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New Langton Arts
Strange is the norm at New Langton, where artists have done odd and occasionally unprintable things since 1975. This nonprofit is where Tony Labat stepped into the boxing ring with his critics and Harrell Fletcher distributed newspapers by teen reporters he'd commissioned to collect good news from their neighbors. Don't miss the Musée d'Honneur Miniscule, a window box in the entryway featuring small, ambitious works.
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Ocean Beach
Clambakes and Elvis sing-a-longs are not the scene here - think more along the lines of s'mores (marshmallows roasted over a bonfire with chocolate atop a graham cracker) among surfers and amateur rappers. Bonfires are permitted in the artist-designed fire-pits, but be sure to follow park rules about fire maintenance and alcohol (not allowed) or you could get fined. Only hardcore surfers and sea lions should brave these riptides.
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Octagon House
Crafty architects are always trying to cut corners on their clients, and here architect William C McElroy succeeded. This is one of the last examples of a brief San Franciscan vogue for octagonal houses in the 1860s, when it was believed that houses catching direct sunlight from eight angles were good for your health. Three afternoons a month, you can pop by to see if you breathe any easier, peruse the collection of colonial antiques and peek inside a time capsule McElroy hid under the stairs.
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Old St Mary's Cathedral
Many thought it a lost cause but California's first cathedral, inaugurated in 1854, tried for decades to give San Francisco some religion - despite its location in brothel central. Hence the stern admonition on the church's brick clock tower: 'Son, observe the time and fly from evil.'
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Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Building
Cinemas like the Castro made the reputation of architect Timothy Pflueger, who took that theatrical flair to a whole new level in this striking 1925 art deco skyscraper dolled up in terra-cotta. Step inside the black marble lobby to check out the bronze elevator doors and ceiling with Chinese mythic figures.
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Pacific-Union Club
Though most people don't dare say this to its face, the neoclassical brownstone powerhouse of Nob Hill that survived the 1906 earthquake is flat, squat and utterly unimaginative. But try telling that to the PU's exclusive membership, which includes various newspaper magnates, both Hewlett and Packard of Hewlett-Packard, several US secretaries of defense and government contractors (insert obvious conspiracy theory here).
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Palace Of Fine Arts
Like a fossilized party favor, this romantic, fake Greco-Roman ruin is the memento San Francisco decided to keep from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The original was built in wood by Bernard Maybeck as a picturesque backdrop. In the '60s The structure was recast in concrete, so that future generations could gaze up at the rotunda relief to glimpse 'Art Under Attack by Materialists, with Idealists Leaping to Her Rescue.'
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Peace Pagoda
When San Francisco's sister city of Osaka, Japan gifted Yoshiro Taniguchi's minimalist concrete stupa to the people of San Francisco in 1968, the city didn't seem to know quite what to do with it, and kept clustering shrubs around its stark nakedness. But with some well-placed cherry trees and a low fountain, the pagoda is finally in its element au natural .
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Portsmouth Square
Chinatown is the most densely populated area in the US outside Manhattan, so to really stretch out and relax many residents head out of their cramped apartments to Portsmouth Square. The square is named after John B Montgomery's sloop, which pulled up near here in 1846 to stake the US claim on San Francisco, but the presiding deity is the Goddess of Democracy, a bronze replica of the plaster statue made by Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989.
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Powell St Cable Car Turnaround
'Wire-rope railway' was a name that didn't exactly inspire confidence in Andrew Hallidie's invention in the 1870s, when crowds steered well clear of his rickety wooden trolleys on their early downhill runs. More than a century later, the two cable-car lines that take off from this central hub still seem like more like carnival rides than commuter transport - and therein lies the appeal.
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Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum
San Francisco's already high freak factor gets dialed up to 11 with Ripley's bizarro artifacts and tales of vampires, mutants, and human sacrifices. The cable car made of a quarter of a million matchsticks adds a nice and highly flammable local touch to the Ripley's franchise.
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Ross Alley
The colorful murals lining Ross Alley hint at the colorful characters that once roamed SF's oldest alleyway, which has been known variously as Mexico, Spanish and Manila St after the ladies who once staffed its notorious back-parlor brothels. Ross Alley is occasionally pimped out to Hollywood production companies as the picturesque backdrop for lamentable sequels like Karate Kid II and Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom .
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Ruth Asawa Fountains
Grab a seat inside the fountain, splash around and stay awhile: Ruth Asawa designed these fountains to be lived in, not observed from a polite distance. Bronze origami dandelions sprout from polished-pebble pools, with benches built right in for bento box picnics. On rare warm days along this wind-tunnel pedestrian block, kids frolic and weary shoppers enjoy footbaths under the dandelions.
