13 Hidden Gems in San Francisco Most People Walk Right Past
13 landmarks with verified facts and stories
16th Avenue Tiled Steps
16th Avenue & Moraga Street, San Francisco
You're standing at the bottom of one hundred and sixty-three steps covered in seventy-five thousand hand-cut fragments of tile, mirror, and stained glass.
Balmy Alley Murals
Balmy Alley (between 24th and 25th Streets), San Francisco
Walk into this alley and every surface screams at you.
Camera Obscura
1096 Point Lobos Avenue, San Francisco
That giant camera-shaped building next to the Cliff House ruins is exactly what it looks like — a camera obscura, and it's one of the last functioning ones in the United States.
Compton's Cafeteria Riot Site
101 Taylor Street (corner of Turk), San Francisco
There's nothing here now that marks what happened on this corner.
Cupid's Span
Rincon Park, The Embarcadero, San Francisco
That enormous bow and arrow buried in the grass along the waterfront — sixty feet tall, with the arrow pointing skyward and the bow half-submerged in the earth — is Cupid's Span.
Emperor Norton Plaque
Commercial Street & Montgomery Street, San Francisco
In eighteen fifty-nine, a bankrupt businessman named Joshua Abraham Norton walked into the offices of the San Francisco Bulletin and placed a notice declaring himself Norton the First, Emperor of the United States.
Filbert Street Steps & Wild Parrots
Filbert Street Steps, Telegraph Hill, San Francisco
Listen.
Jack Kerouac Alley
Jack Kerouac Alley (between Columbus Ave and Grant Ave), San Francisco
This narrow alley connecting Chinatown to North Beach used to be a nameless service lane where garbage trucks turned around.
Musee Mecanique
Pier 45, Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
Step inside this place and you'll find over three hundred antique arcade machines, coin-operated automata, and mechanical curiosities spanning more than a century of American amusement.
Specs' Twelve Adler Museum Cafe
12 William Saroyan Place, San Francisco
This tiny bar across from Vesuvio and City Lights has had more lives than any drinking establishment in San Francisco, and that's saying something for a city that takes its bars very seriously.
Sutro Baths Ruins
1004 Point Lobos Avenue, San Francisco
These concrete ruins clinging to the cliff were once the largest indoor swimming facility in the world, and the man who built them owned one-twelfth of San Francisco.
Tonga Room
950 Mason Street (Fairmont Hotel), San Francisco
You're about to walk into a tiki bar built around a seventy-five-foot indoor lagoon that used to be the Fairmont Hotel's swimming pool.
Wave Organ
83 Green St, Embarcadero, San Francisco, 94111, United States
If you've made it out here to the end of this jetty, you're already doing better than most tourists.
Explore hidden gems in San Francisco
GPS-guided narration at every landmark. Tap a spot on the map, hear the story. Every fact verified.