San Francisco
When Frederick Law Olmsted, architect of New York's Central Park, gazed in 1865 upon the plot of land San Francisco Mayor Frank McCoppin wanted to turn…
Must-see attractions in The Bay Area
The Haight & Hayes Valley
Was it the fall of 1966 or the winter of ’67? As the Haight saying goes, if you can remember the Summer of Love, you probably weren’t here. The fog was…
North Beach & Chinatown
If you look close today at the clinker-brick buildings lining these narrow backstreets, past the temple balconies jutting out over bakeries, acupuncture…
North Beach & Chinatown
No one could have predicted the cultural force City Lights would become when it first opened in 1953. Sure, it had a proletarian ethos suggested by its…
North Beach & Chinatown
If you want to really see San Francisco, head to Coit Tower, a 1933 art deco beaut designed by Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Howard that sits high up on…
The Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf & the Piers
Few cities boast a structure so iconic as the Golden Gate Bridge, commemorated in everything from films like The Maltese Falcon to not one but two emojis…
The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill
Welcome to San Francisco's sunny side, the land of street ball and Mayan-pyramid playgrounds, semiprofessional tanning and taco picnics. Although the…
The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill
The Mission District has a long history of street art and muralismo – an oft-political school of public art prevalent throughout South and Central America…
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The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill
Avast, ye scurvy scallywags! If ye be shipwrecked without yer eye patch or McSweeney's literary anthology, lay down ye doubloons and claim yer booty at…
North Beach & Chinatown
Grant Ave is Chinatown's economic heart, but its soul is Waverly Place, lined with flag-festooned, colorful temple balconies and family-run businesses…
The Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf & the Piers
Alcatraz: for over 150 years, the name has given the innocent chills and the guilty cold sweats. Over the decades, it’s been a military prison, a…
The Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf & the Piers
Is there a science to skateboarding? Do toilets really flush counterclockwise in Australia? At San Francisco's hands-on science museum, you'll find out…
The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill
Since at least the 1980s, if you stroll through San Francisco's Mission District you've likely noticed the neighborhood's profusion of colorful murals and…
San Francisco
Is there any church that better embodies San Francisco's resilience, inclusivity and activist streak? The Nob Hill gem has been rebuilt three times since…
San Francisco
Follow sculptor Andy Goldsworthy's artificial fault line in the sidewalk into Herzog & de Meuron's sleek, copper-clad building that's slowly oxidizing…
California Academy of Sciences
San Francisco
This classic research institute and museum has been teaching San Franciscans about natural history since 1853. Right in the middle of Golden Gate Park,…
Chinese Historical Society of America
North Beach & Chinatown
Picture what it was like to be Chinese in America during the gold rush, transcontinental railroad construction, and Beat heyday in this 1932 landmark,…
The Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf & the Piers
Sea lions took over San Francisco’s most coveted waterfront real estate in 1989 and have been making a public display of themselves ever since. Some…
The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill
A renowned and beloved Mission landmark since 1979, the nation's first women-owned-and-operated community center is festooned with one of the neighborhood…
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The Haight & Hayes Valley
Jeremy Fish's bronze bunny-skull sculpture hints at the weird wonders inside this nonprofit dedicated to works on paper and San Francisco's signature art…
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The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill
Art revolutions are instigated at Catharine Clark, a showcase for such gorgeous provocations as Masami Teraoka's paintings of superheroine geishas and…
Berkeley
This 2079-acre park, up in the hills east of town, is Berkeley’s best. It has nearly 40 miles of hiking and multiuse trails of varying difficulty, from…
San Francisco
That clamor you hear riding cable cars is the sound of San Francisco's peak technology at work. Gears click and wire-hemp ropes whir as these vintage…
The Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf & the Piers
A flashback to penny arcades, the Musée Mécanique houses a mind-blowing collection of vintage mechanical amusements. Sinister, freckle-faced Laughing Sal…
Oakland
Stargazers will go gaga over this kid-oriented science and technology center in the Oakland Hills with loads of exhibits on subjects such as space travel…
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Lombard Financial Center Mosaics
San Francisco
A couple years ago, blighted trees in front of this bank were cut down and a treasure hidden for almost half a century was revealed: mosaics by California…
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San Francisco
You're always in excellent company in the Castro, where sidewalk plaques honor LGBT+ heroes. The walk runs along Market St from Noe St to Casto St and…
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The Haight & Hayes Valley
Hippie communes and Victorian bordellos, jazz greats and opera stars, earthquakes and Church of Satan services: these genteel 'Painted Lady' Victorian…
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San Francisco
Diego Rivera's 1931 The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City is a trompe l'oeil fresco within a fresco, showing the artist himself pausing to…
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The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill
The breezy, grassland slopes of 475ft Bernal Hill are decidedly non-touristy, and hiking them on a clear day offers 360-degree city views, along with rare…
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The Haight & Hayes Valley
Can you see sound? The answer is always yes at this music-inspired art gallery, named for the anthem by SF soul supergroup Sly and the Family Stone…
San Francisco
Crafty kids find ways to persuade parents to brave traffic and chilly fog to reach SF Zoo – but everyone ends up enjoying the well-kept habitats,…
San Francisco
The Legion of Honor, or more formally known as the “California Palace of the Legion of Honor”, is a part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It is…
Sausalito
Bohemia still thrives along the shoreline of Richardson Bay, where free spirits inhabit hundreds of quirky homes that bob in the waves among the seabirds…
Oakland
Every museum has an educational mission, and this one is dedicated to California. You'll find rotating exhibitions on artistic and scientific themes, and…
The Mission, Dogpatch & Potrero Hill
The city's oldest building and its namesake, whitewashed adobe Misión San Francisco de Asís was founded in 1776 and rebuilt from 1782. Today the modest…
San Francisco
'Homeward into the sunset/Still unwearied we go/Till the northern hills are misty/With the amber of afterglow.' Poet George Sterling's poem 'City by the…
San Francisco
You’ve seen the eight switchbacks of Lombard St's 900 block in a thousand photographs. The tourist board has dubbed it ‘the world’s crookedest street,’…
The Marina, Fisherman’s Wharf & the Piers
This triple-decker, brick-walled US military fortress was completed in 1861, with 126 cannons, to protect the bay against certain invasion during the…
North Beach & Chinatown
There was no place to go but up in Chinatown in the 19th century, when laws restricted where Chinese San Franciscans could live and work. Atop barber…
