Stand at a brown and white Cable Car Stop sign. As the cable car approaches, raise your hand to signal the driver to stop. Pay the conductor after boarding (with $20 notes or less) if you don’t already have a ticket or pass. If the cable car does not stop, it is likely full. Between 8 am and 5 pm, Read more...
San Francisco’s cable cars are pulled along by a cable below the street that runs at a continuous 9.5 mph. The cars can release their grip on the cable and brake for slowing down and stopping. Read more...
Stripe’s headquarters are located at 510 Townsend Street in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. The payment processing technology company moved into the newly built 300,000 square foot building in 2018. Read more...
Warren G Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on August 2nd, 1923, aged 57. The 29th American President was reportedly suffering from pneumonia and died suddenly in room 8064 (now room 888), the eighth-floor presidential suite. Read more...
There is a parking lot next to the San Francisco DMV office at Fell Street and Broderick Street in Haight-Ashbury which is free for DMV customers between 7 am and 5 pm. Read more...
Just before 9 am on June 14th, 2017, Jimmy Lam shot five coworkers, three fatally, at the UPS distribution facility at 320 San Bruno Avenue, between 16th and 17th Streets in San Francisco’s Portero Hill neighborhood. Lam later took his own life in the building by shooting himself in the head. A memorial service was held on July 9th, 2017 Read more...
The Megabus stop for all arrivals and departures in San Francisco is on Townsend Street eastbound, at the corner of 5th Street, opposite the UserTesting building. The bus stop is one block west of the San Francisco Caltrain station. Read more...
The mural of musician Carlos Santana is on the exterior wall of a store at 19th Street and Mission Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. The 16-foot-wide black and white mural was painted with spray cans by local artist Mel Waters in 2014 as a tribute to Santana, who lived and attended school in San Francisco in his teens. It Read more...
The Beaver Street Wall is a radiolarian chert, a hard sedimentary rock comprising fine silica crystals originating from the shells of radiolaria, tiny ocean-dwelling plankton, that settled to the sea floor millions of years ago. Large areas of the rock appear smooth and shiny, a feature known as a slickenside, which suggests that the rock sat on one side of Read more...
The blue house in French singer Maxime Le Forestier’s song San Francisco is situated at 3841 18th Street in the Mission district. The song, on his 1972 album Mon frère, recalls a time when he lived in the house in 1970 when it was a hippie commune called Hunga Dunga. It was repainted from light green to the original blue Read more...
The house from the movie Mrs Doubtfire is located at 2640 Steiner Street in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood. It was used for exterior shots as the home of the Hillard family in the 1993 film starring Robin Williams. Read more...
Twitter’s first offices were at 164 South Park Street in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. The social networking technology company, founded in 2006 by Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Noah Glass, was based here until 2008. An early-stage Instagram was a tenant here later. Read more...
The Caltrain commuter rail line terminates in San Francisco at 4th and King Street Caltrain Station where there are connections to Muni bus lines, E Embarcadero historic streetcar and Muni light rail services. Read more...
The first Starbucks Coffee in San Francisco opened in March 1992 at the corner of Union and Laguna Streets in the Cow Hollow neighborhood. Read more...
The Transamerica Pyramid at 600 Montgomery Street in San Francisco with its distinctive pyramid shape is an icon of the city’s skyline. At 853 feet (or 260 meters) high, it is visible from most parts of the city and is the second-tallest building in San Francisco since losing the top spot to the Salesforce Tower in 2017. Read more...
San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid limits access to tenants and their approved guests only. An observation room on the 27th floor was permanently closed for security reasons many years ago and replaced by a street-level virtual observation deck on Clay Street which provides a view from the top via live video feed. Read more...
San Francisco’s tallest building is the Salesforce Tower (formerly called the Transbay Tower) skyscraper at Mission Street and 1st Street in the SoMa neighborhood. It is 1070 feet (or 326 meters) tall. Read more...
Jack Kerouac Alley is located off Columbus Avenue, between Broadway and Pacific Avenue in San Francisco. The now-pedestrianized passageway was renamed in 1988 to recognize the area’s association with Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac who, during visits to San Francisco, had frequented the City Lights bookstore and Vesuvio Cafe bar that flank the alley entrance. The short alley, connecting Columbus Read more...
The downtown San Francisco area is not officially defined but is generally considered to refer to the city’s Financial District. The area it is often broadened to include the Union Square, Chinatown, Tenderloin, and SoMa districts. Read more...
The North Face was founded in San Francisco as a ski, camping and mountaineering mail order business in 1964. The Grateful Dead played at the official opening of its first store at 308 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach on October 26, 1966. Read more...
