Madeleine continues to signpost her obsession by visiting
the grave of Valdes. The tiny cemetery, in which the
suicidal Carlotta supposedly rests – every bit
as atmospheric as it appears in the movie – has
its own share of buried secrets. You can find it behind
the Mission Dolores, 320 Dolores
Street at Sixteenth Street in the Mission
District (BART Metro: 16th Street-Mission).
Once youíve seen the ornate exterior, you can forget
the pompous basilica which was grafted on next door
in 1913, the real interest here is the MisiÛn
San Francisco De Asis, completed in 1791.
One of the 21 California missions established by the
Spanish in the 18th century and the oldest intact survivor,
its four-foot thick adobe walls having withstood the
worst assaults of San Andreas, the mission of St Francis
of Assisi is not only the oldest building in San Francisco
but gives the city its name. Visit the cool, dark chapel
interior with its unique Spanish-Mexican decoration
and ceiling painting based on the designs of the Ramaytush
people ‚ dubbed Costanoans (ìcoast dwellersî) by the
ëkindlyí Spanish Franciscans who occupied their land,
resettled them and oversaw their complete extinction.
By 1850 there was only one Ramaytush left alive.
A small museum records sanitised highlights of the missionís
history ‚ for a while in the 1840s and 1850s under Mexican
rule it became a hotel and a gambling den, and bullfights
were held on the plaza where Dolores Street now stands.
The museum exits into the cemetery itself. Donít be
fooled by the size. Over 5,500 of the native people
are buried here in a common grave, commemorated by a
single stone shrine. The grander monuments record the
founding Father Palou, the cityís bigwigs and the, mainly
Irish, immigrants who poured into the area after the
Gold Rush.
Back northwest of the city is the granite sea wall beneath
the southern anchoring of the Golden Gate Bridge at
Fort Point, Marine Drive
off Long Avenue, the spot where Madeleine takes a reckless
plunge into the notoriously treacherous waters of the
Bay. The site is named for the brick fort, built in
the 1850s to defend the city from sea attack long before
the bridge was conceived. It now houses a museum of
militaria (tel: 415/556.1693).
Vertigo location: Scottie's
home: 900 Lombard Street, and Coit Tower on the
horizon, San Francisco
Falling for the possessed woman act, Scottie rescues
Madeleine and takes her back to his apartment. Scottieís
home stands, virtually unchanged, at 900
Lombard Street on the corner of Jones Street,
just at the foot of the series of famous hairpin bends
on the ëCrookedest Street in the Worldí, which you'll
recognise from films such as The
Love Bug.
Looking east along Lombard Street you canít miss Telegraph
Hill, and crowning it, the Coit
Memorial Tower, Telegraph Hill Boulevard,
the landmark Madeleine later uses to find her way back
to Scottieís apartment. The tower was built ëto beautify San Franciscoí
(like, this city needs beautifying) with a bequest left
to the city by Lillie Hitchcock Coit (no relation),
a Bay City pioneer woman apparently fascinated by firemen
(as a girl she was made an honorary member of the Knickerbocker
No.5 Fire Company). Itís claimed, presumably by people
unfamiliar with the works of Freud, that the monument
is intended to resemble a firehose nozzle.
If your ambition is to visit the top of a reinforced
concrete tower perched on the summit of a steep hill
in a notorious earthquake zone (so how could you resist?),
you can take the elevator to a 210-foot observation
deck, which does actually give wonderful views of the
Bay (admission charge).
