Cow Hollow

Cow Hollow is a peaceful environment filled with yuppies and young families. It is a leafy, well-maintained neighborhood made up of preserved Edwardian and Victorian houses. The residents are mainly upper to middle class with houses running in a few million dollars. For those renting, studio apartments are on the upswing and can run you a pretty penny. Cow Hollow also carries over some of its charm from neighborhood communities including the Marina to the north.

Mostly, the neighborhood is rather quiet with the exception of the Union Street’s commercial drag. The area is a shopper’s dream, comprised of fashion boutiques, cafes, motels, beauty spas, antique stores and other designer shops. At night, Union Street is buzzing with nightlife. It offers plenty of fine dining restaurants, trendy dive bars and expensive wine taverns. Bar None is one of the more fashion forward sports bars in the area, where yuppies come to play beer pong and chat with other yuppies.

During June, the district shuts down a couple blocks to host Union Street Fair. Bunches of local merchants come to sell their paintings, crafts and ornamentation. The event also serves an array of ethnic cuisines and offers plenty of live music. However, over the last couple of years, the fair has decreased in size due to the economic downturn.

For public transit needs, the 41 and 45 traverses Union Street and then heads down south to downtown San Francisco. For those who own their cars (which many do), street parking is rather abundant.

If you’re from outside of SF, you don’t hear much about Cow Hollow. It doesn’t have the Palace of Fine Arts like the Marina District to the north and it isn’t really a family neighborhood like Pacific Heights to the south. It hasn’t had movies named after it like the Presidio on the west (or Pacific Heights too). And it isn’t quite the destination for weekend partiers from the burbs that North Beach on the east is. As a matter of fact, if you live just across the Bay Bridge or down in San Jose, you could live here for years without ever even hearing about Cow Hollow. It is pretty much a SF enigma.

Those who know SF well, however, know this neighborhood as the place where young professionals who are either single or just married and maybe with a kid on the way live before moving up the hill to Pacific Heights. You might think of this area as the minor leagues for the Pacific Height Pros if that makes any sense. The differences have to do with age in part. The typical Cow Hollow resident is a bit younger than the typical Pacific Heights resident.

Cow Hollow is pretty similar to the Marina, except it's not on the water. The residents are mostly young, professional people. This is not really a neighborhood for families if that's what you're looking for. Additionally, you're going to have to pay more to live in this prized area. One bedroom apartments are probably going to cost $2300+ in rent. The high prices are what you pay to live close to all the bars and restaurants that are nearby.

The shopping and restaurants are great in this neighborhood. I especially love Union Street where most of the shops are located. My favorite restaurant, which I heavily recommend, is Betelnut. They serve upscale Chinese food and great drinks. It will be a little bit pricey though (the theme of the area).

If you are looking for a quiet neighborhood, then this isn't the place. On Thursday through Saturday nights, you'll find hoards of young people crowding the street. Hoards of young DRUNK people. I once saw a girl throwing up all over the street here.

Cow Hollow is one of the ideal neighborhoods to live at in San Francisco. However, mostly for those who have a big enough paycheck to spend for the living costs here. I’d say that Cow Hollow is mostly for those who are of the younger generation with a good job who also want to raise a family in a quiet area. I’ve done some private work here in Cow Hollow before for someone, and through that experience I’ve seen that there are a good number of singles living here as well. Although raising a family in Cow Hollow is the ideal place and definitely a great place to, there are few places to take the kids out. There are few parks, during my working time in Cow Hollow I rarely saw of any recreational areas. Shopping and eating here in Cow Hollow is aplenty. I’ve been to a several restaurants such as Kara’s Cupcakes, Mel’s Drive-In, and a Thai restaurant (that I forget the name of, forgive me). Great food and definitely a great neighborhood to enjoy the food in. Lombard Street also runs through Cow Hollow, although the steep curvy hills of Lombard Street are not in this neighborhood, though you’ll eventually reach them as you travel down Lombard Street.

