Funny Shaped Street in San Francisco
San Francisco is a weird city. Built on the backs of thousands of adventurers, speculators and grifters seeking gold, it's probably no surprise that the city has always inhabited a space on the edge of American life.
Walking the city today there are a hundred spots of intrigue that tell stories of its bizarre past, but they're not always easy to find.
Searching Google for a list of "the weirdest things in San Francisco" yields some pretty tired results (sorry, wave organ and pretty staircases), so we decided to make our own.
From the fortress where someone managed to plunge the city into darkness to the hideous sculpture a rock star defaced, to the strip club where a man was crushed to death while fornicating on a mechanical piano — here's where San Francisco really gets weird.
The mysterious fortress that was the scene of a crime
PG&E's Mission substation on Eighth and Mission in San Francisco.
Sundry Photography/Getty ImagesThe reason the lights went out in San Francisco is locked deep inside the fortress on Eighth and Mission.
From the outside, it looks like a windowless prison from a sci-fi thriller, complete with spooky bas-reliefs and tall, sharp pikes. There is one locked door in and out.
On Oct. 23, 1997, a little after 6 a.m., someone with a key walked into the PG&E's Mission substation and manually turned 39 separate control valves, powering down a bank of five transformers. Because the substation powered smaller stations around the city, 126,000 customers from the Bayview to the Richmond lost power. All of downtown was dark.
At first, PG&E assumed it was some kind of mechanical failure. But when all automatic causes were ruled out, the company realized the outage could only have been done manually — and purposefully. "What we do know is it is not an accident," FBI spokesperson George Grotz said the next day.
Although the outage lasted less than three hours, the mystery has endured now for decades. Despite its location on a very busy street, the building had no cameras, no motion sensors and no security guard at its one entrance. Seventy-five employees who had keys to the substation were thoroughly vetted by the FBI (destruction of an energy plant is a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in jail). PG&E also looked into any ex-employees who might have a grudge against the company, or merely a desire to see it briefly humiliated.
There has never been an arrest or a even suspect in the case. San Francisco police, PG&E and the FBI were all stumped.
Whoever committed one of San Francisco's boldest acts of vandalism walked silently away from the castle on the bustling Civil Center intersection, still hiding its saboteur's secrets today.
The hideous fountain Bono vandalized in 1987
The Vaillancourt Fountain, with Ferry Building in the background.
DEA / W. BUSS/De Agostini via Getty ImagesThe Vaillancourt Fountain in Embarcadero Plaza is probably ugly/weird/controversial enough to make an entry on this list even if diminutive Irish rock god Bono hadn't vandalized it in front of 20,000 fans in 1987.
The 40-foot concrete fountain was designed and built by Canadian sculptor and performance artist Armand J. R. Vaillancourt in 1971 and was immediately despised almost as much as the doomed freeway that loomed over it.
It's not hard to see why. Up close today, the modernist concrete tentacles sit deliberately unfinished, covered in seagull s—t and spewing green water into the pool that surrounds them.
In 1971, opponents of the fountain leafleted San Franciscans on its day of dedication calling for its removal, describing it as a "loathsome monstrosity" and "idiotic rubble." Worse, the National Safety Council said that the fountain "may be a safety hazard."
But the $600,000 monument was there to stay.
On Nov. 11, 1987, Bono found what he was looking for during a free concert on U2's Joshua Tree tour. At the time, the band was at the peak of its powers, and 20,000 fans rushed to the site after the concert was announced that morning on local radio stations.
The impromptu gathering halted traffic exiting the Embarcadero Freeway, and Bono decided to commemorate the moment by scaling the fountain and daubing "Rock N Roll Stops The Traffic" across its concrete tubes during the instrumental break in "Pride (In the Name of Love)."
The city was going through a wave of graffiti at the time, and Bono's antics were met with widespread criticism. In very un-rock 'n' roll fashion, the frontman apologized after receiving a citation from the city for misdemeanor malicious mischief. "I really do regret it. It was dumb," Bono said. The band covered the cost of removal.
Mayor Dianne Feinstein didn't enjoy the prank either. "I am disappointed that a rock star who is supposed to be a role model for young people chose to vandalize the work of another artist," she said at the time, though apparently was a fan of the band, adding, "The unfortunate incident marred an otherwise wonderful rock concert."
