This two-hour tour transforms Montgomery Street and Telegraph Hill into a hands-on exploration of how the conditions of modernity have shaped San Francisco since the late nineteenth century. These conditions include finance, mass media, real estate speculation, surveillance, automobiles, and disaster risk. You will learn to distinguish between modernity, which refers to the social and economic changes of the modern era, and modernism, which refers to the artistic and architectural movements that respond to those conditions. You will also learn how these conditions show up in the city’s daily life.

On this tour, architecture, painting, sculpture, film, and music are not just stops along the way—they help tell the story. You will see how steel-frame towers, glass curtain walls, privately owned public open spaces, noir and disaster films, and social realism murals reveal the larger systems at work in our city. By the end of the walk, you will see downtown San Francisco as a place shaped by modernity and reflected by modernism. You will see how modernist styles both celebrate progress, like light, speed, and order, and question its mental, environmental, and social costs.

The tour begins at Market and Montgomery and travels up Montgomery Street to Coit Tower. The tour will formally close at the end of Montgomery Street below the Filbert Steps. Participants are encouraged to climb the steps and visit the Coit Tower murals, which reflect the conditions of modernity discussed on the tour.