7 ideal things to do in San Francisco

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked October 4, 2025

The Lands End Trail and the Sutro Baths ruins
The northwest corner, above the Golden Gate straitEarly morning in June, when the fog is in and doing its work
Sutro's enormous glass swimming palace burned down in the 1960s, and what remains is a set of concrete tanks slowly filling with seawater at the foot of the cliff — a better ruin, probably, than the building ever was. The trail runs east from there along the wave-cut coast through cypress, with the bridge appearing and vanishing in the fog on a schedule of its own. Free, and the best three kilometres in the city. Our Marjan path does the same job with worse signage and considerably better light.
Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge
East sidewalk, city sideMorning, before the afternoon wind gets organised
Walk it on the east sidewalk — the west side belongs to cyclists during the day — and commit to the full 1,280-metre main span instead of turning back at the first tower like everyone who came only for the photograph. It is loud. Traffic passes a metre away and the deck moves under you. The suicide-deterrent nets, finished in early 2024, are visible below the railing and they change the character of the crossing in a way I did not anticipate and would not want undone.
Alcatraz
Ferry from Pier 33 on the EmbarcaderoBook far ahead; summer sailings go weeks in advance
Book it before you book the flight, which sounds like an exaggeration until you try to get a July sailing. The cellhouse audio tour is the best I have used anywhere, and it declines to oversell the material, which on this subject is a decision worth noticing. What stays with me is not the cells but the distance: the city sits a mile and a half off, lit, audible across the water on a still night, and completely out of reach.
Coit Tower's 1934 murals and the Filbert Steps
Telegraph HillWalk up. Driving to the top is how you lose an afternoon
In 1934 a group of twenty-five painters on a federal relief programme covered the base of this tower in Social Realist fresco — dockworkers, farmhands, a newsstand carrying radical headlines — and the politics in them delayed the opening. They are free to look at. Then take the Filbert Steps down the east slope: some four hundred wooden stairs through private gardens, with the feral parrots of Telegraph Hill overhead making a noise like a car alarm holding a grudge.
The Cable Car Museum on Mason Street
Nob Hill, at Washington and MasonTwenty minutes, on the way to something else
Free, and not really a museum at all but the working powerhouse: four enormous winding wheels hauling the cables that drag every cable car in San Francisco, running while you stand over them, at a volume that makes conversation a waste of effort. A lower gallery lets you watch the cables routed out under the street junction on sheaves the size of a dining table. It is the only place in the city where the transport system stops and explains itself to you.
The Hamon Observation Tower at the de Young
Golden Gate ParkA clear afternoon. In thick fog it is a glass box in a cloud
Ninth floor, no museum ticket required — take the lift beside the admissions desk and step out into a glass room with 360 degrees of Golden Gate Park, the Pacific, the Marin Headlands and the bridge. Herzog & de Meuron wrapped the building in perforated copper that has weathered green and streaky exactly as intended, to a decade of local complaint. Go down and pay for the museum, or don't, and walk to the Japanese Tea Garden instead. Nobody at the desk will judge you either way.
Balmy Alley and Clarion Alley murals
Inner Mission, Balmy between 24th and 25thDaylight. It is a working alley with people living along it
One block of garage doors and back fences, painted continuously since the early seventies and repainted many times since. The 1985 PLACA project alone put twenty-seven murals in here at once, most of them about United States policy in Central America, and the walls have gone on arguing ever since. Clarion Alley, a mile and a half north, is the younger and angrier descendant of the idea. Walk both. People live behind those fences, so keep the camera aimed at the paint and not through anyone's kitchen window.

The long version

San Francisco at the fog line: the small American city on the hills

San Francisco is geographically tiny — 7 miles by 7 miles — and topographically intense. The city's gift is that almost every walk involves climbing a hill, and almost every hill ends at a view.

Read the full essay →