Super Bowl week sightseeing and adventure goes well beyond football in the San Francisco Bay Area

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Take a stroll down The Embarcadero on San Francisco's spectacular waterfront to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market for plentiful food options, people watching and souvenir shopping.

Travel farther outside the city for renowned wine tasting or a breathtaking drive along the coastline.

Fans coming to the Bay Area for the Super Bowl will have no shortage of options for great eats and outdoor adventure, all within a couple of hours of San Francisco.

Sure, the week centers around football — it's Patriots vs. Seahawks at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara on Feb. 8 — yet anyone visiting this week can seek out entertainment ahead of Super Bowl Sunday.

Make sure to hit the Ferry Building on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday for one of the most famous farmers markets in the country, with both indoor and outdoor food and shopping options.

From world-renowned vineyards and wineries to the north in the Napa Valley region to spectacular ocean vistas to the south along 17-Mile Drive on the Monterey Peninsula providing views of picturesque Pebble Beach Golf Links, there's something for everybody. There is a fee for cars on 17-Mile Drive, while walking and biking are free. It can be foggy during the winter season.

Walking the Golden Gate Bridge is always a popular choice, but bring a windbreaker or light rain jacket just in case to combat the chill factor. For anyone eager to explore former prison Alcatraz, the tour leaving from iconic Pier 39 can fill up fast and should be booked in advance — especially for the weekends.

At Alcatraz, patrons can not only go inside the cells but hear audio of the voices of those formerly incarcerated at the iconic federal penitentiary that closed in 1963. You can decide whether to believe whether anyone might have ever escaped through the choppy bay water some 1 1/2 miles off San Francisco's shore.

A hike beneath the towering, old-growth coast redwoods at Muir Woods National Monument is less than an hour's drive away in Marin County, offering hiking and history in a treasured spot protected as a national monument since 1908. There, you can see the cross section of an old redwood showing its growth rings to better understand the tree's life cycles and how historical events affect them.

That's just one of many available outdoor activities to do all year long, and if you're ready to go a little farther, the Napa wine country is just more than an hour away.

Napa and Sonoma offer wine tasting and even an opportunity to see the lush landscape by riding the Napa Valley Wine Train.

Back in the city, a jaunt to the Presidio will provide access to some of San Francisco's deep history from the former Spanish military post, while Golden Gate Park offers opportunities for walking and fitness.

There also is the predominantly gay Castro District where visionary, politician, and civil and human rights leader Harvey Milk came to fame.

— Take a ferry ride from the Ferry Building in San Francisco to Oakland's Jack London Square waterfront neighborhood or go in the other direction to Sausalito for lunch — a chance to see some of the city's famous spots like Coit Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge from the water.

— Head straight for North Beach in San Francisco to find top-notch Italian food options, such as Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, where waiting is worth it. This area is also home to City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, a beloved spot founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 where readers, writers, artists and activists immediately gravitated.

— San Francisco's world-famous vintage cable cars are a fun way to travel up the steep city hills and a huge tourist attraction.

— Venture to the Mission District and Mission Street to discover some of the best burrito options in the city.

— If you're staying in the East Bay, Fentons Creamery in Oakland is an old-fashioned ice cream parlor with charm and generous scoops — but prepare to wait if you want a table. Ice cream can be purchased at the counter and taken to go.

— For anyone with teenagers wanting to take college tours, both Stanford and California in Berkeley have beautiful campuses with plenty of sightseeing nearby.