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Saints Peter & Paul Church
Wedding cake was the apparent inspiration for this 1924 triple-decker cathedral with its lacy white towers, and in downtime between masses in Italian and Chinese, the church pulls a triple wedding shift on Saturdays. Joe Di Maggio and Marilyn Monroe had their wedding photos taken here, though they weren't permitted to marry in the church because both had been divorced (they got hitched at City Hall instead).
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San Francisco Botanical Garden & Strybing Arboretum
There's always something blooming in these 70-acre gardens, covering a world of vegetation from South African savannah to New Zealand cloud forest. The Garden of Fragrance is designed for appeal to the visually impaired, and the California native plant section explodes with color when the native wildflowers bloom in early spring, right off the redwood trail. Free tours take place daily; for details, see the bookstore inside the entrance.
Read more about San Francisco Botanical Garden & Strybing Arboretum
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San Francisco Center For The Book
Anyone who can't get enough of the sound and smell of a freshly cracked book will achieve a whole new level of obsession with these displays of elaborate Coptic binding and wooden typesetting machines. One recent exhibit showcased letterpress poetry chapbooks made to protest the car-bombing of Baghdad's Mutannabi St, the famed booksellers' quarter.
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San Francisco Main Library
Like your favorite librarian, the 'New Main' inaugurated in 1995 only looks austere from afar - it's friendly, light-hearted and an invaluable resource once you get to know it better. Besides its eclectic collection of San Franciscans and their favorite books, the library quietly boasts a high-profile author reading and lecture series, plus intriguing ephemera exhibits in the 6th floor Skylight Gallery.
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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
With its vantage point on the cutting edge of the Pacific Rim, local technology savvy and prodigious collection of photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) was destined from the start (in 1935) to be an eclectic, unconventional museum. But when it moved into architect Mario Botta's light-filled brick box in 1995, suddenly it became clear just how far this museum was prepared to push the art world.
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San Francisco National Maritime Museum
This quirky museum shaped like a streamlined art deco luxury liner was initially a public bathhouse when built by the Depression-era Works Project Administration (WPA) in 1939. The museum is currently closed while its interior is restored to ship-shape, but you can still appreciate the all-ashore exterior decor: entryway slate carvings by celebrated African American artist Sargent Johnson.
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San Francisco Zoo
Even those who object to zoos in theory have been known to break down and take kids here after being begged for, oh, the thousandth time - only to discover that, actually, there are some well-kept habitats here, including a Savannah featuring giraffes, zebras, ostriches and other African wildlife.
On Christmas day 2007 the zoo made headlines for all the wrong reasons when a Siberian tiger escaped from its enclosure, killing one person and injuring two others.
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Sf Arts Commission Gallery
Get in on the next art movement at this lobby-level public gallery featuring international perspectives and local talents. Recently, visitors got an eyeful of SF performance artist Mark Lee Morris acting out all the roles in his own not-so-private soap opera, alongside film clips featuring Billy Bob Thornton and doctored by artist Canadian Jillian McDonald to insert herself as co-star.
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Sf Camerawork
Take everything you know about photography and stretch it a mile, and there you have SF Camerawork. Since 1974 this nonprofit organization has explored the world of photo-based imagery beyond vintage black and white, including Binh Danh's ethereal portraits developed directly on leaves and Lars Laumann's conspiracy-theory video collage of Morrissey from the Smiths apparently predicting Princess Diana's death.
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South Park
'Dot com' was the word on the street here in the mid-'90s, when venture capitalists plotted website launches in parkside cafés with tattooed 20-something techies. But speculation is nothing new to South Park, which was planned by a real estate speculator in the 1850s as a bucolic gated community.
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Spofford Alley
Sun Yat-sen once plotted the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty here in the early 1900s, and then later turf battles exploded over local bootlegging and protection rackets. Spofford has mellowed with age and now features several senior community centers. But the action still gets started around sundown, when a Chinese orchestra strikes up a sprightly tune, the frantic clicking of a fast-moving mah jong game begins, and beauty parlor owners and florists use the pretense of sweeping their doorsteps to gossip.
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SS Jeremiah O'Brien
Hard to believe this 10,000 ton beauty was turned out by San Francisco's ship workers in under eight weeks, and harder still to imagine how she dodged U-boats on a mission delivering supplies to Allied forces on D-Day. For steamy piston-on-piston, 2700-horsepower action, visit during 'steaming weekends' (usually the third weekend of each month) or check the website for upcoming cruises.
