1.1 Miles in Lafayette Square with SF City Guides

This course may be short, but it was mighty. 
I tagged along with a sfcityguides.org
"Victorian San Francisco" tour on Sunday afternoon, with tour guide Bob Liu,
and it was WONDERFUL.

SF City Guides is a non profit that offers hundreds of free (donations welcome) walking tours around San Francisco.  During these walks you learn about the architecture, culture and history of the city.  This walk focused on the Victorian houses in the Lafayette Square area just east of Pacific Heights.

After taking this tour, I can now identify the various details that define the Victorian (in this neighborhood, the time frame is 1870-1900) architecture and how those details changed from decade to decade.  Flat roofs became pitched, doorways and window frames became more ornate, and bay windows became rounder over time.

This neighborhood doesn't have just a couple of Victorian houses, it has rows of them.  If you can't take one of these SF City Guides tours, you can learn more about this era of architecture HERE.

This tour took us to the north edge of Lafayette Park which gives a stunning view of the bay in the background, with the Spreckels Mansion (now part-time home of romance novelist, Danielle Steel) in the foreground.

This tour runs approximately 90 minutes, though because I was on the tour asking too many questions, it ran closer to two hours.  This tour got me hooked on taking more walking tours when I'm in the City again.