San Francisco packs 250 years into 49 square miles: a 1776 Spanish mission, a harbour of abandoned Gold Rush ships buried under the Financial District, a city that burned in 1906, and neighbourhoods that survived exclusion, internment and redevelopment.
Founded 1776, the adobe chapel of 1791 is the oldest intact building in San Francisco — 1.2m thick walls, redwood ceiling beams lashed with rawhide, and a reredos brought from Mexico in 1796. Open 09:00–16:00 daily.
The plaza where Captain Montgomery raised the US flag in July 1846 over a village of 200 people called Yerba Buena. Bronze plaques mark the original 1846 waterline — the bay once reached Montgomery Street, three blocks east.
Spanish garrison from 1776, Mexican from 1822, American from 1846 — 218 years of continuous military use. The Officers' Club encases surviving adobe walls behind glass, with excavated Spanish-era foundations displayed in situ.
A three-tier brick casemate fort of 1861 built to guard the Golden Gate with 126 cannon, never fired in anger. Saved from demolition in the 1930s when Strauss redesigned the bridge with an arch to span it. Open Fri–Sun 10:00–17:00.
Sits on the 1852 site of the original express office. Holds an original Concord stagecoach, gold nuggets and dust from the Mother Lode, Black Bart's poems, and telegraph equipment from the era when Montgomery Street banked the Comstock.
Gifted by actress Lotta Crabtree in 1875, it became the survivors' message board after 18 April 1906 — where people posted names of the missing. Survivors gathered here at 05:12 every anniversary until the last died in 2016.
Built 1933 with Lillie Hitchcock Coit's bequest to the city's firefighters. The ground-floor fresco cycle was painted in 1934 by 26 New Deal artists — labour scenes so radical the tower's opening was delayed amid Red Scare protests.
The UN Charter was signed in the Herbst Theatre on 26 June 1945 by 50 nations, and the Treaty of San Francisco ending the Pacific War was signed in the Opera House on 8 September 1951. Granite columns in the plaza list the founding members.
Housed in the 1932 Julia Morgan-designed Chinatown YWCA. Documents the 1882 Exclusion Act, the paper-son system and the 1906 destruction of the birth records that let thousands claim citizenship. Open Tue–Sun 11:00–16:00.
One of three surviving Japantowns in the US. In spring 1942 the entire population was removed under Executive Order 9066; timeline plaques along Buchanan Street mark the assembly point and the Fillmore's later Black jazz-era occupancy of the vacated homes.
An 1886 Queen Anne survivor of the 1906 fire, whose western edge stopped at Van Ness when the army dynamited a firebreak. 24 rooms with original furnishings, occupied by one family until 1972. Tours Wed/Sat/Sun.
The first standalone queer history museum in the US holds Harvey Milk's camera-shop till, his kitchen table and the sound tape of his political will. His shop at 575 Castro is now a bookstore with a plaque and mural.