Bono was having a bit of a day that morning and in another embarrassing incident, mistook the letters "SF/U2" on a fan's sign to mean "Sinn Fein" and went on an impassioned rant about the IRA, yelling, "F—k freedom," before being informed that "SF" probably meant "San Francisco."
The real crookedest street in San Francisco
A stretch of Vermont Street between 20th and 23rd streets on Potrero Hill that is more crooked than Lombard's famous twisty bit.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATEIt's a favorite gotcha question of San Franciscans: What's the crookedest street in the city?
Did you guess Lombard? WRONG, San Franciscans will proudly tell you. It's Vermont Street.
A trip to Vermont Street quickly shows why its less jaunty counterpart on Lombard is astronomically more famous. From the top of Vermont, you can't even see what's to come. In fact, it looks like a narrow pedestrian path. Driving down is a slightly harrowing experience, as uber-tight switchbacks cut back and forth every 20 feet or so. Because of the tight turns and heavy vegetation, you can't see the full scope of its windiness from either the top or the bottom of the street.
Photogenic Lombard, with its pretty houses and tidy landscaping, gets all the glory. But if you want all the thrills — and the right trivia answer every time — try a short drive down Vermont.
The secrets of the Bohemian Club
The Bohemian Club, San Francisco.
Wikimedia CommonsNext time you're walking around Lower Nob Hill, stop for a drink at a little bar named The Owl Tree. From the window seat, you'll see a looming, ivy-clad, red brick fortress across the intersection of Post and Taylor. This is the city clubhouse of the highly exclusive men's society, The Bohemian Club.
Look closer, and you'll see an etching of an owl staring right back. But it's not just any owl: This one looks particularly startled and is surrounded by the words "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here." The line, from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," is the club motto and serves as a warning to leave all outside concerns at the door.
The club and its infamous summer retreat in a forest clearing 50 miles north of the city started as an artists' retreat, but for a century it has been only "bohemian" in name, and holds some dark secrets.
The gathering spot of old-money conservative men has welcomed every Republican president since Herbert Hoover to its summer camp, (until Donald Trump, who reportedly never got an invite). The GOP leaders weren't all fans though — Richard Nixon wasn't impressed by the sacrificial burning of a human effigy in front of a giant owl.
In 1942, "the father of the atomic bomb," J. Robert Oppenheimer, headed a Manhattan Project planning meeting in the camp clubhouse that resulted in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki three summers later.
Visiting the clubhouse on Post Street is no easy feat. The entire operation, along with its annual summer camp, is almost entirely hidden — no website, email contact, no application process, no wait list for membership (it's invite-only).
A murderous intersection
The intersection of Washington and Cherry in San Francisco where the Zodiac Killer murdered taxi driver Paul Stine in 1969.
Google Street ViewThe most infamous intersection in San Francisco was almost on a different street.
When the man known as Zodiac stepped into Paul Stine's taxi cab on Oct. 11, 1969, in Union Square, dispatch records show he told Stine to drive to Washington and Maple. But for reasons known only by the killer, Stine ended up a block further at Washington and Cherry, cementing the street's status in serial killer lore.
There, on the dark residential street, the Zodiac Killer shot and killed Stine. As he rifled through Stine's pockets and wiped clean the car, a few eyewitnesses in a home across the street frantically called 911, thinking they were witnessing a fatal robbery. When police showed up shortly after, the intruder had slipped away. Two days later, a letter to the Chronicle containing a piece of Stine's bloody shirt confirmed Zodiac's one and only murder in San Francisco.
Standing on the pretty, ritzy street, it's hard to imagine one of the most famous murderers of all time stalked this very patch. But he did — and he disappeared, never to kill in the city again.
The ghostly apparitions of the Financial District
The "Corporate Goddesses" statues atop 580 California St. in San Francisco.
Santi Visalli/Getty ImagesBusy workers hurrying below 580 California St. may never notice the cadre of deathly angels watching their every move.
But look up and you'll see the 12-foot-high "Corporate Goddesses," a set of statues created by Muriel Castanis in 1982. Five years later, on the completion of the 23-story tower at Kearny and California, the ladies found a permanent home along the edge of the roof.
Depending on your outlook, the 12 faceless statues are either terrifying or thrilling. Castanis never revealed their meaning, so it's up to you to decide if the statues are guardians of the city … or ghouls just about to attack.