In many respects, Cow Hollow mirrors its counterpart to the north, the Marina District. It’s a gathering spot for the young and well-heeled, with a chic shopping street (Union) paralleling rowdy, dowdy Lombard a few blocks away, in the way Chestnut in the Marina does. But Cow Hollow differs in that it has hills, older homes, and a whiff of old money that the Marina’s air of nouveau riche lacks.

The name is historic, one of those monikers that seems more a misnomer in modern times. But at one point in its history, Cow Hollow did indeed have cows. In the mid-1800s, the area’s springs (earlier on, the place was called Spring Valley) pooled into a small lake, and the surrounding grassy meadows served as pasture for dairy herds that supplied the city’s population. By the 1890s, however, the push outward from central San Francisco, especially by well-to-do merchants, politicians, and influential citizens, had transformed the locale into a prime residential area. The cows were banished in 1891, and some of the neighborhood’s more spectacular Victorian homes filled in the fields. Union Street, once a dirt trail leading to the Presidio, became a paved main road through the area and has, since the resurgence of the district in the 1950s and ’60s, served as a prime shopping and restaurant corridor.

The great quake of 1906 spared many of Cow Hollow’s homes and landmarks: the Vedanta Temple (at Webster and Filbert streets), an extravagance of domed turrets and arched galleries, was built in 1905 and is said to be the first Hindu temple in the Western Hemisphere; St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church (at Union and Steiner streets) where one of the original Cow Hollow springs still flows in the Eternal Fountain; Octagon House (at Gough and Union streets), built in 1861 and one of two such houses remaining in San Francisco (the other in Russian Hill), was acquired and restored in the 1950s by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in California and is today a museum whose unusual collections include decorative arts and furnishings from America’s colonial and federal periods as well as documents from early colonial history, notably the signatures of 54 of the original 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence; and the Sherman House (on Green near Fillmore), among the best examples of San Francisco’s vanishing Italianate Victorians.

Today, Cow Hollow is an area of well-maintained, often opulently restored homes and small apartment houses. U.S. Census Bureau figures show the neighborhood to be overwhelmingly white (86 percent), with a small minority of Asians (9 percent) and other racial groups. Young singles have been attracted to the neighborhood for many years, and many have stayed as they have found mates and begun raising families (the sidewalks outside Union Street cafes are often choked with tandem strollers and toddler-toting parents). Almost everyone here is educated (with more than 75 percent having a bachelor’s degree or better), young-ish (56 percent are between 25 and 44 years old), and financially comfortable (median household income is $150,000), though three-fourths of all residents rent, rather than own, their homes.

Though the boundaries of Cow Hollow are not particularly well defined (and depend on who is doing the defining), Union Street is universally considered both the main commercial drag as well as the dividing line between Cow Hollow’s more upper-crust (and steeper) southern half and its less affluent (flatter, though still trendy) northern half. It is among San Francisco’s more boutique-heavy blocks, with a dizzying assortment of clothing shops (including Armani Exchange, Bebe, Lululemon Athletica, et al.), numerous restaurants and cafes, a number of well-known watering holes (including Perry’s, which longtime owner Perry Butler has nurtured since 1969 as an upscale neighborhood bar, and Bus Stop Saloon, a quintessential sports bar), and several fitness centers. Although the Metro Theatre, built in 1924 and a visual landmark on Union (between Webster and Buchanan streets), has been shuttered as a cinema, it is slated for renovation as a fitness center and its owners plan to keep the marquee and many interior details, including the historic murals. Meters regulate parking on and around busy Union Street; elsewhere, residents get a “K” parking permit and occupy their on-street spaces (when they can be found) religiously.

Filbert Street also has a number of eateries and watering holes, along with a Real Food market, known for its organic produce and gourmet food items. Along with Greenwich Street, it has most of the area’s late 20th-century buildings, blocky apartment units or small single-family houses that look as if they might have been airlifted here from Daly City. This rather treeless, boxy section of Cow Hollow is redeemed somewhat by the presence of two side streets that run three blocks each (between Steiner and Buchanan)—Pixley and Moulton. Along with the charming Charlton Court (off Union between Buchanan and Laguna), these little streets resemble alleys, really: leafy, low-scale, quaint and quiet refuges from the bustle of the surrounding area.

