Old Saint Mary's Cathedral

This guide to Old Saint Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco starts with the warning carved beneath its clock tower, aimed at the men once walking toward the Barbary Coast's gambling halls and brothels just beyond this corner. It traces the building's construction in the 1850s, from granite quarried in China to the Chinese laborers who actually raised its walls, and follows the church's decades as the seat of the archbishop before the neighborhood's reputation caught up with it. Look for the granite trim below the brick, shipped across the Pacific alongside the bricks that rounded Cape Horn from New England.