San Francisco's Most Iconic Landmarks

The Golden Gate Bridge leaps across the mile-wide strait where San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific, connecting the tip of the city to the Marin headlands.

Chief engineer Joseph Strauss led the project, but the elegant final form owes as much to engineer Charles Ellis, who worked out the mathematics of the suspension design, and to consulting architect Irving Morrow, who gave the towers their stepped Art Deco profile and chose the now-famous color.

That color, International Orange, was selected over the gray or striped schemes the Navy preferred because it complements the landscape and stands out in fog, and crews repaint the bridge continuously to hold back the corrosion of the salt air.

When it opened it was both the longest and the tallest suspension bridge in the world, its two towers rising some seven hundred and forty-six feet and its main span stretching four thousand two hundred feet between them.

The bridge is a working roadway, but it is also a walk, a photograph, and a pilgrimage. Sidewalks on the eastern side carry pedestrians and cyclists out over the water, where the cables sweep down and back up in a long catenary curve and the deck hums under passing traffic.

The great drama here is the weather: the fog that pours through the gate on summer afternoons can swallow the towers whole, leaving only their red tips floating above a white sea.

Coit Tower stands at the crest of Telegraph Hill, a fluted concrete column two hundred and ten feet tall that has become one of the city's most beloved silhouettes.

It was built with a bequest from Lillie Hitchcock Coit, an eccentric heiress who as a girl became an honorary member of a volunteer fire company, and legend long held that the tower was shaped to resemble a fire hose nozzle, though its architect Arthur Brown Jr.

always denied any such intent.

The tower's true treasure waits inside at ground level: a continuous cycle of frescoes painted in 1934 by more than two dozen artists under the New Deal Public Works of Art Project.

Executed in the social-realist style influenced by Diego Rivera, the murals depict California workers in fields, factories, libraries, and city streets, and a few details were controversial enough at the time to briefly delay the tower's opening.

An elevator carries visitors to the observation platform at the top, where one of the great three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panoramas of San Francisco opens up: the bay and its bridges, the downtown towers, the neighborhoods spilling over the hills, and the boats crossing toward Alcatraz and Angel Island.

The approach up the hill is a pleasure in itself, whether by the winding road or the leafy Filbert and Greenwich Steps, where wild parrots often call from the trees.

The Ferry Building anchors the foot of Market Street on the Embarcadero waterfront, its long arcaded facade crowned by a two-hundred-and-forty-five-foot clock tower modeled on the Giralda bell tower of Seville Cathedral. Designed by architect A.

Page Brown and opened in 1898, it was for decades the second-busiest transit terminal in the world, funneling tens of thousands of commuters who crossed the bay by ferry before the great bridges were built.

When the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge opened in the 1930s, ferry traffic collapsed and the building slid into decline, later hidden behind an elevated freeway that walled it off from the city.

The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 damaged that freeway so badly that it was torn down, reopening the waterfront and setting the stage for the building's celebrated revival.

Restored and reopened in 2003, the Ferry Building now houses a soaring interior nave lined with artisan food shops, cheesemongers, bakeries, oyster bars, and cafes celebrating the bounty of Northern California.

Several days a week the plazas outside fill with one of the country's finest farmers markets, where the region's farmers and foragers sell directly to chefs and home cooks.

Ferries still depart from the slips behind the building, so it remains a living gateway between the city and the bay.

San Francisco's cable cars are the world's last manually operated cable railway system still in daily service, a moving national landmark that climbs the city's steepest hills by gripping a continuously running cable buried beneath the street.

The system was born in 1873 when Andrew Hallidie, moved by the sight of horses struggling and falling on the wet cobbles, devised a way to haul cars up the slopes using the same wire-rope technology used in mining.

Each car has no engine of its own; instead the gripman operates a great lever that clamps onto or releases the moving cable running at a steady nine and a half miles per hour, while a second crew member works the brakes.

All the cables run out from a central powerhouse on Nob Hill, where visitors can watch the enormous winding wheels turn through the windows of the free Cable Car Museum.

Three lines survive today: the Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason lines climbing from the downtown turntable near Union Square out toward Fisherman's Wharf, and the California Street line running east to west through the Financial District and Chinatown.

Riding one is not merely transport but a plunge into the nineteenth century, the car swaying and clanging its bell as it crests a hill and the whole bay suddenly opens up below.

The California Academy of Sciences sits in the middle of Golden Gate Park, an extraordinary institution that combines an aquarium, a planetarium, a natural history museum, and a four-story indoor rainforest under a single roof.

The academy itself is one of the oldest scientific institutions in the country, but its current home, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and opened in 2008, reinvented it as a showcase of sustainable design.

The building's most striking feature is its undulating living roof, planted with native Californian wildflowers and grasses that rise and fall in green hills echoing the city's topography, cooling the building and sheltering local wildlife.

Skylights and glass walls flood the interior with daylight, and the whole structure earned the highest environmental rating, a deliberate statement that a museum of the natural world should tread lightly upon it.

Inside, visitors descend into the Steinhart Aquarium to walk beneath a coral reef, climb through the humid glass dome of the Osher Rainforest among free-flying butterflies and birds, and recline beneath the Morrison Planetarium's all-digital dome for immersive journeys through the cosmos.

An albino alligator, a colony of penguins, and a specimen-filled naturalist center round out a place that manages to be both a serious research institution and one of the most delightful family attractions in the city.

Fisherman's Wharf spreads along the northern waterfront, a historic fishing harbor that grew from the Italian and other immigrant fishermen who worked these waters and still supplies the city with Dungeness crab in season.

The wharf remains a working port in part, its lagoon crowded with fishing boats, while its walkways brim with seafood stands serving crab cocktails and clam chowder ladled into hollowed-out rounds of the city's famous tangy sourdough bread.

At its lively eastern end stands Pier 39, a festive boardwalk of shops, restaurants, street performers, and a vintage carousel that opened in 1978.

Its most beloved and entirely unplanned attraction arrived after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, when hundreds of California sea lions hauled themselves onto the pier's boat docks and simply stayed, barking, jostling, and sunbathing in a heaving mass that now draws crowds year-round.

Beyond the crab stands and souvenir shops, the district holds genuine history and sweeping views: the vessels of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park moored at Hyde Street Pier, the World War II submarine USS Pampanito, and clear sightlines out to Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge.

It is unabashedly touristy, but the salt air, the sea lions, and the smell of sourdough and crab make it an essential and enjoyable slice of the city.