The gruesome history at Lincoln Park Golf Course
Remains of the Chinese cemetery at Lincoln Park Golf Course, San Francisco.
Andrew ChamingsA century ago, there were more than 30 cemeteries in San Francisco, covering thousands of acres. These included Yerba Buena Cemetery, at what is now Civic Center BART; four giant cemeteries in the Inner Richmond; a Jewish cemetery at what is now Dolores Park and the vast Golden Gate Cemetery.
The Golden Gate Cemetery was the city's first graveyard and was segregated into different plots for different ethnicities, including the Chinese Cemetery at what is now Lincoln Park Golf Course.
San Francisco in the 1900s was not a clean place, and the acres of cemeteries were not safe or sanitary. Most of the sites already had no room for more bodies, and coffins were not always used, leading to some archival reports of kids finding body parts while playing among the mausoleums.
One of the more curious concerns among white residents were the goings-on at the Chinese cemetery. The story goes that to provide sustenance to the spirits, Chinese mourners would often leave delicacies and meat on the gravestones of loved ones during funerals. Opportunistic vagrants would walk the cemetery at night and feast on the offerings.
As Charles Caldwell Dobie's 1933 book "San Francisco: A Pageant" described, "In a bygone day, the cemetery was the haunt of ghoul-like hoboes who regaled them-selves on roast pig and sweetmeats once the funeral cortege had disappeared."
After decades of political fighting, it was finally decreed that the tens of thousands of bodies would be moved to the new necropolis of Colma, south of the city, and it even became illegal to get buried in San Francisco. The Chinese cemetery, however, was not properly exhumed, and in 1993, excavation for the renovated Legion of Honor Museum at Land's End uncovered at least 700 bodies, and it's believed that there are many more still under Lincoln Park Golf Course.
While the meat-strewn graves are long gone, Chinese tombstones are still visible today on the 1st and 13th fairways.
A very confusing tower on Telegraph Hill
Pasquale's Tower, Telegraph Hill, San Francisco.
Andrew ChamingsIf you squint you can see it while driving over the Bay Bridge, nestled somewhere below Coit Tower on the southern slope of Telegraph Hill. A curious blue dome atop a cartoonishly narrow tower that looks like it belongs in a Dr. Seuss story. You can also see it from a small portion of Broadway in North Beach.
But that's about it; there aren't many other spots in San Francisco you can get a glimpse of Pasquale's Tower.
Maybe the obscurity is unsurprising for a building with no real address and no city record of a building permit ever being pulled.
There are many stories about Pasquale's Tower, and the man who built it.
These myths included the story of the lovelorn Italian immigrant, Pasquale Gogna, who built the tower with his bare hands to entice his love in Italy to move to San Francisco. When finished, she made the journey to America and, upon seeing the tower, declared that she was returning to Italy immediately, leaving Pasquale brokenhearted, alone in his strange creation.
The more likely story, as told by Gogna's nephew Joseph, reveals that Pasquale Gogna immigrated from Italy in 1907 and spent his days working in the city as a baker and his nights brawling and fighting the law (as many old arrest records show.)
The home he built for himself honored the architecture of his home, with a living room on the first floor, a kitchen on the second, a bedroom on the third and a study on the fourth. The blue dome on top is also a remembrance of Mediterranean life, the most striking examples of which can be seen in Santorini, Greece.
The real house on Telegraph Hill
A view of renovations taking place at Julius' Castle in San Francisco in May 2021. The restaurant hopes to reopen soon.
Katie Dowd/SFGATESan Francisco's love of kitsch dates back more than 100 years, as evidenced by the city's oddest little "castle."
Inspired by another castle attraction (Telegraph Hill's Layman's Folly, where performers jousted outside), Julius Roz built his own wooden palace in the 1920s, perched on a hill, nestled by the Filbert Steps, overlooking the bay. The restaurant-slash-illegal speakeasy turned into one of the city's gaudiest nights out, a place to see and be seen.
Among its famous guests were Cary Grant, Marlon Brando and Ginger Rogers. Horror film lovers will also recognize it from 1951's "The House on Telegraph Hill."
It closed in 2007, but its revival may not be far off. A new owner is currently renovating the castle from top to bottom with plans to reopen as a restaurant in the near future.
