North Point Street is another one of those San Francisco Streets that, like New Montgomery Street or Van Ness Avenue, people usually drop the road designation and just refer to it by its title, leaving out Street or Avenue. Golden Gate Avenue is an exception because it can get confused with several San Francisco landmarks, and Broadway is understandable because I don’t think it has a last name. North Point was the original name of a part of San Francisco that stuck out into the Bay before the area was filled in, and would more appropriately be named Northeast Point Street, but that could be confusing too. Although I use North Point often, I don’t usually pay much attention to it, but now that the Liberty Ship, the Jeremiah O’Brien, is berthed where North Point merges into the Embarcadero, I’ll be traveling on it more often. The street extends from the Embarcadero (Embarcadero doesn’t have a specification, either) all the way to the Palace of Fine Arts. It completely disappears from Van Ness to Laguna Street and from Fillmore Street to Scott Street and passes by one of San Francisco’s most famous landmarks, but I’ll only be traveling a small part of North Point in this post. (Thumbnail images)
North Point at Grant Avenue in 1906: North Point Wet Weather Facility obscures the view of Telegraph Hill from here now, but you can see Coit tower in my picture, that wasn’t there in 1906. (Vintage picture from opensfhistory,org)
The view south down Powell from North Point in an opensfhistory.org picture from 1940: The building on the left is gone, as is the matching foot bridge, but you can see the spires of Saints Peter and Paul Church in both photos.
As I was passing Stockton Street, before I got to Powell, the smell of something cooking down the street got my undivided attention. Like in those old cartoons when an aroma would cause a character to float through the air in a trance to the source of the cooking, I wandered down to the corner of Stockton and Beach Streets. There was a fellow there selling grilled hotdogs that were twice the size of the ones you buy in a package, along with grilled onions and peppers, on an oversized bun. Although my doctor might have scolded me, a SWAT Team couldn’t have kept me from buying one. As I waited for my hotdog, I thought of another time I’d been to this corner long ago, when I wasn’t by myself.
It crossed my mind the other day,
Since you both grew up, and moved away.
When I walk by places from the past,
that time goes by so very fast.
Although it’s over twenty years,
It doesn’t seem that long.
It crossed my mind the other day,
I still take you along.
North Point also gets a cameo in one of my favorite San Francisco film noir movies, ‘The Lineup’ from 1958. Here at North Point, looking south along Mason Street, police officers are alerted by radio that a serial killer, played by Eli Wallach, has been spotted near the Cliff House. The police car makes a sharp U turn at North Point, and heads back along Mason Street to the site of the alert, which in reality is all the way over on the other side of San Francisco. Don’t worry, they get him. You can see the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel in the far background on the left in both pictures.
The south east corner of Ghirardelli Square at North Point and Larkin Street during the 1920s: The entire south side of Ghirardelli Square borders North Point.
There are also beautiful vistas from North Point, like this view of Alcatraz and the Hyde Street Pier from Larkin Street at North Point during the 1980s, and a picture that I took in 2021. (Vintage picture from SF Gate)
In a 1972 episode of the television show ‘The Streets of San Francisco’ an armed security guard is shot to death during an armed robbery at Ghirardelli Square, and police officers Lt. Mike Stone (Karl Malden) and Inspector Steve Keller (Michael Douglas) respond the shooting. They enter Ghirardelli Square from the North Point entrance near Polk Street. A building has been put in since 1972 behind where the blue Volkswagen bus was. Also, if I had a dollar for every episode of ‘The Streets of San Francisco’ that had a scene that was filmed at Ghirardelli Square during the five year run of the show, that would buy a lot of Ghirardelli Chocolate.