Ferry Building

The Ferry Building's 245-foot clock tower, modelled on the Giralda bell tower in Seville, has anchored the foot of Market Street since 1898. For nearly four decades it was the second-busiest transit terminal on earth after London's Charing Cross, funnelling around 50,000 commuters a day off bay ferries into the city. Then the Bay Bridge opened in 1936, the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, and the ferry trade collapsed almost overnight. By the 1950s the building had been carved into offices and buried behind a double-deck freeway.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake did the city an accidental favour: it damaged the Embarcadero Freeway badly enough that San Francisco chose to demolish rather than repair it. The waterfront reopened to daylight, and a 2003 restoration gutted the mid-century office partitions to expose the original 660-foot nave and its steel-truss skylight. The result is one of the most successful adaptive reuses of a transit building anywhere.

Inside is a food hall that locals actually shop at. Hog Island Oyster Co. shucks Tomales Bay oysters at a marble counter; Cowgirl Creamery sells cheese made up the coast in Point Reyes; Acme Bread supplies half the good restaurants in the Bay Area; Blue Bottle, Boccalone, Humphry Slocombe and Far West Fungi fill out a roster that reads like a manifesto for Northern California food. Prices are not cheap, and the quality justifies it.

The Saturday farmers market, run by CUESA, spills across the plaza and the bayside arcade and is plausibly the best market in the country — 100-plus regional farmers, foragers and ranchers, plus prepared-food stalls where you queue behind chefs. Smaller markets run on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the building still does its original job: Golden Gate Ferry and San Francisco Bay Ferry sail from the slips behind it to Sausalito, Larkspur, Tiburon, Oakland and Vallejo. The 30-minute Sausalito crossing, with the skyline receding behind you and Alcatraz off the starboard rail, is the cheapest great bay cruise in San Francisco.