Visual essay
Even in San Francisco, where downtown’s towers are viewed by many residents with suspicion or disdain, the skyline plays an outsize role in defining where we live. It is what we in the region see from afar, and what tourists snap up and send off. Depending on your physical perspective, the city’s “skyline” is many different things.
One angle might have a 21st century sheen; another reveals layers of past visions and battles. But a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are eight angles on the Bay Area’s most statuesque urban terrain.
For people arriving via car from the East Bay, the city's defining portal is the Bay Bridge. You're on one bridge but can see another; green hills interlacing dense buildings form a topography much different than the ridges of Marin. Variations of this context are what set San Francisco apart.
Then you approach land, and are engulfed by a new city that's shiny with glass. During the past 30 years, towers have been allowed to sprout on Rincon Hill and nearby blocks — the result of a planning strategy to put housing near downtown jobs so that residents can commute to work on foot, not by automobile.
Take in the same scene from Treasure Island, and the perspective feels different — water and sky with big buildings in between. Nothing to compare with Hong Kong or Manhattan, but it definitely conveys a big-city mood.
The inland views are much different, as they should be: San Francisco prides itself on being a city of neighborhoods. The perspective from Potrero Hill, for example, offers a hint of the city’s overlapping layers of experience and life.
The residential character here is unmistakable, with many once-modest homes perched on steep tree-lined streets. The contrast is vivid — downtown rising up from a varied older city, one where people work at jobs that don’t necessarily include office cubicles.
Dolores Park has become one of the city's favorite outdoor spaces, and the setting helps explain why — a beckoning green oval in front and an elongated skyline in the distance. Not only that, this vista is available from a Muni platform. That's a welcome change of pace from the privileged nature of too many views, high in a tower or not easily reached except by car.
As skyline angles go, the vantage point from Alamo Square in the Western Addition isn’t much in terms of statuesque allure. But buildings can combine to tell larger stories about where you are, and that's why this is now one of our definitive views.
Victorian-era Painted Ladies meet the Transamerica Pyramid and now, Salesforce Tower. Call it an architectural version of San Francisco’s diversity, compressed into a postcard or a selfie. Intimate meets expansive. Old meets new. No wonder first-time visitors want to see it for themselves.
Some panoramas you search out. Others are surprises en route to somewhere else. Here's what you see when walking from Pier 39 on a footbridge above Jefferson Street to the visitor mecca’s parking garage — the skyline is reduced to a quartet of recognizable peaks, with longtime favorite Coit Tower out in front.
The antithesis of Alamo Square is Ina Coolbrith Park, a forested nook on Russian Hill with a sense of settled urbanity. This includes a tight-packed skyline where Salesforce Tower looms behind the Transamerica Pyramid and other Financial District towers, the high-rise core until 15 years ago.
The contrast on view is striking, with the tall buildings stopping abruptly before they reach North Beach or Chinatown. And yes, there’s a reason — city planners in the 1980s pushed tower expansion south of Market Street, not wanting big boxes to encroach any more on those neighborhoods than they already had.
Ultimately, a city's skyline is whatever you want it to be. Threatening or seductive, glamorous or matter-of-fact. San Francisco is blessed with a setting like none other in the world — and our still-evolving skyline, good buildings and bad, adds yet more character and nuance to the powerful scene.
Guy Wathen / The Chronicle
Guy Wathen / The Chronicle