At San Francisco's Edge

The weather forecast is for snow in San Francisco this weekend.  Decades pass between snowfalls here, particularly ones where the flakes don't melt as soon as they hit the ground.  This may be our year for not being able to avoid snow no matter where we are.

Meanwhile, it's sunny and clear between rainy spells. 

A couple of weeks ago we drove along the edge of the city, following the coastline on the north, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and stopping at Baker Beach, just west of the bridge.  This urban beach can be crowded in the summer but was virtually empty in February except for the occasional fishermen, walkers, or crows.

I wonder if they actually caught anything.

This view of the city is looking east from the Legion of Honor Museum in Lincoln Park near Land's End, the farthest northwest point of San Francisco.  The terracotta-colored dome is Temple Emanuel.  The hills in the distance are Berkeley and Oakland, separated from the city by the Bay.

I've written before about the Museum of the Legion of Honor and how it was copied from the one in Paris.  It's a lovely building in a spectacular location and does have a French feeling to it.  The inscription across the entrance doesn't hurt.

It even has its own little glass pyramid in the courtyard, much smaller than the one in the courtyard of the Louvre, but  I suspect that's where the idea came from.

There are several monuments around the museum; this one I had never noticed before.  Frances E. Willard was a president of the National Council of Women as well as of the National Women's Temperance Union and an organizer of the Prohibition Party.  As a feminist and a lover of a good martini, I'm one tempted human who is mixed in my admiration for her.

The George Segal sculpture of a lone survivor standing by a barbed wire fence in front of a pile of bodies is the San Francisco Holocaust Memorial.  On the wall next to it is a list of names of concentration camps and killing centers in France, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine in which families of San Franciscans perished.