Updated October 2026.
Looking for unique things to do in San Francisco? Skip the Alcatraz-and-Pier-39 loop. These thirty are the places and plans locals actually send visiting friends to: a sculpture the tide plays, a concrete slide you ride on cardboard, a bathhouse on the Bayview waterfront, a museum of hand-cranked arcade machines, and a couple of workshops where you leave with something you made. Most are free or under $30. We have grouped them by neighbourhood so you can do three or four in an afternoon rather than crossing the city for each.
Two of the thirty are ours. We run craft studios in SoMa and the Financial District, and we have put our two most unusual classes in the slots where they honestly belong. Everything else we have no stake in.
Along the Water
1. The Wave Organ
At the end of a jetty past the St. Francis Yacht Club, twenty-odd PVC and concrete pipes run down into the Bay, and at high tide the water pushes air through them into a low, gurgling music. It was built in 1986 from the granite and marble of a demolished cemetery. Look up the tide table and go within an hour of high water; at low tide it is silent and people leave confused. The view back to the city from the jetty is the bonus. Free, forty-five minutes.
2. Musée Mécanique
Three hundred working coin-operated machines on Pier 45, from 1880s music boxes to Laughing Sal, the terrifying animatronic from the old Playland. Free to enter, a quarter a machine, so bring a roll. It is the only thing at Fisherman's Wharf that locals go to on purpose.
3. Sutro Baths at low tide
The concrete ruins of an 1896 saltwater swimming palace at the edge of Ocean Beach, now tide pools and a cave you can walk through when the water is out. Go at low tide, wear shoes you do not mind soaking, and then climb the Lands End trail above it. Free.
4. The Lands End Labyrinth
A stone labyrinth on a cliff at Mile Rock, with the Golden Gate Bridge framed behind it. It gets kicked apart and rebuilt by volunteers every year or so, so it may be perfect or half-gone when you arrive. Either way the walk to it along the Coastal Trail is the best free hour in the city.
5. The Camera Obscura
A small camera-shaped building behind the old Cliff House that projects a live, rotating image of Ocean Beach onto a dish inside, using a lens and a mirror and nothing else. It is from 1946 and it is open when the weather is, which is to say check first. A few dollars.
6. Fort Funston hang gliders
Two-hundred-foot sandstone bluffs at the city's southwest corner where hang gliders launch on windy afternoons and off-leash dogs own the beach below. Stand on the viewing deck and watch people step off a cliff. Free, and a short drive from everything else on this list.
7. Sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge
Most visitors see the bridge from land. A catamaran out of Pier 39 takes you under it and back with the city behind you, and the sunset sails are the ones worth booking. Dress for wind in every month. Around $60–80 per person.
8. Angel Island by ferry and bike
A state park in the middle of the Bay with a five-mile loop road, the Immigration Station museum, and views of the city from the side you never see. Take the ferry from Pier 41, rent a bike on the island or bring one, and give it the whole day. Around $20–30 for the ferry.
The Parks and the West Side
9. The 16th Avenue Tiled Steps and Grandview Park
A 163-step mosaic staircase in the Inner Sunset, hand-tiled by neighbours, that reads as a single image from the bottom. Keep climbing past the top and you reach Grandview Park, a bare rock summit with a view across the whole west side to the ocean. Free; go in the hour before sunset.
10. The Hidden Garden Steps
The quieter sibling, four blocks south on 16th Avenue at Kirkham: another tiled staircase, this one surrounded by the gardens neighbours planted alongside it. Do both in one walk.
11. The bison paddock
Golden Gate Park has had a bison herd since 1891, and they are still there, in a paddock on John F. Kennedy Drive near the west end. You will walk past it on the way to the windmills and nobody will believe you.
12. The Dutch windmills and the tulip garden
Two working windmills from the 1900s at the ocean end of the park, built to pump irrigation water. The Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden around the north one blooms in late February and March and is the most photographed thing in the park for those six weeks. Free.
13. Andy Goldsworthy in the Presidio
Four pieces by the British land artist hidden across the Presidio: the Spire, a hundred-foot column of cypress trunks; the Wood Line, a serpentine path of eucalyptus; Tree Fall; and Earth Wall. Wood Line is the one to see, a ten-minute walk from the Presidio Transit Center, and most people walk straight past it. Free.
14. Presidio Tunnel Tops and Battery Bluff
Fourteen acres of new parkland built on top of the highway tunnels, with the best ground-level view of the bridge in the city and a café. Walk west along the bluff to the old gun batteries. It opened in 2022 and still feels like a secret to people who last visited before then.
15. The Dahlia Garden
Next to the Conservatory of Flowers, a small garden that from August to early October is the most intensely coloured thing in San Francisco: dinner-plate dahlias in every variety, grown by a volunteer society. Free and almost nobody knows to look.
Downtown, SoMa and the Hills
16. A rug tufting workshop in SoMa
Full disclosure, this one is ours. You get a tufting gun, a frame and a design, and spend two and a half hours turning yarn into a rug you take home the same day. It is loud, physical and absurdly satisfying, and it is the thing on this list that groups of friends come back for. Rug tufting at 360 Ritch Street, five minutes from Caltrain, $89 with materials; evening classes most days.
17. The Cable Car Museum
Free, on Nob Hill, and not a museum of objects: it is the working powerhouse, and you stand on a mezzanine above four winding wheels pulling every cable car cable in the city, in real time. Ride a Powell line car there and walk down through Chinatown.