The smallest park in San Francisco, where a 'Voodoo priestess' changed America
Mary Ellen Pleasant Park, San Francisco.
Andrew ChamingsThe corner of Bush and Octavia streets in Pacific Heights is a pretty, curious spot. Stone benches stand among six tall eucalyptus trees that form San Francisco's smallest park.
A plaque on the ground commemorates a woman who planted those very trees 150 years ago, before becoming one of the most important figures in California history. According to ghost tours, she also still haunts the place, but Mary Ellen Pleasant's life was more tragic, heroic and confounding than any ghost story.
A Black woman who passed as white, Pleasant was both celebrated as the "Mother of Human Rights in California," but also demonized as a brothel-owning, magic-weaving, murderous "Voodoo queen."
After working her way out of indentured servitude to an abolitionist family in Massachusetts, Pleasant helped enslaved people escape the South on the Underground Railroad before turning her eyes to California, a place where she could gather funds to fight the ultimate fight — the abolition of slavery in America.
Pleasant set up classy boarding houses and restaurants for men across the city, from gold miners to wealthy, powerful politicians. Pleasant created a tiny empire, building laundromats, flour stores and restaurants. She learned every secret of the city and weaponized them to lift Black people up, secured them housing, jobs, loans, funded legal battles and made it acceptable for high society to hire Black employees.
But as word spread of Pleasant's activism, alongside the rumor that she may actually be Black herself, San Franciscans gossiped about how the opulent mansion was in fact a brothel. The city newspapers wrote salacious rumors about the supposed witchcraft and orgies happening behind the ornate doors in Pacific Heights, but Pleasant didn't back down.
"My cause was the cause of freedom and equality for myself and for my people. And I'd rather be a corpse than a coward," she wrote.
Her mansion and grounds on Octavia Street were pulled down in 1928, but the eucalyptus trees she planted, like the idea that the fight against inequality should be fought and won, still stand strong today.
A salacious fatality straight out of urban legend
A 1960s file photo of Carol Doda showing off the headlines in front of the Condor Club where she performed.
Bettmann/Bettmann ArchiveIt sounds too ridiculous to be true: a club bouncer and his girlfriend having a late-night tryst are crushed by a piano. But it is true — and it's just another piece of what makes the lore of the Condor Club so incredibly strange.
The club's fame went into the stratosphere with the arrival of Carol Doda in 1964. Her legendary bust (she was one of the first topless performers to increase her cup size with silicone injections) and dynamic personality made her one of America's pioneering topless dancers. Soon, her likeness graced the building, and Condor Club and Carol Doda became synonymous.
In 1984, the white piano that Doda stood on as she was lowered down from the ceiling turned into the stuff of urban legend. Club bouncer Jimmy Ferrozzo and his girlfriend were partaking in some after-hours enjoyment on the instrument when one of them triggered the piano to start moving back up. Ferrozzo asphyxiated, although his girlfriend survived.
Today, the Condor Club — and all its many San Francisco quirks and tragedies — continues to watch over the corner of Broadway and Columbus, complete with Doda's memorable likeness.
The narrow hole to freedom
A prison guard kneels by hole in Frank Morris' cell.
The Denver Post/Denver Post via Getty ImagesAll of Alcatraz, in its modern form, is pretty weird, if you think about it. For a while, one of America's most famous cities had a maximum security prison seated in the picturesque waters of the San Francisco Bay. Pleasure boaters could wave at hardened killers, bank robbers and mafia dons.
But no part of Alcatraz is stranger than the holes in the cells that once belonged to Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin.
On June 12, 1962, an Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary guard on his morning rounds noticed the three inmates had not woken from their slumber. When he pushed at the sleeping frame of one man, his head rolled off the bed. It was a dummy.
For six months, during the daily hour when inmates were allowed to play instruments and sing, the men used the cover of that cacophony to scrape through the backs of their cells. Once through, they had access to an unguarded utility corridor. From there, all they had to do was climb to the roof, remove the bolts from a ventilation shaft, and crawl to freedom.
(Whether or not they made it to said freedom, you'll have to decide. All we know for sure is they've never been found by authorities, dead or alive.)
You can see the unbelievably small holes today on the Alcatraz tour, and both marvel and feel a little queasy at how desperate you'd have to be to shove yourself through one.
Source: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/weirdest-places-spots-streets-in-san-francisco-16183110.php
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