Offbeat Tours Give Different View of S.F.

OK, so you’ve seen the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf. You’ve toured Alcatraz, climbed Telegraph Hill, visited the Japanese Tea Gardens. You’ve experienced San Francisco.

But have you visited the sewers?

If not, says Kay Grant, you’ve got some more looking to do.

Grant has started a company called Near Escapes to provide offbeat outings for people in one of the nation’s top tourist towns.

“Remember in school how there were never enough field trips?” Grant said. “Well, these tours are for those of us who loved the field trips and wanted to see how things tick.”

Pastries, Fire Engines

Grant has taken groups behind the scenes at a pastry shop, through a fire station and a lock company and to a school for race car drivers. Other excursions have visited an old mine and a plant where airline food is prepared.

Although Near Escapes was founded only three months ago, Grant said, she has been organizing such events for the last eight years for charities and private groups.

“People were enjoying it, but I had never done it for money,” she said. “My friends kept telling me I could make a living doing these tours and it was great fun, so Near Escapes was born.”

Many of the tours are to places normally open to the public for free or a small charge. Grant charges between $5 and $25 for her tours, which generally include lectures by a guide--and a different perspective.

“Even when I do things the public can do, I like to do them with a twist,” she said.

Picnicking in the Pipes

For instance, the city Public Works Department has tours of the giant sewers being constructed under the city to handle storm runoff. But Grant’s tour of the musty man-made caverns includes a picnic lunch.

Steve Laughlin, a spokesman for the city’s Clean Water Program, said the city provides an engineer to lecture on the tours because it “gives people an idea of how a city like San Francisco has applied technology to correct the problem.”

People on the tours visit a pumping station and a treatment plant, then don hard-hats to go underground into the 2 1/2-mile-long, 50-foot-wide concrete box that will hold runoff water once the system goes into operation next year.

Grant’s most popular tour is to the cemeteries in the nearby community of Colma, where more than a million people are buried. Colma was designated the site for San Francisco’s dead because space within the city was at a premium.

Graves of Rich and Famous

The four-hour outing, led by one of Colma’s 700 living residents, includes stops at the graves of such notables as Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss and a 19th-Century eccentric who called himself Norton I, Emperor of California and Protector of Mexico.

Grant’s latest schemes are a cable car ride for Christmas carolers, a visit to the kitchen of a McDonald’s restaurant and a tour of an airport control tower.

“I’ve got a file full of ideas and people bring them to me all the time,” she said. “There are more things to do than there is calendar time to do them.”

Grant, who moved to San Francisco from her native Pennsylvania in 1968, says the tours don’t produce enough income to constitute a full-time job, although mailing flyers and answering calls takes much of her time.