AFOOT IN SAN FRANCISCO CITY'S SUPERB WALKING TOURS ADD ZEST TO NEIGHBORHOOD EXPLORATIONS.

Byline: Eric Noland Travel Editor

SAN FRANCISCO - Being bound to a motor vehicle in San Francisco is a sure recipe for aggravation.

The withering steepness of the streets - nine with a grade of 24 percent or more, some as precipitous as 31.5 percent - wreak havoc on your transmission, emergency brake and nerves. Cable cars and streetcars rumble through traffic lanes. And the last available street parking space is usually gobbled up by, oh, 6:17 a.m. or so.

A much wiser course is to lace up some comfortable shoes.

``It's a very walkable city, despite the hills,'' said Robert Mack, founder of Foot!, a tour company built around stand-up comics. ``It's compact. It's neighborhoody. It is a city that grew quickly in a pre-car era, so it lends itself to walking.''

For visitors and residents alike, there is no need to wander aimlessly and cluelessly.

Dozens of guided walking tours are available, and the quality is extremely high. The merit of any walking tour hinges almost entirely on the competence of the guide, and there seems to be an army of knowledgeable, personable ambassadors leading knots of inquisitive souls through the streets of San Francisco.

Depending on your areas of interest, you can readily plunge into the city's bawdy history, ethnicity, art, architecture, literature, pop culture or culinary heritage.

So everybody try to keep up now. Off we go:

City Guides

What a terrific resource in this city - a nonprofit program of free walking tours, led by volunteer guides with a passion for their subject matter. Sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library as a project of the Tides Center, they're offered 52 weeks a year, nearly every day, and span the gamut from familiar subjects (Chinatown, North Beach, the Golden Gate Bridge, Nob Hill) to more obscure ones (Sutro Forest, the murals of Coit Tower, art deco in the Marina).

Best of all, no advance reservations are necessary. ``You can be totally spontaneous,'' said City Guides executive director Laura Schroeder. ``Just grab your bag, meet at a street corner and join other folks on a great tour.''

The volunteer guides go through an extensive training program, and we've never encountered one who was just mailing in the duty. Most are passionate souls like Greg Pabst, who teaches advertising and public relations classes at the University of San Francisco and has been volunteering as a guide for 17 years.

``It's not a docent program,'' he said. ``There's a written copy of every tour, and you can do that if you want. But most of us are kind of hams and love to tell stories, so we're doing our own research most of the time. We collect our own stories. When I do Gold Rush City, I tell a ghost story. I'm not giving a history lecture. People are here to have fun, and I'm going to try to spook them a little.''

Mangia

Some walking tours can have a breezy, superficial feel to them - ``This building dates to ... Over there is where ...'' All the more so if the walking pace is brisk.

The Mangia North Beach Tour, led by restaurant writer GraceAnn Walden, is more of a languid neighborhood stroll. In 5 1/2 hours, the tour covers only a few blocks of San Francisco's Italian enclave, but it delves deeply beneath the neighborhood's surface, poking around in shops and chatting up bakers and butchers.

While standing outside Saints Peter and Paul Church, Walden said, ``You hear people say, 'The Chinese drove the Italians out.' It's not true. After World War II, with the GI bill, people wanted to move to the suburbs and own a house. The next immigrants moved in. Today this church has Masses in three languages. It will get 100 people at its English Mass, 300 people at its Cantonese Mass, and maybe 30 people, mostly old, at its Italian Mass.''

The tour delivers a jarring progression of tastes. In order: cookies (at 10:30 a.m.), coffee, Parmesan cheese, Sicilian sausage, salty focaccia bread, sweet truffles, then a lunch of antipasti and red wine at Washington Square Bar & Grill. I would have preferred to crisscross the neighborhood to sample those in a more sensible order.

But the small, folksy establishments that serve up the morsels are delightful nonetheless. We were ushered into the kitchen of Liguria Bakery to sample the focaccia among the brick ovens. And at XOX Truffles, owner Jean-Marc Gorce was ladling creamy chocolate onto his creations. ``Try the cognac!'' he said, proffering one gooey truffle directly from the mixing bowl.

