#travelwithgdp Fact: There’s a series of metal plates along the pier with excerpts from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The Sea and the Hills. In part: “Who hath desired the Sea? Her menaces swift as her mercies?The in-rolling walls of the fog and the silver-winged breeze that disperses?”

#travelwithgdp Fact: On top of the building is a 245-foot-tall (75 m) clock tower with four clock dials, each 22 feet (6.7 m) in diameter, which can be seen from Market Street, a main thoroughfare of the city. American architect A. Page Brown designed the clock tower after the 12th-century Giralda bell tower in Seville, Spain, […]

#travelwithgdp Fact: San Francisco is the first city that launched cars pulled along by cables running beneath the street.

#travelwithgdp Fact: At Kearny and Washington streets in San Francisco, Domenico Ghirardelli – born in Rapallo, Italy, opens a confectionary shop, Ghirardely & Girard, which eventually becomes the modern-day Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. I need more space, the company buys the Pioneer Woolen Building on San Francisco’s northern waterfront, and manufacturing moves there; this is the present […]

#travelwithgdp Fact: In June 1935 an earthquake struck the region as men worked atop the bridge’s unfinished south tower. According to PBS’ American Experience, one worker recalled, “the tower swayed 16 feet each way. There were 12 or 13 guys on top with no way to get down… The whole thing would sway toward the ocean, […]

#travelwithgdp Fact: Several of the bodies in the sculpture were designed to be symbolic. One of the bodies resembles Christ, another is of a woman holding an apple, evoking Eve. Both symbolize the connection between Jews and Christians.

#travelwithgdp Fact: Rodin’s breakout sculpture, The Age of Bronze caused a critical scandal for its extreme naturalism and ambiguous subject matter. Fashioned over a period of eighteen months and based on a live model, the sculpture depicts a suspended moment of human awakening, either to suffering or to joy.

#travelwithgdp Fact: The Golden Gate Bridge is the second-most used suicide site/suicide bridge in the world, after the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge. After years of debate and an estimated more than 1,500 deaths, suicide barriers, consisting of a stainless steel net extending 20 feet from the bridge and supported by structural steel 20 feet under the […]

#travelwithgdp Fact: The Golden State is the official state nickname which came to be in 1968, representing the discovery of gold in 1848 and the fields of golden poppies seen each spring.