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People walk in front of the carousel at Pier 39 in San Francisco, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

A couple walk along a pathway beneath giant redwoods at the Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County, Calif., Monday, March 31, 2008. Muir Woods, just a dozen miles north of San Francisco, gets a million visitors a year and the sounds of Mandarin, French, Spanish or a score of other languages are often heard in the park at any time. Mostly they seem to be saying the same thing: These trees are big. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

A boat sails in front of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2013, file photo, Roberto Castro, right, walks to his ball on the tenth green of the Pebble Beach Golf Links during a practice round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am golf tournament in Pebble Beach, Calif. It's played on one of the world's most picturesque courses on the first weekend after the Super Bowl, offering magnificent views of the Monterey Peninsula to golf fans still digging out from the snow. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Two visitors enjoy a view of the Pacific Ocean from a cliff along 17 Mile Drive on Wednesday, March 19, 2014, in Pebble Beach , Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

In this Oct. 4, 2019 photo, Cabernet Sauvignon wine grapes that are almost ready for harvest are held at Wente Vineyards in Livermore, Calif. American wine producers are being squeezed out of the fast-growing Chinese market, thanks to President Donald Trump's trade war with China. Since the trade dispute began last year, China has raised tariffs on American wines three times in retaliation for U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Those Chinese tariffs have made U.S. wine much more expensive, leading to a steep drop in sales. Among the casualties is California's Wente Vineyards, a family-run wine business that was among the first U.S. winemakers to export to China 25 years ago. (AP Photo/Terry Chea)

A residence sits on a hilltop overlooking a vineyard in Napa, Calif., Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008. Beautiful Napa is experiencing foreclosures, plunging housing prices, unheard of drops in home sales and the nervous sense of foreboding that has spread across the country like a flu. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Rainbow banners hang in the Castro District Thursday, June 25, 2020, in San Francisco. As San Francisco Pride turns 50 without its signature parade down Market Street and Civic Center party due to the coronavirus pandemic, LGBTQ individuals and their allies are marking the milestone in other ways. Pride weekend will be kicked off with a pink torch procession from Oakland to San Francisco. Mayors London Breed and Libby Schaaf are scheduled to take part. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

The Golden Gate Bridge is seen in San Francisco, Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

NEW YORK (AP) — On a recent weeknight, three tenants of an aging Bronx building were trading apartment horror stories inside a packed ballroom lined with city bureaucrats.

The occasion was the third in a series of “rental rip-off hearings,” a new forum launched by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for disgruntled renters to air their complaints directly to housing officials — and in some cases, the mayor himself.

As she waited in line, Gulhayo Yuldosheva said she worried that noxious mold in her apartment had worsened her child’s asthma. Nearby, her downstairs neighbor, Marina Quiroz, was showing a video of rats scurrying through her kitchen to a representative of the city’s tenant protection office.

Ann Maitin, a longtime resident of the same building, had just met with the mayor.

“He let me go over my three minutes,” she said, holding up a spiral notebook’s worth of grievances.

Mamdani, a democratic socialist swept into office on a promise of zealous tenant advocacy, framed the event as a struggle session for renters, assuring the standing room only crowd that their stories would guide the city's efforts “to actually hold landlords accountable when they don’t follow the law."

To the residents of 705 Gerard Avenue, this raised a practical problem: No one seemed to know who actually owned their building.

“It feels like such a basic question,” said Maitin, a retired Verizon technician who recently organized the building’s tenant association. “You’d think we’d have the right to that information.”

Their situation is hardly unique. As corporate owners and investor groups have grown their share of the rental market in New York City, they are increasingly shielding their identities behind limited liability companies, or LLCs.

The practice, which has also been spreading nationally, is legal. But experts warn it could complicate Mamdani’s promised crackdown, making it harder for the city and tenants to track the chronically negligent owners whose buildings the mayor has vowed to target and even seize.

“There are these big slumlords that everyone knows are doing predatory investment, but pinning them down is going to be difficult, for the LLC reason,” said Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. “That’s a problem for the administration, and it’s even worse for tenants.”

For Yuldosheva and her neighbors, finding their landlord is one of many problems afflicting their six-story building near Yankee Stadium.

Heat and hot water outages are regular enough that some tenants keep a thermometer on their fridge and the city’s complaint hotline on speed dial. Common areas are often filthy, and increasingly populated by drug users. Getting help with an urgent maintenance issue “feels like waiting for Christmas in July,” said Maitin.

During a monthslong elevator outage, a tenant who uses a wheelchair, Tommy Rodriguez, said he was forced to “slide down the steps, like a kid.” Calls to the building management about a repair timeline went unanswered, he said.

