The scenic route down from Ina Coolbrith Park – via steep stairs, past gravity-defying wooden cottages – is so charming, it looks like something from a novel. And so it is: Armistead Maupin used this shady, hidden byway as the model for Barbary Lane in his Tales of the City series.
Macondray Lane
San Francisco
Lonely Planet's must-see attractions
4.1 MILES
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…
2.65 MILES
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…
0.57 MILES
If you look close today at the clinker-brick buildings lining these narrow backstreets, past the temple balconies jutting out over bakeries, acupuncture…
0.54 MILES
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…
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
1.25 MILES
When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expanded in 2016, it was a mind-boggling feat that nearly tripled the institution's size to accommodate a…
0.62 MILES
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…
3.48 MILES
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…
2.78 MILES
Welcome to San Francisco's sunny side, the land of street ball and Mayan-pyramid playgrounds, semiprofessional tanning and taco picnics. Although the…
Nearby San Francisco attractions
0.14 MILES
With a 31.5% grade, the honor of steepest street in San Francisco is shared by Filbert St and 22nd St in the Castro. Filbert is shorter, but wins top…
0.17 MILES
On San Francisco's literary scene, all roads eventually lead to Ina Coolbrith. She was California's first poet laureate, editor of Mark Twain, colleague…
0.17 MILES
This tiny cottage on a quiet alley was the source of major drama from 1951 to 1952, when Jack Kerouac shacked up with Neal and Carolyn Cassady and their…
0.2 MILES
Reach staggering heights with spectacular views along this staircase connecting North Beach with Russian Hill – ideal for working off a pasta dinner…
0.25 MILES
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,’…
0.28 MILES
'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…
0.3 MILES
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…
8. San Francisco Art Institute
0.31 MILES
Since the 1870s, SFAI has been at the vanguard of Bay Area art movements – including 1960s Bay Area abstraction, 1970s conceptual art and 1990s new-media…