Cow Palace

Off to the side is a huge, plain barn of a building called the Cow Palace — and that ridiculous name tells you everything about why it's out here and not in the city. Back in the Depression, when they proposed building a state livestock pavilion, a San Francisco official scoffed at spending public money on, in his words, a palace for cows. The jab stuck, they built it anyway — out here on cheap land at the very edge of town, in 1941 — and San Francisco spent the next several decades sending its biggest events to the barn it had mocked.

Because it turned out the city needed a room this size and never built one of its own. When the Beatles launched their first full North American tour in 1964, opening night was right here. They came back in 1965. When the Republican Party needed a hall big enough for a national convention, they came to the Cow Palace — in 1956 to renominate Eisenhower, and again in 1964, when this arena is where Barry Goldwater won the nomination that split his party wide open. Presidents and Beatlemania, in a livestock pavilion named as an insult.

And it never stopped being a barn. To this day the Grand National Rodeo runs here every fall — real cattle, real cowboys, on the same floor the Fab Four played. That's the pure version of this whole tour's theme: San Francisco was too proud to build its own big arena, so the overflow — the crowds, the conventions, the rock and roll and the rodeo — all of it landed just across the line, in the palace for cows. From here we roll down into South San Francisco — watch the hillside ahead of you.