San Francisco is everyone's favorite city, where the fog rolls in over the tops of the hills, where the sun sparkles on the Bay, where cable cars clang their way up steep hills, where ethnic neighborhoods abound with the aromas and flavors of elsewhere, where the bookstores hold that first edition you've always coveted, where Luciano Pavarotti made his major United States debut, where sourdough bread has reached perfection, where “Beach Blanket Babylon” has delighted audiences forever, where the Victorian “painted ladies” charm passersby, where virtually anything is possible and virtually everything is all right.

We wouldn't want to live anywhere else, and we hope that the following pictures, taken here and there in the San Francisco Bay Area, will show you the visual side of why.

The Palace of Fine Arts was built for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, the crowning achievement of Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck. It was Roman in style, Greek in decoration. The Palace wasn't expected to remain after the fair was over so it was built out of plaster. San Francisco, however, fell in love with it and didn't want it to be torn down...so it stood.

A former landlady of Mimi's remembered playing tennis inside it in the 1930s, but eventually it deteriorated into our own Roman ruin, still magnificent, but inaccessible because of safety hazards. Mimi discovered it soon after arriving in the Bay Area, and she and a friend contemplated swimming across the lagoon one night to see what was inside. They never did.

Finally, in the 1960s, money was raised to reconstruct the Palace from the original molds, this time in concrete, but without some of the original decoration. It now houses a theater and a hands-on science museum called the Exploratorium—a wonderful place, by the way.

This, however, is how it looked when it was still a ruin, in photographs Mimi took early one Sunday morning in 1959.

The Exploratorium has its own Web site, should you want to find out more about the reconstructed Palace of Fine Arts.

We joined the Cornell Alumni Association of Northern California for a picnic on Treasure Island in September of 1995 and so saw the Bay Area from a new vantage point—the center of San Francisco Bay!

One of the best ways to see San Francisco is from the East Bay Hills, especially as the sun goes down and afterward....

The lights of the Bay Area look like thousands and thousands of jewels sparkling in the night.