From Nob Hill, looking down upon the business wards of the city, we can decry a building with a little belfry, and that is the stock exchange, the heart of San Francisco; a great pump we might call it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarter to the pockets of the millionaires on the hill .
- Robert Louis Stevenson

If the Financial District is representative of new money in the city, the posh hotels and masonic institutions of Nob Hill exemplify San Francisco's old wealth; it is, as Joan Didion wrote, "the symbolic nexus of all old California money and power." Once you've made the stiff climb up (or taken the California cable car), there are very few real sights as such, but nosing around is pleasant enough, taking in the aura of luxury and enjoying the views over the city and beyond.

The area became known as Nob Hill after the robber-baron industrialists who came to live here while running the Central Pacific Railroad. Grace Cathedral here is one of the biggest hunks of sham-Gothic architecture in the US. Construction began soon after the 1906 earthquake, but most of it was built, of faintly disguised reinforced concrete, in the early Sixties. The entrance is adorned with faithful replicas of the fifteenth-century Ghiberti doors of the Florence Baptistry. A block east, be sure to go inside the Fairmont Hotel , 950 Mason St, to get a sense of the opulence that once ruled the hill. Take its elevators up for a great view of the city. Across from the Fairmont , the brownstone of the Pacific Union Club was the only original Nob Hill structure left standing after the 1906 fire.

Nob Hill

• Nob Hill

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