SF Rainy Day Museum Planner: 3 Waterfront Maritime Stops

The San Francisco waterfront looks like the worst place to be in a storm: open piers, wind off the bay and a long promenade with nothing overhead. But three of its best indoor stops, the Exploratorium, Musée Mécanique and the Maritime Museum at Aquatic Park, are strung along the F-line streetcar, and the historic cars run right past all of them. This rainy day museum planner uses the streetcar as the hallway and the museums as the rooms.

The Exploratorium was founded in 1969 by physicist Frank Oppenheimer inside the Palace of Fine Arts and moved to Pier 15 in 2013. The pier shed is enormous, and almost everything inside is meant to be touched: tide models, wave tanks, microscopes, optical illusions, a tactile dome you crawl through in darkness. Rain does not change much here except that the bay outside the glass becomes part of the show.

Give it the most time of the day. Three hours goes quickly, and families can spend longer. The Bay Observatory gallery at the east end of the pier looks straight out over the water, and on a stormy day you can watch rain bands cross from the East Bay, ferries pitch in the chop and the Bay Bridge disappear and return. The museum also runs adults-only evenings on Thursdays, which are a good rainy-night alternative if you would rather spend the daytime elsewhere.

Lunch can stay indoors on the pier, or you can head ten minutes south along the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building, where the arcade under the clock tower keeps you mostly covered between food stalls.

The F-Market and Wharves line runs vintage streetcars from around the world along the Embarcadero, and catching one outside Pier 15 turns the longest exposed stretch of the route into a ride. Get off near Pier 45 at Fisherman's Wharf. The cars are old, heated unevenly and very popular, so on a wet weekend expect to stand. If one passes full, the next is usually not far behind.

Musée Mécanique is inside a shed on Pier 45 and holds one of the largest privately owned collections of mechanical arcade machines in the world: penny-arcade fortune tellers, hand-cranked movie viewers, player pianos, miniature carnivals and Laffing Sal, the cackling funhouse figure who once stood at Playland-at-the-Beach. Admission is free, and you pay machine by machine, so bring a pocketful of quarters or use the change machines inside.

It is the best kind of rainy-day stop because it is loud, warm and impossible to rush. Children and adults both end up feeding coins into the same machines. An hour is plenty, and the wet weather tends to keep the pier itself quieter than usual.

From Pier 45, walk west along Jefferson Street to Aquatic Park, about ten minutes, or reboard the F-line to its terminus at Jones and Beach streets, a few blocks east of Aquatic Park. The Maritime Museum sits in the Aquatic Park Bathhouse, a 1939 Streamline Moderne building shaped like a ship, and its lobby is decorated with Hilaire Hiler's underwater murals. It is part of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, whose visitor center at Hyde and Jefferson streets tells the story of the waterfront with ship models and large-format photographs.

The historic ships at Hyde Street Pier belong to the same park, but they are mostly outdoor decks. On a wet day the bathhouse and the visitor center are the better choice, and the tall masts of the square-rigger Balclutha are easy to admire from the shore without climbing aboard in the rain.

Bay storms often blow through in bands, and a dry hour in the late afternoon is common. If it arrives while you are at Aquatic Park, walk the curve of the Aquatic Park promenade for a view toward Alcatraz, or follow the path up the hill to Fort Mason, where the lawns give a wide view over the marina. Neither is worth attempting while it is still pouring, since both are completely exposed to the wind.

If the rain gets heavier instead, cut the route short. The Exploratorium plus Musée Mécanique is already a full day, and skipping the walk to Aquatic Park costs you nothing but a pretty building you can come back to on a clear morning.

The Embarcadero BART and Muni Metro station is a short walk from the Ferry Building and about fifteen minutes on foot from Pier 15, or one F-line stop. At the north end, the Powell-Hyde cable car terminus sits beside Aquatic Park, though in steady rain the open sides of a cable car make the F-line or a bus back downtown a drier choice. Parking along the Wharf is expensive and garages fill up on weekends, so this is a good day to leave the car behind.

The Exploratorium sells timed tickets online, and buying ahead on a rainy weekend saves standing in a line on an exposed pier. Musée Mécanique needs nothing but coins. The Maritime Museum and the visitor center are run by the National Park Service and are free to enter, though their opening days are more limited than the bigger museums.

The Embarcadero promenade is wide and well drained, but wind across the open piers will turn a cheap umbrella inside out. A hooded rain jacket is more useful than an umbrella on this route. Jefferson Street near Fisherman's Wharf is crowded even in bad weather, so allow extra time for the walk to Aquatic Park.

Tell Karpo in the Karpo APP that you want an indoor waterfront day, where you are starting and roughly when you want to finish, and it can suggest an order for these stops, compare the streetcar route with walking it, and suggest a warm place for chowder or coffee near the Wharf afterward. Streetcar times and museum details come from Muni and the museums themselves.