Foot!

An ornate Victorian dwelling loomed behind him, painted a funky lavender, as guide Nick Leonard revealed that this was where the Grateful Dead holed up in the band's formative period.

``The police raided this house and shocked everyone when they found a small amount of marijuana,'' he said. ``It shocked everyone because it was a small amount.''

We had chosen ``Flashback: A Mind-Blowing Trip Through Haight-Ashbury of the 1960s.'' It's one of several comedian-led Foot! tours, which delve into such subjects as the strippers and beats of North Beach or San Francisco's original red-light district. They're pricey - $30 for a two-hour jaunt - but fun.

Infusing the tours with an element of humor, said founder Robert Mack, ``makes it more accessible. A lot of history can just be a lot of dates. We try to make it as entertaining as it can be.''

On our tour of the Haight, Leonard, clad in a tie-dyed T-shirt, wasn't busting off thigh-slapper punch lines, but his droll, clever sense of humor seemed more appropriate to the setting. ``San Francisco is known as Paris of the West,'' he said as we set out, ``so be careful where you step.''

Along the way, Leonard pointed out the pink Victorian that was the former home of Janis Joplin, paged through a notebook of psychedelic concert posters and vintage photos, and, best of all, played archival music from a boom box slung over his shoulder.

Though the fidelity of the music was atrocious - a tinny, scratchy cassette tape - the audio time travel included obscure snippets of the Great Society, Grace Slick's band before the Jefferson Airplane; Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, forerunner of the Grateful Dead; and the Amazing Charlatans, a Dan Hicks/George Hunter collaboration that is credited with pioneering San Francisco's psychedelic rock sound.

Mission murals

The transformation of Balmy Alley (the actual name of the street) began in the early 1970s, when a muralist living here began painting the surfaces of the narrow passageway - walls, fences, garage doors, buildings. It since has been transformed in brilliant colors, exotic images and poignant themes.

These and other vivid murals of the Mission District are perhaps best perused with a representative of Precita Eyes Mural Arts & Visitors Center, an organization that oversees the work and trains many of the artists.

As we made our way down the alley in a persistent rain, tour coordinator Patricia Rose noted that many of the murals are political in nature, dealing with the struggles of immigrants in their native Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Philippines.

As for mediums employed, there are no constraints whatsoever. Rose pointed out one mural in which the artist alternately used brush, roller, aerosol can and fingertips.

While examining the murals, it's easy to forget that you're in a working, urban alley, not a gallery. This point comes home when a door in the middle of an elaborate scene suddenly opens and a resident steps through on the way to fetch groceries.

Wok Wiz

There is no substitute for exploring an ethnic neighborhood in the company of someone who grew up there. Accordingly, chef and cookbook author Shirley Fong-Torres provides an insider's glimpse behind the colorful facades of Chinatown.

Tour participants learn of the history and culture of the neighborhood, with visits to herb shops and a Buddhist/Taoist temple, a sit-down tea tasting, and a dim sum lunch at an establishment that might not even print its menu in English.

``We like to bring Chinatown to life for our guests who don't realize it's such a vibrant community,'' said Fong-Torres, who offers several other cuisine-based tours.

Dashiell Hammett

Don Herron's got this tour down cold. Clad in a weathered trench coat and fedora, he leads pulp-fiction buffs into the shadowy world of private investigator Sam Spade.

Hammett lived in San Francisco in the 1920s, and many real-life features of the city made it into his stories. In fact, the Post Street apartment where Hammett lived is recognizable down to the doorknobs as Spade's home in the author's most famous work, ``The Maltese Falcon.''

The apartment's current owner is agreeable to visitors, and our entire tour soon found itself inside Sam's cramped quarters. Was it coincidence that there was an empty half-pint of Jim Beam on a well-worn end table?

