San Francisco Audio Tours

San Francisco's 46 square miles contain more contradictions per block than most countries manage in their entirety. Founded as a Spanish mission in 1776 and remade by the 1849 Gold Rush, it was then rebuilt almost from nothing after the 1906 earthquake leveled three-quarters of the city. The reconstruction happened so fast that by 1915 the city was hosting a world's fair on reclaimed bay land.

The neighborhoods refuse to stay still.

North Beach was the Beat Generation's living room in the 1950s, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti ran City Lights bookstore on Columbus Avenue and Jack Kerouac drank at Vesuvio next door. Haight-Ashbury hosted the Summer of Love in 1967. The Mission District has shifted from Irish to Latino to whatever it is becoming now, block by block. Cable cars have climbed the same lines since 1873, including the Powell-Hyde route with its stomach-dropping descent toward Aquatic Park.