11 Weird and Wonderful Spots in San Francisco
11 landmarks with verified facts and stories
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.
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.
Lombard Street
Lombard Street between Hyde and Leavenworth, San Francisco
Alright, so here's the thing about the so-called crookedest street in the world — it's not.
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.
Palace of Fine Arts
3601 Lyon Street, San Francisco
What you're looking at is a building that was designed to look like a ruin — and then actually became one.
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.
Vaillancourt Fountain
Justin Herman Plaza, The Embarcadero, San Francisco
That massive concrete structure in the plaza — the one that looks like someone stacked brutalist building blocks during an earthquake — is the Vaillancourt Fountain, and it has been making people angry since the day it was unveiled in nineteen seventy-one.
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 quirky in San Francisco
GPS-guided narration at every landmark. Tap a spot on the map, hear the story. Every fact verified.