhood that needs no introduction. The Muni Metro subway station is right there, and so is the terminal of the F-Market historic streetcar line. I\u2019d take whatever 24 bus comes first. So let\u2019s head north, across Market and up the hill, weaving around past the Davies Campus of the Sutter Health hospital system. The 24 then rolls down Divisadero Street, which has changed a lot in the past few years.<\/p>\n
Divisadero used to be a kind of neighborhood shopping street, a bit tough around the edges. Now it\u2019s hip, lined with restaurants and institutions like the Bi-Rite Market and Nopa, a restaurant that\u2019s organic and wood-fired. NoPa stands for North of the Panhandle, and Divisadero is the main street. Not long ago, New York magazine called Divisadero \u201cSan Francisco\u2019s epicenter of cool.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
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Moving on, the neighborhood gradually becomes the Western Addition, one of the city\u2019s classic districts. The street is lined with apartments and flats, many of them Victorians. The trolley wires that power the bus head up the hill and right on Jackson Street, the home of handsome mansions, rich but not cool. Down the side streets a glimpse of the bay, ships, sailboats, Alcatraz.<\/p>\n
The end of the line is Fillmore and Jackson, a good place to get off to explore the classy upper Fillmore neighborhood.<\/p>\n
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The 24-Divisadero passes Calvary Presbyterian Church at Jackson and\u00a0Fillmore streets, a landmark on the National Register of Historic Places.<\/p>\n
Carl Nolte\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
Get back on and head back, seeing\u00a0Divisadero from the other side of the bus. Back to Castro and Market, get off to check out the Castro, or just ride through and head south.<\/p>\n
Now it\u2019s up Castro Street over the hill that forms the south side of Eureka Valley. The grade is so steep here that for 54 years starting in 1887, it was climbed by cable cars.<\/p>\n
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This part of the 24 line comes with a kind of tour of San Francisco architectural styles right out the bus window. The crown jewel, you might say, is a blue and red Queen Anne-style Victorian house at 20th and Castro streets. It was built in 1897 as the home of Fernando Nelson, a master builder who designed and built 4,000 San Francisco houses, from\u00a0Noe Valley to West Portal, the Sunset and Richmond. He used all kinds of styles, but he started with Victorians in Noe Valley.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a row of three of his elegant houses right out the bus window on the west side of Castro near 25th. Nelson was no architect; he carried his building plans in his coat pocket. He built homes for working families, he said, but now his surviving homes are worth a fortune. Welcome to San Francisco.<\/p>\n
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The 24-Divisadero reaches the end of the line at Palou Avenue and Third Street.<\/p>\n
Carl Nolte\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
The bus turns left here, then up\u00a0Noe Street. The recorded announcement says \u201cHang on\u201d\u00a0\u2014 good advice because Noe is really steep. Up and down and around, a brush with a bit of wild San Francisco at 30th Street just down from Billy Goat Hill. Then east along 30th, a dogleg on Mission, then up Cortland Avenue through the main shopping area of Bernal Heights. Lots of good restaurants and shops.<\/p>\n
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Down the hill, a dogleg again, this time on Bayshore and then left on Industrial to\u00a0Palou Avenue to Third Street in the heart of the Bayview with its murals of Black city life. The end of the line is a surprise, the Bayview Opera House, a landmark that dates from 1888. If you are tired of buses, you can catch the T-Third Street train that will take you back to the city everybody knows: Oracle Park, Union Square and Chinatown, back on the beaten tourist path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 24-Divisadero, shown making its way up the steep portion of Noe Street, offers a snapshot of seven…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[184,7,3768,101,103,102,104,106,105,3766,2422],"class_list":{"0":"post-251877","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-bay-area","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-muni","11":"tag-san-francisco","12":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","13":"tag-san-francisco-news","14":"tag-sf","15":"tag-sf-headlines","16":"tag-sf-news","17":"tag-transit","18":"tag-travel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}