Alamo Square: the Painted Ladies and the grand blocks
Postcard Row's Victorians against the downtown skyline, the square itself, and the wide Western Addition streets. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Postcard Row, 710–720 Steiner Street
Start at the row everyone comes for — six matched Queen Anne Victorians from the 1890s, lined up with the downtown towers rising behind them. Cross to the park side of Steiner for the angle that sells a million postcards. Then look past them.

2. Alamo Square Park summit
Walk up into the square itself, a green block on a low hill. The crown of the rise gives you the Painted Ladies framed against the skyline and the whole grid spread out around. A bench, a lawn, and dogs off the lead in the morning.

3. The Westerfeld House, 1198 Fulton
On the park's north-west corner, the tall dark Stick-Eastlake mansion of 1889 — grander and stranger than the famous row, with a tower and a long, odd history of owners. A private home; admire the silhouette from the corner.

4. Fulton Street's grand blocks
Head west along Fulton, the broad Western Addition boulevard where the Victorians and Edwardians get bigger and the front gardens deeper. This is the architecture without the crowd. Walk slowly and read the cornices.

5. NoPa, Divisadero Street
Turn down Divisadero into NoPa — North of the Panhandle — the neighbourhood's eating-and-coffee spine. Bakeries, a long-running corner grocer, and the kind of cafés that fill on a weekend morning. Stop for something here.

6. The Panhandle
End at the thin green finger of park that runs off Golden Gate Park's east edge — a tree-lined strip of redwoods and a cycle path, planted in the 1870s. Quiet, shaded, and the 5-Fulton along its north edge takes you on.

Alamo Square: the Painted Ladies and the grand blocks