Growing up in the building in the 1980s, Rodriguez recalled the previous landlord as a friendly and responsive neighborhood presence.

“This felt like a home before,” Rodriguez said. “Now they treat us the same as the rats.”

A large rodent had recently chewed a hole through his couch cushion. He handled the extermination himself, with a two-by-four.

Recently, tenants received a clue about their landlord, following the partial collapse of another Bronx building. The man identified in news stories as the owner of that building, David Kleiner, shared a Brooklyn office with their building manager, Binyomin Herzl.

A handful of tenants visited each of the building’s 72 units, logging an array of decrepit conditions and unusual alterations.

“We didn’t want to become the next news story,” said Yuldosheva, pointing to a crack in the wall of a bedroom shared by her three children — a result, she feared, of the subway that rumbles just below her windows.

Lawsuits show that Herzl has been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings, several of which were found by a judge to pose an imminent hazard.

Reached by phone, Herzl said he didn't own any of those properties, but simply acted as a middleman between tenants and the true owners, whom he declined to list. “There’s no one landlord,” he said. “It’s a group of investors.”

Kleiner, who was previously featured on the city’s “worst landlord” list, confirmed his partial ownership of 705 Gerard in a brief phone call, but declined further comment.

Herzl, meanwhile, attributed the tenants’ complaints to “normal wear and tear” of a nearly century old building. He said Mamdani should focus on improving the city’s public housing, rather than going after private landlords.

“Our buildings look like five star hotels against his,” he added.

When landlords refuse to address a serious violation, like heat or hot water outages, the city can step in and order repairs, then bill the owner directly.

In the last three years, inspectors have ordered emergency repairs at 38 buildings that list either Herzl or Kleiner as an owner, according to records provided by the city’s housing department. The men have been billed $446,521 for those repairs.

Mamdani has proposed using such fines as a vehicle to bring distressed rental properties under city stewardship, by aggressively pursuing liens on delinquent landlords and buying up their portfolios through foreclosure auctions.

Just as the city can shut down unsanitary restaurants, Mamdani has said, landlords that “repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk will not be allowed to operate in New York City — with no exceptions."

In reality, the process is resource-intensive and legally fraught. It is made more complex by the nest of LLCs often used by landlords to obfuscate the full scope of their portfolios, according to Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

“It’d be great to have a better sense of who owns the buildings that we are regulating and overseeing,” she said.

State legislation that would have made it easier to identify LLC owners was recently vetoed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul amid pressure from landlords.

Kenny Burgos, the CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a landlord lobbying group, said Mamdani’s tenant proposals — including freezing the rent for regulated tenants — would force landlords to cut back on maintenance and services.

“That’s going to take away from the elevator budget, the boiler budget, the heating budget,” he said. “It’s a question of math: These buildings are crumbling because of policy, not because of bad landlords.”

He characterized the rental rip-off hearings as “show trials” that took a “tribal approach” to the city’s affordable housing crisis.

Despite the combative branding — “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords,” blares one promotion — the Bronx event mostly resembled a standard constituent service night: City officials fielded questions about local laws, helped residents with paperwork and connected them to service providers.

Maitin left feeling “glad to be heard by someone who can actually do something about the problem,” but felt it was too early to tell “if it’s all talk."

The next morning, she was surprised to find the building’s superintendent applying a fresh coat of paint to a staircase. Outside, workers were removing scaffolding that had been in front of the building for years.

“I think they caught wind of the rental rip-off,” Maitin said. “They’re scared.”

Gulhayo Yuldosheva's children get ready for school in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Francisco Medina, left, cleans his apartment next to his relative, Maria Frias, right, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Gulhayo Yuldosheva, 33 , center right, Marina Quiroz, 65, top, pose for a portrait with other two residents in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Tommy Rodriguez, right, talks to his relative, Francisco Medina, left, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Marina Quiroz stands in her living room in a Bronx apartment building, where tenants report maintenance issues, pest infestations, Tuesday, March 17, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)