Steep streets and literary ghosts define the hill rising around you in San Francisco. Russian Hill got its name from a small Russian cemetery discovered here in the 1850s, believed to contain the graves of Russian fur traders or sailors who died while operating out of Fort Ross, the Russian colonial outpost 80 miles north of San Francisco. The cemetery was never found after the 1906 earthquake.
The hill became a haven for writers and artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Jack London, Ina Coolbrith — California's first poet laureate — and Gelett Burgess, who wrote the nonsense poem about the purple cow, all lived on Russian Hill. Macondray Lane, a narrow unpaved alley accessed by wooden steps and canopied by trees a few blocks from here, was the inspiration for Barbary Lane in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels, the serialized San Francisco story that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle beginning in 1976 and became the defining fictional portrait of the city's bohemian, sexually liberated post-Stonewall culture. Maupin lived near here while writing it.
The lane itself is one of the quietest spots in the city — a garden alley where cats sleep on wooden decks and the city noise drops away entirely.