Another San Francisco icon – Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill.  The 210 foot tower sits atop the affluent neighborhood – with the land gifted to the city in the early 1900s by a wealthy socialite who enjoyed chasing fires (according to Wikipedia), Lillie Coit.  The tower is a monument to the city’s firefighters, who took on special meaning after the intense fires that followed the 1906 earthquake.

I’ll share this little tidbit of info from wikipedia, mostly because I found it quite entertaining: “Lillie Coit was one of the more eccentric characters in the history of North Beach and Telegraph Hill, smoking cigars and wearing trousers long before it was socially acceptable for women to do so. She was an avid gambler and often dressed like a man in order to gamble in the males-only establishments that dotted North Beach. Coit was reputed to have shaved her head so her wigs would fit better.”  Whatever the history and whatever Lillie’s true habits were, the tower is a gorgeous addition to the SF skyline.