Painted Ladies of Alamo Square

The six Queen Anne Victorians on the 700 block of Steiner Street are the most photographed row houses in the United States, and the reason is composition rather than architecture. Alamo Square Park slopes up directly opposite them, so from the northeast lawn you get the pastel roofline in the foreground and the Financial District's glass towers rising immediately behind — a century and a half of San Francisco stacked in one frame. Locals call the row Postcard Row; the wider term 'Painted Ladies' refers to any Victorian repainted in three or more complementary colours, a movement that started in the Haight in the 1960s.

The houses themselves were built between 1892 and 1896 by developer Matthew Kavanaugh, who lived in the mansion next door. They are ordinary speculative housing of their day — San Francisco built roughly 48,000 Victorians before 1915. What was extraordinary was their survival. The 1906 earthquake and the three-day fire that followed destroyed most of the city's Victorian stock east of Van Ness Avenue; the fire line held just short of Alamo Square, which is why this neighbourhood still reads as pre-earthquake San Francisco while downtown does not.

Alamo Square Park itself deserves more than the ten minutes most visitors give it. Renovated and reopened in 2017, it's a 12.7-acre hilltop green with a dog run, tennis courts, mature cypress and one of the better casual picnic lawns in the city. Come with coffee and pastries and you understand the neighbourhood rather than just photographing it.

The surrounding blocks are the real reward. Walk south into the Lower Haight, east into Hayes Valley for independent boutiques and some of the city's best cocktail bars, or north through NoPa's tree-lined streets, where the Victorian and Edwardian housing stock is arguably finer and completely uncrowded. The Westerfeld House on Fulton — a Second Empire pile with a strange, brilliant history involving Russian émigrés, the Grateful Dead and Kenneth Anger — is three blocks away and worth the detour.