Hammett devotees will find noir nirvana on this tour, though casual readers might long for the Cliffs Notes. The noon tour runs four-plus hours, and Herron mines his literary turf in exhaustive detail - he talked for 85 minutes before we got to the first site identified in a Hammett story. He can also get persnickety if bumped off his spiel. Ask about something before he is prepared to tell it and you'll likely hear, ``Just wait, just wait, we'll get to that.''

A tour highlight is a visit to Burritt Alley, where Miles Archer, Spade's partner in ``The Maltese Falcon,'' was plugged by a femme fatale. Herron recites a long stretch of the story from memory, and you can almost feel the chill of the fog in the story. Then, at the climactic moment, he whips a rubber-dart gun out of his coat pocket and guns down one of the tour guests.

In the novel, the killer simply melted into the streets of San Francisco.

On foot, of course.

Eric Noland, [phone]

eric.noland(at)dailynews.com

IF YOU GO

CITY GUIDES: Tours are held 52 weeks of the year, nearly every day, rain or shine. There is an expanded schedule in October and May to correspond with generally favorable weather. Tours are free (though tips for the volunteer guides are welcomed) and last 1 1/2 to two hours. No advance reservations are taken - just show up at the prescribed time and place. For a schedule of tours, visit www.sfcityguides.com. Tour schedules are also available at all library branches. To arrange to have one mailed to you, call [phone].

FOOT!: The ``Flashback'' tour of Haight-Ashbury is offered Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m., and most Wednesdays at 3 p.m. Tours last two hours and cost $30 per person. Advance reservations are required: [phone]. Consult the calendar and get details on other tours at www.foottours.com.

DASHIELL HAMMETT: The tour is offered Sundays in the months of September and May, though special tours - often at least one per month - are available. The tour begins at noon and lasts at least four hours. The cost is $10 per person. No reservations are taken; just show up at the northwest corner of the new main library in the San Francisco Civic Center, 100 Larkin St. Information and special tour dates: www.donherron.com.

MANGIA: The tour is held Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and includes all tastes and lunch. The cost is $75 per person and advance reservations are a must: [phone] or gaw(at)sbcglobal.net. Other food-related tours are also available.

MISSION MURALS: Tours are offered Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. They last 1 1/2 hours and cost $10 for adults on the morning tours, $12 on the afternoon tours. Precita Eyes Mural Arts & Visitors Center is located at 2981 24th St. www.precitaeyes.org (click on Main Studio); [phone].

WOK WIZ: The Chinatown tour is held daily from 10 a.m. to roughly 1 p.m. The cost of the tour is $40, including lunch, $28 without lunch. Reduced rates for kids under age 11. Reservations are required: [phone]. Other food-related tours are also available. Details for all at www.wokwiz.com.

CAPTION(S):

11 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- 3 -- color) San Francisco's wealth of walking tours proves glimpses of Haight-Ashbury, the colorful murals of the Mission District, above right, North Beach in the tow of City Guides' Greg Pabst, above left, and the shadowy haunts of Sam Spade with guide Don Herron, left.

(4 -- 7) A boy becomes a blur as he runs by the murals of Balmy Alley, left, a popular walking tour destination in San Francisco; the Italian French Bakery in North Beach, above, makes an inviting stop; Mike Jones leads a tour at the Palace Hotel, below, and tourists gather at a lavender Victorian in Haight-Ashbury, below left, that was home to the Grateful Dead.

(8 -- 11) San Francisco City Hall, above, is a popular walking tour destination; Barbara Lowe of City Guides offers insights about the Ferry Building, top left; Shirley Fong-Torres' Wok Wiz tour takes visitors to sights in Chinatown such as a Buddhist/Taoist temple, bottom near left; and Jean-Marc Gorce ladles chocolate onto some treats at XOX Truffles, one of the stops on the Mangia tour, bottom far left.

Jay Solmonson/Staff Photographer

Eric Noland/Travel Editor

Michelle Le/Staff Photographer

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IF YOU GO (see text)