San Francisco has an unusually strong tradition of building odd things in public and leaving them there. Some of it is municipal, most of it is volunteer, and almost none of it appears on any visitor itinerary — which is exactly why it is the part of the city that residents actually use. Nearly all of it is free and outdoors, which makes it the best fallback plan there is.
Most of this is free, outdoors and unmarked. Ask Karpo which is closest to you.
The stairways
San Francisco has hundreds of public stairways connecting streets that the hills made impossible to join, and several have been turned into mosaics by neighbourhood volunteers. The 16th Avenue tiled steps in the Sunset, completed in 2005 by two artists working with local residents, run 163 steps up towards Grand View Park and are the best known. The Hidden Garden Steps a few blocks away are the second.
Beyond the tiled ones, the Filbert Steps and the Greenwich Steps up Telegraph Hill pass through private gardens with wild parrots overhead, and the Lyon Street Steps in Pacific Heights are the city's outdoor gym. All of them are public rights of way, all are free, and all deliver a view at the top.
The strange objects
The Wave Organ, on a jetty at the end of the Marina, is an acoustic sculpture built in 1986 from salvaged cemetery granite, with pipes running into the bay so that the tide plays it. It works best at high tide and it is quiet — the point is to put your ear to a pipe rather than to hear music from a distance. It is free, it is at the end of a beautiful walk, and it is almost always empty.
Elsewhere: the Camera Obscura at Ocean Beach, a 1946 structure projecting a live image of the coastline onto a disc inside; the labyrinths at Lands End and at Grace Cathedral; the Seward Street slides in the Castro, two concrete slides on a hillside where you borrow a piece of cardboard; and the Musée Mécanique at Fisherman's Wharf, a free-to-enter collection of antique coin-operated arcade machines that is genuinely one of the odder museums anywhere.
The views nobody queues for
Twin Peaks is the famous viewpoint and it is usually busy. The alternatives are better: Grand View Park in the Sunset, reached by the tiled steps, which locals call Turtle Hill; Tank Hill above Cole Valley; Corona Heights above the Castro; Bernal Heights, which is a bare grassy summit with a three-hundred-and-sixty degree view and a large off-lead dog population; and Billy Goat Hill, which has a rope swing.
Lands End, at the north-west corner of the city, is the best coastal walk in San Francisco: a trail along the cliffs with the ruins of the Sutro Baths at one end, shipwrecks visible at low tide, and the Golden Gate Bridge in front of you the whole way. It is entirely free and considerably less visited than the bridge itself.
The institutions
San Francisco has a set of small, strange, long-standing places worth knowing about. The Prelinger Library, a private research library open to the public on limited days, arranged by association rather than by classification. The Randall Museum in Corona Heights, free and full of animals. The Institute of Illustration and various small archives and single-subject museums scattered through the city.
There is also a strong tradition of participatory oddness: the annual events, the neighbourhood parades, the outdoor dance and exercise groups, the Sunday drum circle in Dolores Park. These are not attractions and cannot be booked; they are things that happen and that anyone is welcome at, which is a different and better proposition.
The neighbourhood oddities
Certain blocks have concentrations worth walking specifically. Balmy Alley and Clarion Alley in the Mission are two of the densest mural corridors in the country, both painted over continuously since the 1970s and 1990s respectively. Vermont Street in Potrero Hill is crookeder than Lombard and has no queue. The Seward Street slides, the Ingleside sundial, the parrot colony on Telegraph Hill and the ship-shaped houses and painted staircases scattered through Bernal and Glen Park all reward wandering. None are signposted, and that is broadly the point.
How to find more
The general method is to walk. San Francisco is small, dense and full of things that are unmarked, and almost every neighbourhood has a stairway, a hidden park, a mural or a piece of unexplained public sculpture that nobody has written about. The city's own list of parks includes dozens of tiny ones — mini-parks, garden plots and hillside fragments — that are effectively private to the block they sit on.
The other method is to go at odd hours. Lands End at seven in the morning, the Wave Organ at high tide, Bernal Hill at sunset, Ocean Beach on a clear winter afternoon. Almost everything on this list is transformed by timing, and almost nobody bothers.
A last one, because it is the most San Francisco thing on the list: the city has a long tradition of unofficial public rituals — outdoor dance sessions, drum circles, group swims at Aquatic Park, seasonal parades and neighbourhood events that have run for decades without any organisation behind them. These cannot be booked or looked up reliably. You find them by being outside on a weekend and paying attention, which is the whole method for everything above.
Practical notes
All of the above is free. Most of it is outdoors and therefore fog-dependent — check which side of Twin Peaks you are heading to. The stairways are steep and the walks are hilly; wear proper shoes. The Wave Organ works at high tide and is inaudible at low. Many of the small institutions have very limited opening days, so check before travelling. And bring a layer for anything near the ocean, which is colder and windier than the rest of the city at any hour.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #HiddenGems #UnusualThings #ThingsToDo #TiledSteps #WaveOrgan #LandsEnd #BernalHeights #SunsetDistrict #FreeThingsToDo #SFLife #ExploreSF #OffbeatSF #SFParks
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which of these is closest to you, whether the fog will spoil it, and what time is best to go? Ask Karpo before you head out.
