San Francisco Relocation Guide - Antevia

Union Square from The Cheesecake Factory.
Union Square has also come to describe not only the immediate vicinity of the park but
the general shopping, dining and theater sub-districts within the surrounding blocks. The
Geary and Curran theaters one block west on Geary anchor the "theater district" and
border the Tenderloin. At the end of Powell Street two blocks south, where the cable cars
turn around beside Hallidie Plaza at Market Street, is a growing retail corridor that leads
to the Yerba Buena Gardens, with its own arts and entertainment centers, more large
hotels, the Moscone Convention Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Also south of Market and near Yerba Buena Gardens is the historic United States Mint
Building, built in 1874 of granite: a rare survivor of the 1906 quake. Nob Hill, with its
grand mansions, apartment buildings and hotels, stands to the northwest of Union Square.
This area is also home to some of the most upscale luxury hotels in San Francisco.
To the north is Chinatown, with its gate at Grant Avenue and Bush Street, one of the
largest Chinese communities outside Asia. The city's historic "French Quarter" runs east
along Bush Street and tucks into the alleys of Belden Place and Claude near the French
Consulate and the landmark Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Church.
Union Square is the central shopping, hotel and theater district in San Francisco.
This area was the home to the city's first French settlers, who, according to historian
Gladys Hansen, were most sympathetic of the housing and employment needs of the
Chinese settlers in the nascent days of Chinatown and shared Dupont street as a business
address -- a tolerance that was only tested, according to Alexandre Dumas in A Gil Blas
in California (1852), when Chinese cooks began to tamper with French cuisine. The
cafes, hotels and restaurants of the French Quarter today maintain a distinct joie de vivre
befitting the Quarter's heritage. Every year, the area is the site of the boisterous Bastille