Literary places in San Francisco

Mapped

• 1899

  McTeague

  Frank Norris

  Polk Street, block by block, above a dental parlour. Norris pins his people to specific corners of the 1890s city and the flats of the East Bay, most of it erased by the 1906 earthquake a few years after he wrote it. The story then flees south and east, out of the setting entirely, to end in Death Valley.

  6 places →

• 1930

  The Maltese Falcon

  Dashiell Hammett

  Hammett worked the case out on a real city grid. Sam Spade's office looks down Sutter Street; his partner is shot in Burritt Alley, a real dead-end off Bush Street that now carries a plaque; he eats chops at John's Grill on Ellis Street, which still keeps a Falcon room upstairs; and the black bird itself comes ashore off a burning ship at the waterfront. The pursuit of the jewelled statuette runs a tight circuit of downtown San Francisco.

  5 places →