North Beach, San Francisco: Coit Tower, Washington Square and the Columbus Avenue blocks

The literary block is the short stretch of Columbus Avenue on either side of Jack Kerouac Alley, which runs through to Grant Avenue. City Lights Booksellers & Publishers occupies 261-271 Columbus Avenue and is San Francisco Landmark No. 228, designated in 2001; San Francisco Planning's parcel record gives the building year as 1907. Vesuvio Cafe stands across the alley at 255 Columbus Avenue. No source states opening hours for either consistently, so none are given here. At Columbus Avenue and Broadway stands the installation Language of the Birds, which the San Francisco Arts Commission's Civic Art Collection records under accession number T2009.1.

The Beat Museum is at 540 Broadway, in the Swiss-American Hotel Building of 1910. The museum's own site states that the building has been vacated for a soft-story seismic retrofit and that a reopening date has not been announced, so no opening hours are given. Caffe Trieste is at 601 Vallejo Street, with its annex retail store at 609 Vallejo Street; no current source states their opening hours either.

Farther along the avenue the shopfronts turn Italian: Molinari Delicatessen at 373 Columbus Avenue, in a building San Francisco Planning's parcel record names P G Molinari & Sons and dates to 1910; Biordi Art Imports at 412 Columbus Avenue in the 1924 Columbus Building; The Stinking Rose at 430; Hotel Boheme at 444; Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe at 566. The National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi stands on Vallejo Street between Columbus Avenue and Grant Avenue: San Francisco Landmark No. 5, designated in 1968. On the lower Columbus blocks, 916-920 Kearny Street is San Francisco Landmark No. 33, designated in 1970, and 4 Columbus Avenue is San Francisco Landmark No. 52, designated in 1973.

A cluster of stairs and alleys carries the names of writers and artists associated with the neighbourhood: Kenneth Rexroth Place, Bob Kaufman Alley, Via Ferlinghetti, the Peter Macchiarini Steps and Jack Micheline Place. They are streets. They have no operators, no admission and no hours.

Coit Tower is at 1 Telegraph Hill Boulevard, on the summit of the hill inside Pioneer Park, which San Francisco Recreation and Parks says was established in 1876 on the former site of the telegraph station. The tower was designed by the firm of Arthur Brown, Jr., architect of San Francisco's City Hall, and was completed in 1933. It is named for Lillie Hitchcock Coit, who died in 1929 leaving a bequest for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city she had always loved; the same bequest funded a monument to the volunteer firefighters, in Washington Square.

Artists employed by the Public Works of Art Project painted the murals in the base in 1934. Recreation and Parks records the controversy that followed during the longshoremen's strike of that year, when some elements were painted over and the tower was padlocked for several months; the frescoes opened to the public in the fall of 1934. The tower is San Francisco Landmark No. 165, designated in 1984, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008, reference number 07001468.

Two public stairways cross the east face of the hill. The Filbert Steps run down it between Telegraph Hill Boulevard and Sansome Street, with the Grace Marchant Garden flanking them; the garden is private land, volunteer-maintained, with no gate and no published hours. The Greenwich Steps descend the same face. 302-304 Greenwich Street is San Francisco Landmark No. 121, designated in 1980, and San Francisco Planning's parcel record names the property Julius Castle and gives its building year as 1923. The house at 1254-1256 Montgomery Street was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, reference number 79000532.

The hill also carries a district designation of its own. The Telegraph Hill Historic District was designated under Article 10 of the Planning Code by Ordinance 442-86, adopted on 13 November 1986, and stands as Appendix G to that article; San Francisco Planning's record names Richard Neutra and Irvine Goldstine among the architects who worked within it.

No source states a bus route or a rail station for the neighbourhood, so none is given here. Steer by addresses and by the cable car instead. The Powell-Mason cable car line turns at Taylor and Bay Streets.

The addresses that matter: Coit Tower, 1 Telegraph Hill Boulevard. Washington Square, which San Francisco Recreation and Parks addresses as Filbert and Stockton, San Francisco, CA 94133. Saints Peter and Paul Church, 666 Filbert Street, on the north side of that square. The North Beach Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, 850 Columbus Avenue. Joe DiMaggio Playground, 651 Lombard Street. The National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi, on Vallejo Street between Columbus Avenue and Grant Avenue.

Getting up the hill and down it are two different problems. Coit Tower has an elevator to the observation deck and sells its tickets in the gift shop at the base. The Filbert Steps and the Greenwich Steps are public stairways on the east face of Telegraph Hill, with no operator and no published hours; the Filbert alignment runs between Telegraph Hill Boulevard and Sansome Street.