Walks in San Francisco, California
The Best Kept California Secret: The Filbert Steps on Telegraph Hill
Oct 10, 2008
The Filbert Steps in San Francisco, California are really a staircase that descends a cliff, from Montgomery Street to Sansome Street near the shores of the bay. They follow an old path that the Irish and Italian dock workers used in the nineteenth century to descend Telegraph Hill directly to the bay wharves. The wooden stairs are stolid, unpainted and precipitously steep, and the houses to either side of them are also made of wood. These houses, almost never on the market, yet always sought after, are defiant of modernity, and you have to walk to them in order to see them.
The best way to get to The Filbert Steps is to park (if you can find a spot) near the corner of Montgomery and Filbert Streets. In downtown San Francisco, Montgomery is the center of the city's finances, the bourse, the banks. Here at the crest of Telegraph Hill, it is part of a small neighborhood warren of narrow streets, straight and crooked streets alike that are crowded with flats, little apartment buildings and shadowed stairways, all overlooked by the comic presence of Coit Tower, a famous tourist attraction that was commissioned by a society matron in 1933.
At 1360 Montgomery (at the very top of The Filbert Steps), the visitor can spend a few minutes looking at the Malloch Building, constructed in 1939. A splendid example of art-deco design, this apartment building was used in the film Dark Passage that starred Humphrey Bogart.
The Marchant Gardens and the Beautification of Telegraph Hill
When a woman named Grace Marchant moved to The Filbert Street Steps in 1949, they were in bad disrepair, and the slope was basically a trash heap being used by neighbors from all over Telegraph Hill. A famous story tells of Ms. Marchant's clearing the trash toward the bottom of the Filbert Street slope and dumping it down the cliff which is part of an abandoned nineteenth century quarry that overlooks the bay. Despite threats from the authorities that she would be fined for doing so, Ms. Marchant continued tossing the trash over the side. When she began cultivating what ultimately became The Grace Marchant Gadens on The Filbert Steps, the city relented. Ms. Marchant passed away a quarter century ago, but her gardens, and several others up and down The Steps, are still gloriously maintained by the residents.
The Wild Forest and the Wild Parrots
Once you start down the Filbert Steps from Montgomery Street, you will be transported into a forest. It may have been designed by Ms. Marchant, but it is nonetheless seemingly wild. Roses splash down the slope, arm in arm with every kind of trumpet-flower tree. There are lilies, banana trees, white sweet midnight-jasmine and tropical palms. Rolling expanses of green grasses and other ground covers are everywhere between princess-flower trees, redwoods and oaks. All this is punctuated with lurid explosions of red, pink and purple rhododendrons as well as by the chatter of the flock of parrots that has lived on The Steps for many years. These parrots were immortalized in the documentary film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.
The funky wooden houses, some with the best San Francisco views ever, are set apart from each other by this forest the entire length of the steps.
The Anderlini Rose Garden
The visitor who goes to The Filbert Steps should also go up Filbert from Montgomery to see a renowned rose garden that was planted and tended for many years by Elios and Virginia Anderlini. If you proceed up the steps through this garden, you'll eventually arrive at the base of Coit Tower itself.