Lombard Street, considered the northern limit of Cow Hollow, is a main off-ramp from the Golden Gate Bridge. With its collection of hotels, motels, fast-food eateries or more established restaurants, along with gas stations, cleaners, and a post office, it provides the neighborhood with services but little visual or esthetic appeal.

As for green spaces in the area, the tiny, picket-fenced Allyne Park on Green Street (behind the Octagon House) is the only park contained entirely within Cow Hollow. But the neighborhood adjoins the hundreds of acres of green space offered by the Presidio directly to the west. The Lyon Street steps, descending from Pacific Heights, also afford residents some topiary and great views of the bay and surrounding city going up or coming down its two-block stairway.

The Cow Hollow Association strives to “protect and preserve the residential character of one of San Francisco's distinctive neighborhoods,” according to its mission statement. In the last decade, that has meant serving as a watchdog over such projects as the Letterman Digital Arts Center and other projects in the adjacent Presidio as well as the realignment of Doyle Drive as it concerns traffic flow in and out of the area. The association has also raised concerns that the inns and motels along Lombard not be redeveloped in such a way as to negatively affect the neighborhood’s character.

Cow Hollow has two sizable grade schools: St. Vincent de Paul (private, K-8, Catholic) and Sherman Elementary School (public, K-5; it got a 9 out of 10 rating by GreatSchools). Tule Elk Park Child Development Center, on Greenwich at Webster, is run by the San Francisco Unified School District and offers preschool kids an art- and recreation-centered program, with an award-winning garden playground. Older children from the area often attend one of the reputation-driven elementary/middle and high schools just up the hill in Pacific Heights.

Public transportation options are good for Cow Hollow residents, especially those who don’t mind commuting via bus to jobs downtown or in the Financial District. The 41 and 45 buses traverse Union Street and then connect to Columbus Avenue for quick trips to Union Square (45) or Embarcadero Center (41). The 22 bus makes its way north and south mostly along Fillmore Street from the Mission District to Marina Green on the bay. And the 76 joins Golden Gate Transit buses going up and down Lombard and then Van Ness for treks to Civic Center.

Most crimes are clustered along main commercial streets like Union and Lombard, where San Francisco Police Department figures show that disturbing the peace and vandalism are fairly common, with occasional burglaries and robberies in a recent three-month period. Assaults, especially along bar-heavy Union Street, occur about once a week, though no homicides have been committed in the last three years.

To live here obviously requires money: single-family homes south of Union Street range from $2.5 million for a modest two-bedroom, two-bath to $4 million-plus for a Spanish colonial four-bedroom, 4-bathroom mini-mansion on an inclined street with views of the bay. Condos (one bed/one bath, and generally in buildings north of Union and near Van Ness or Lombard) go for considerably less, in the $500,000 to $800,000 range. Rentals are comparably pricey: studios go for $1,300 a month, with one-bedroom apartments fetching up to $2,500 and two-bedrooms going for $3,200 and up. True, it’s a lot to pay to rent a roof over one’s head, but given the neighborhood’s amenities, it’s unlikely many people spend much time at home.

I grew up in Cow Hollow it's a very nice and peaceful neighborhood.The neighbors are great and they usually mind their own business.It's a great environment for families with kids.Cow Hollow School preschool is excellent and offers parent participation.I personally like to get involved with my child's education.There are a lot of fun activity's you can do here in your spare time.We have nice restaurants,stores,boutiques and wellness centers and spa's.Allyne Park is a nice place to just sit and relax in the middle of all the rush.I couldn't imagine living anywhere else!

Cow Hollow is a rather nice and affluent neighborhood in San Francisco. Its located near the extremely affluent neighborhood of Russian Hill and is also relatively close to the bay. The area is rather residential but there are lots of hotels, inns, and motels in the area. It features many large old homes and lots of older flats and apartments. The major area of interest is around Union Street which has great shopping and lots of spas. There are also several good restaurants such as Brazen Head and Liverpool Lil's.