18. Grace Cathedral's indoor labyrinth
Two labyrinths, one indoors on the nave floor, plus Keith Haring's final altarpiece and stained glass that includes Einstein. Free to enter, and walking the labyrinth slowly on a weekday afternoon is a strange, good thing to do in the middle of a city.
19. The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory
A tiny room in Ross Alley in Chinatown where two women fold fortune cookies by hand off a rotating griddle, as they have since 1962. It takes ten minutes, a bag of warm cookies costs a few dollars, and you can bring your own fortunes.
20. Li Po Lounge
A Chinatown dive bar from 1937 with a cave-like entrance, a golden Buddha and a Chinese mai tai made with baijiu that is stronger than you want it to be. Anthony Bourdain drank here; so does everyone who lives within ten blocks.
21. The Tonga Room
A tiki bar in the basement of the Fairmont with a lagoon in the middle, a band playing on a boat, and an indoor rainstorm every half hour. It has been ridiculous since 1945 and the city would riot if it closed. Book a table; expensive drinks, worth one.
22. Exploratorium After Dark
On Thursday evenings the Exploratorium is adults only, with a bar and six hundred hands-on exhibits about light, sound and perception. It is the best eighteen-plus night out in the city that does not involve a line. Around $20–25.
23. A Turkish mosaic lamp workshop
Ours again. The craft KraftStories was founded on: glass tiles and beads set onto a lamp globe, grouted, and fitted onto a base, over two and a half unhurried hours. The lamp you leave with is the souvenir of San Francisco that actually gets used. Turkish mosaic lamps in SoMa, $79 with materials; the Financial District studio takes larger groups.
24. Mission Dolores
The oldest intact building in San Francisco, a 1791 adobe chapel that survived the 1906 earthquake while the basilica next door fell, with a cemetery that appears in Vertigo. It is small, quiet and two blocks from Dolores Park. A few dollars.
The Mission, the Castro and Points South
25. The Seward Street Slides
Two concrete slides in a pocket park in the Castro, built in 1973 after a teenager won a design competition. You bring cardboard, you sit on it, and you go faster than seems reasonable. Adults are only allowed on the slides with a child, so borrow one, or go for the view and the laugh. Free.
26. Clarion Alley
One block of murals between Mission and Valencia at 17th, repainted constantly since 1992 and more political than pretty. Walk it, then walk Balmy Alley twenty minutes south for the older Central American murals that started the tradition. Free.
27. Dandelion Chocolate's factory
The 16th Street factory walks you from cocoa bean to bar with a tasting at the end and a café for afterwards. Short, indoors, and the best rainy-afternoon stop in the Mission. Around $20–40.
28. Archimedes Banya
A Russian bathhouse on the water in the Bayview: a wood-fired sauna, a steam room, hot and cold pools, a rooftop, and pelmeni and beer upstairs. Co-ed, swimsuits required, a car or rideshare to get there, and four hours disappear. Around $50–70.
29. Kabuki Springs & Spa
The other bathhouse, in Japantown: a quiet communal bath with a hot pool, a cold plunge, sauna and steam, on a schedule of women-only, men-only and co-ed days. Check which day it is before you go and book ahead on weekends. Around $40–60.
30. The Interval at Long Now
In the corner of Fort Mason's Building A, a bar and small museum run by the Long Now Foundation: a working prototype of their ten-thousand-year clock, a wall of books chosen to restart civilisation, and very good cocktails. It opens in the afternoon and is the quietest place in the city to end a day of all of the above.
Quick Answers
What are the most unique things to do in San Francisco?
The Wave Organ at high tide, the Seward Street Slides, Musée Mécanique, the Sutro Baths ruins, the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps, a Russian banya in the Bayview, and a workshop where you leave with a tufted rug or a mosaic lamp. None of them appears on the standard tourist loop and most are free.
What is there to do in San Francisco for young adults?
Exploratorium After Dark on Thursdays, Li Po Lounge and the Tonga Room, a sunset sail from Pier 39, Off the Grid food trucks at Fort Mason on Friday nights in season, and an evening tufting class in SoMa with a group of friends. The Mission and the Castro are the neighbourhoods to end up in afterwards.
What are unusual things to do in San Francisco at night?
Twin Peaks after dark for the view, the Tonga Room's indoor rainstorm, a late film at the restored Castro Theatre, Exploratorium After Dark, and the Wave Organ if high tide falls after sunset. Evening craft classes in SoMa run most nights of the week.
What can a group of friends do in San Francisco?
Things you do together rather than watch together: an escape room at the Palace of Fine Arts, a tufting or mosaic lamp class where everyone makes their own, a banya afternoon, a bike loop of Angel Island, or Off the Grid followed by The Interval. Groups of eight or more can book any of our classes privately.
Is San Francisco worth visiting if I have already seen the main sights?
More so. The city rewards the second visit, because most of the things on this list are in neighbourhoods the first visit skips: the Richmond, the Sunset, Japantown, the Bayview and the Presidio's interior. Pick a side of the city per day and walk it.
How many of these are free?
Sixteen of the thirty cost nothing: every park, step, garden, mural, labyrinth and lookout on the list, plus Musée Mécanique and the Cable Car Museum. The rest are mostly under $30, with the bathhouses, the sail and the workshops at $50–90.
