San+Francisco+Side+Trips

** Travel Recommendations for the Feminist Conference Goer: **  ** Places In and Around San Francisco to Visit During Your Free Time at ALA Annual 2015toc **
 * San Francisco Side Trips **


 * ** Google Map for San Francisco Side Trips **

== = Old Wives Tales Bookstore = Now the location of a printing firm, 1009 Valencia St. in the Mission District was the site of the long-running feminist bookstore Old Wives Tales. Launched as a partnership by Carol Seajay and Paula Wallace in 1976, the shop later became a worker-owned collective, then briefly a nonprofit before closing in 1995. Over the course of two decades, Old Wives Tales offered an array of books for women loving women and sponsored readings, book-signings, performances and exhibitions by numerous authors, photographers, artists, musicians. In addition, it provided a mail drop for activist groups and a bulletin board where women found notices for jobs, housemates and other opportunities. As African American lesbian photographer Lenn Keller recalls, "The bookstores were amazing spots to hang out. People were very well connected. There were actually physical bulletin boards for jobs, housing, events, rides across the country, etc. This was how we networked back then, before the Internet and cell phones."
 * 1009 Valencia Street**

=Phoebe Hearst Fountain= This cast stone fountain is a tribute to philanthropist, feminist and suffragist Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Hearst was benefactor of the University of California, Berkeley and its first woman Regent, serving on the board from 1897 until her death in 1919. Hearst was instrumental in advocating an institutional commitment to the advancement of women, funding scholarships for women and, aware that women were denied access to facilities available to male students, transforming a large pavilion at her home into the Women's Student Center. Hearst also was a benefactor of the Young Women's Christian Association, Mills College, and the women's suffrage movement. On election day in 1911, California passed Amendment 8, granting women the right to vote in state elections (almost a decade before the 19th Amendment provided women's suffrage throughout the United States). The Votes for Women Club mobilized more than 1,000 workers and poll watchers. Hearst, later a member of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage national advisory council and National Woman’s Party vice chairman, donated the use of the Dreamland skating rink as a resting place for suffrage volunteers.
 * Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park**

=Chinese Historical Society of America/Julia Morgan= Pioneering architect Julia Morgan integrated Chinese motifs with the framework of western architecture in her design for the San Francisco Chinatown YWCA, built in 1932. In 1894, Morgan was one of the first women to graduate with a degree in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1898, Morgan became the first woman admitted to the prestigious École de Beaux Arts department of architecture in Paris. In 1919, she was selected by William Randolph Hearst to construct her most well known work, the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California. Although retained as Hearst’s primary architect, Morgan continued to work on projects, completing over 700 buildings in her 52-year career. Morgan designed YWCAs in California, Utah, Arizona, and Hawaii, an affiliation begun when philanthropist, feminist and suffragist when Phoebe Apperson Hearst (William Randolph Heart’s mother) recommended her for the organization's Asilomar summer conference center, a project she began in 1913. Although no longer a YWCA, Morgan’s building continues with its original function – to serve the community in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where it currently houses the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum.
 * 965 Clay Street (415-391-1188; Tuesday-Friday 12-5 & Saturday 11-4)**

=Ina Coolbrith Park= Ina Donna Coolbrith was a poet, writer, librarian, and a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. Called the "Sweet Singer of California." she was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state. In 1874 Coolbrith took a position as the librarian for the Oakland Library Association, a subscription library that would become the Oakland Free Library, the second public library created in California. In 1894, hoping to keep Coolbrith in California, her friend naturalist John Muir suggested that she could fill the recently vacated position of San Francisco's librarian. Coolbrith responded to Muir that "No, I cannot have Mr. Cheney's place. I am disqualified by sex." San Francisco required that their librarian be a man. The park’s steep hills provide stunning views of the city and the bay.
 * Vallejo & Taylor Streets**

=Birthplace of Isadora Duncan= Dance pioneer Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco in 1877 and formulated her signature movement style during her youth there. Duncan’s choreography was intended to celebrate the female body, removing restrictions and challenging societal norms. As she matured, she developed her choreography and was invited to perform for salons and garden parties by wealthy patrons of the arts. She eventually caught the attention of the Hungarian press, with full orchestra performances in Budapest sold-out for 30 days. She quickly achieved celebrity status among the artistic and cultural illuminati of her day. When the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was constructed in 1913, her image was sculpted for the facade and murals in the auditorium. Duncan was a supporter of the social and political revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union, and in 1921 travelled to Moscow to make arrangements with the new government to found a school of dance. Duncan dismissed American criticism of her outspoken love of Russia: “Yes, I am a revolutionist,” she said to the press, “All true artists are revolutionists.”
 * 501 Taylor Street** (now the Geary Taylor Hotel Apartments)

=Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial= Because of anti-slavery work begun in the 1860s, Mary Ellen Pleasant has been called the “Mother of Civil Rights in California." Arriving in San Francisco in 1852, Pleasant used several names to avoid capture under California's Fugitive Slave Act and became a prosperous business woman with connections throughout the city. She supported the abolitionist actions of John Brown and after emancipation orchestrated civil rights court battles, including the 1868 her case that ensured the right of blacks to ride the San Francisco trolleys without fear of discrimination.
 * [[image:wil Mary Ellen Pleasant.jpg width="97" height="109" align="left"]]1661 Octavia Street (between Bush & Sutter)**

=Dorothy Erskine Park= Savor the views as you wander this secluded hilltop natural area. In the 1930s Dorothy Erskine pushed San Francisco leaders to realize not only the necessity for preserved open space, halting urban sprawl in San Francisco before it could incur devastating consequences for future generations. Erskine founded the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) and the Greenbelt Alliance, aided in the creation of the Save the Bay organization, and played a role in establishing the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. To honor Erskine as an influential environmental activist, Dorothy Erskine Park was acquired by the city in 1977 and dedicated in 1979.
 * Martha & Baden Streets**

=The Women's Building Mural Maestrapeace= In 1971, a group of visionary women founded San Francisco's Women's Centers (SFWC) to incubate emerging Bay Area women's projects. When they outgrew their first building, SFWC purchased a former meeting hall and neighborhood bar, transforming it into the first woman-owned and operated community center in the country. Programs and partners include La Casa de las Madres, San Francisco's first shelter for battered women; The Women's Foundation of California; and Lavender Youth Recreation & Information Center (LYRIC). In 1994 seven women artists covered two exterior walls with MaestraPeace, a mural with the mission of conveying “the healing power of women's wisdom over time, the contributions of women throughout history, and the making of history by women from all corners of the earth.” Women depicted in the mural include are Audre Lorde, Georgia O'Keefe, and Rigoberta Menchu. Also featured are female icons such as Quan Yin, Yemeyah, and Coyoxauqui, along with fabric patterns from throughout the world. Pick up a key to the individuals and symbols of the mural when you visit the Building and learn about the lives and traditions of these diverse peoples.
 * 3543 18th Street (call 415-431-1180 for more information on visiting the Building or purchasing mural merchandise)**

=Juana Briones Memorial= Briones was one of three original settlers of Yerba Buena, the pueblo that would become the city of San Francisco. In the 1830s, Briones established her own homestead; today Washington Square occupies the land that once served as her corral and dairy farm. Here Briones, with her children and sisters, ran a prosperous business farming and selling produce, dairy and eggs to Yerba Buena residents as well as to ships docked in San Francisco’s port. She was also known as a “curandera,” or traditional healer and served as a nurse and midwife to the growing community.
 * Washington Square**

=Woman's Athletic Club of San Francisco= The women's club movement of the early 20th century was a product of the desire of women to improve themselves intellectually, physically and artistically; to participate actively in public life; and to influence American society on a wide range of issues. Energized by this movement, Elizabeth Pillsbury and other socially prominent San Francisco women founded the first woman's athletic and social club on the West Coast. The club was incorporated in 1915; the facility opened in 1917 offering gymnastics, swimming, dancing, basketball, fencing, hockey, volleyball, and tennis in the city's first indoor tennis court, as well as Turkish baths, massage, hydro-therapeutics, and hair dressing—"for the twin goals of fitness and beauty." The core of the membership came from the Social Register, but efforts were made to reach artistically trained women and working-class women. The aim of the club, as stated in 1914 in a letter sent to prospective members, was "educational first and recreation and pleasure afterwards." The club flourished through the 1920s, when an expanded building was completed, and was reincorporated in 1965. It has continued as the Metropolitan Club, a full service private women’s club, since 1966. The Woman's Athletic Club of San Francisco was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.
 * 640 Sutter Street (now the Metropolitan Club)**

=GLBT History Museum= Supported by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, The GLBT History Museum’s is the first full-scale, stand-alone museum of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history and culture in the United States. The main Gallery exhibit, “Queer Past Becomes Present,” includes The Lesbians of The Ladder: Courage Under Attack. In 1955 a small group of women founded the Daughters of Bilitis, a social club for lesbians. The organization's publication, the Ladder, quickly became a lifeline for women across the country struggling to come out in a virulently homophobic society.
 * 4127 18th Street (general admission $5; free on the 1st Wednesday of the month and on Sunday, June 28, 2015 in honor of San Francisco Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride)**

=Woman Suffrage Downtown Walking Tour= Want more feminist history? Take the **San Francisco Woman Suffrage Downtown Walking Tour** from Jessica Ellen Sewell, author of //Women in the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915// (University of Minnesota, 2011).

Sources
 * **FoundSF**, a project of Shaping San Francisco, a participatory community history project documenting and archiving overlooked stories and memories of San Francisco.
 * **Preserving LGBT Historic Sites in California**