The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake had an immediate and long-term impact on this part of the city (which, ironically, covers landfill rubble resulting from the epic earthquake and fire that dealt widespread knockdown blows a century ago this year). Looming high overhead, the Embarcadero Freeway, a traffic-clogged segment of Interstate 480, sustained such severe structural damage in ’89 that inspectors ordered it torn down.

Result: extensive urban renewal. Eliminating the ugly concrete double-decker reconnected adjacent districts and businesses to the east-side waterfront. No longer engulfed in shadowy gloom, the curving Embarcadero thoroughfare now sports palm trees imported from the Canary Islands. They border F-line public-transit tracks used by a fleet of old-time streetcars, brought here from such cities as Brooklyn, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City and Cincinnati—plus Milan, Hamburg, Osaka and Brussels.

To augment their cable-car hill-climbing, shopping, museum-going and all-around sightseeing, your clients are well-advised to explore this revitalized stretch of terrain.

Its central white “beacon,” illuminated nightly for can’t-miss visibility, is the clock-towered Ferry Building at the Market Street-Embarcadero intersection. Completed eight years before the ’06 calamity, the familiar Spanish-style landmark has been revered as a venerable, unshakable survivor ever since.(more)