San Francisco Bizarro: A Guide to Notorious Sites, Lusty Pursuits, and Downright Freakiness in the City by the Bay

by Jack Boulware

San Francisco. The very name may bring to mind anything from Sam Spade dodging bullets to drug experimentation at Fillmore West to the first openly gay community in the Castro district. Ever since the gold rush, the city has been a haven for the unusual and the well-before-their-time, but there's no better time than now to see the downright bizarre.

If you want to see the Golden Gate Bridge and eat Ghirardelli chocolates, there are many fine books that will hold your hand through the process. But if you'd

-Visit the birthplace of LSD
-Take home a toilet guitar
-Worship at the church of John Coltrane
-Have a pint and a nosh at O'Greenberg's
-Photograph the attractive Manson family home
-Ride with the Hell's Angels
-Take a Black Panther legacy tour, or
-Visit the nation's only fully restored nuclear missile site,

then San Francisco Bizarro is the book for you. With addresses, hours, and phone numbers, you'll be fully equipped for the most bizarre visit ever. Because America doesn't get any freakier than this.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 5, 2000

About the author

Jack Boulware is an American author and journalist, and was founding editor of the satirical Nose magazine. He is author of Sex American Style and San Francisco Bizarro, and co-author of the recent oral history Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk From Dead Kennedys to Green Day.

He writes regularly for a variety of publications, and is co-founder of San Francisco's Litquake literary festival (http://litquake.org/). He is proud to contribute to the canon of literature authored by Boulwares, which includes The Oratory of Negro Leaders: 1900-1968, The Truth About Boulwarism: Trying to Do Right Voluntarily, and Snoring: New Answers to an Old Problem.

Reviews

[Rylan]

Just not that bizarre.