Hotel At a Glance: The Pickwick Hotel

Built in 1926, The Pickwick Hotel has been fully renovated to take advantage of its 30s-style decor and style. Located in San Francisco’s SoMa district, the boutique hotel is within a mile of Union Square, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. It’s also perfectly centered in the city’s premiere shopping district, largely located along nearby Market Street.

• Where you’ll stay: Elegant rooms are a model of urban chic, with modern decor in soothing earth tones, free WiFi, and city views.
• Come hungry and dine at three onsite restaurants, including the Mediterranean-inspired Soma Restaurant & Bar. Select options come with a $30 credit towards dinner at one of these eateries.
• Shop ‘til you drop at Westfield San Francisco Centre, a shopping mall located next door, where you’ll find 200 shops and restaurants.
• The press says: Fodor’s writes, “this terra-cotta-clad neo-Gothic hotel … is decked out with a can’t-miss-it, seven-story corner sign straight out of film noir.”
• Work out at the 24-hour onsite fitness center

San Francisco’s South of Market Neighborhood: Museums, Gardens, and Tech Headquarters

Just north of the popular Mission District, South of Market (or SoMa, as it’s sometimes called) is a vast neighborhood that contains many of the city’s best museums, including the Asian Art Museum and the Cartoon Art Museum. (The Museum of Modern Art is located here as well, though it’s in the midst of an expansion project.) Yerba Buena Gardens displays a number of outdoor art pieces and a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, which sits behind a 50-foot-high waterfall. The public gardens, a butterfly garden among them, cover two city blocks.

Quite a few Silicon Valley companies have had headquarters in South of Market, including Twitter, Yelp, and Wired. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is one of Apple Inc.’s favorite venues for unveiling new products—Steve Jobs introduced the iPod and the iPad to the world from its stage.

Jump on the Powell Street cable car and head up into the North Beach area to get a feel for San Francisco’s eclecticism. Fishers from Genoa immigrated to North Beach more than a century ago, and there’s still a strong Italian presence in the area. In the 1950s and 1960s, the neighborhood became a center for beatnik subculture. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac often hung out at the now-famous City Lights bookstore, an independent shop that remains a literary landmark and a center for San Francisco’s progressive politics.

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