Looming above Cow Hollow on one side and Japantown on the other, wealthy PACIFIC HEIGHTS is home to some of the city’s most monumental Victorian piles and stone mansions – a millionaires’ ghetto, beautifully poised around two windswept parks. A local joke has it that when the bright young things of the Marina grow up and have kids, they climb the hill to Pacific Heights and look down on all the fun they used to have. Even when these hills were bare back in the 1860s, their panoramic views of the ocean earmarked them as fashionable territory as soon as the gradient-conquering cable cars linked them with downtown. The lavishly proportioned mansions that teeter precipitously atop these hills today are the chosen domains of stockbrokers, business magnates, and the odd best-selling novelist, like Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, who set up his one-man fiction factory here, producing 82 novels that sold some three hundred million copies.

West of Fillmore Street, lower Pacific Heights is centered on restful Alta Plaza Park, at Clay and Steiner Streets, where local dog-walkers earn their keep by exercising pampered pooches. You can enjoy good views of St Mary’s Cathedral and Civic Center from its crest or play a game of tennis on the upper courts. Barbra Streisand fans will recognize the park as the site of the famous scene in What’s Up Doc?, in which she drives the car down the steps on the south side. Look closely and you’ll see the cracks left in the steps after the scene was shot here. North of the park, the territory becomes solidly residential, home to well-tended gardens and immaculate houses. West, at the intersection of Broadway and Lyon, a set of steps leads down a steep incline, passing several grandiose homes and offering a magnificent view of the Palace of Fine Arts and the Bay.

South of Alta Plaza park, at the furthest reaches of Pacific Heights, lies San Francisco’s most beautiful and overlooked church, St Dominic’s, at the nondescript intersection of Bush and Steiner streets. Though established in the mid-nineteenth century, the current structure – a glorious mixture of styles firmly grounded in English Gothic with a striking four-spire tower and flying buttresses running along either side – wasn’t begun until 1923 and was only completed in 1974. Badly damaged during the 1989 earthquake, the structure was renovated and retrofitted to prevent further damage. Inside resides a treasure trove of original European sacred art: the white-oak confessionals, shrines, and secondary altars were hand carved in Oberammergau, Germany, while the high altar was carved of botticino marble at Pietrasanta, Italy, and shipped to San Francisco in 76 crates. Carved in Liège, Belgium, the statuary, such as the angels under the rood beam and the statue of the Virgin in the Lady Chapel, is incredibly intricate, as are the stained-glass windows from Paris which line the nave.

East of Fillmore, the windswept, cypress-dotted peak of Lafayette Park is a popular local hangout. Facing it to the north are several mansions worth admiring if you’re wandering round the neighborhood, among them the squat brownstone at 2150 Washington St, the Phelan Mansion, built by former mayor James Phelan, an anti-Asian protectionist who later, as senator, pushed to bring a poet laureateship to California. Not far away, at 2080 Washington St, is the Spreckels Mansion, a gaudily decadent white-stone palace and home now to romance pulpist Danielle Steele, who pumped a not-so-small fortune into the structure’s restoration and upkeep. Unfortunately, neither of these are open to the public, nor are the set of old Queen Anne Victorians a block away at 2000–2010 Gough St. For that, head another block east to the ornate Haas-Lilienthal House at 2007 Franklin St (Wed & Sun noon–3pm; $5), a grand symbol of old wealth, with intricate wooden towers outside, and Tiffany art-glass and stenciled leather paneling inside. A bit south, the stretch of California Street from Franklin west to Fillmore holds more Victorians, notably the Egyptian-flavored one at no. 2026, distinguished by its blue-and-gold trim and bust of King Tut over the entrance.

To the south, the city’s newest and most conspicuous Catholic church is St Mary’s Cathedral (tel 415/567-2020) at Gough and Geary. Built in 1971, the cathedral has been the butt of local humor ever since, due to a modernist design that many have likened to a washing machine agitator (hence its nickname, “Our Lady of the Maytag”). Take a look inside at its open, 190-foot vaulted space which rounds delicately inward; the massive organ within is a spectacle in itself, especially when it’s played during the wildly popular Christmas Midnight Mass, though bad acoustics don’t do it justice.

West of Pacific Heights, Sacramento Street leads into Laurel Heights, a smart collection of antique shops and used designer-clothing stores. There’s not really much to deter you on your way to the Presidio, but it’s a nice enough strip to make for good idle window shopping.