A century-old movie house got a gleaming red third act. The Strand Theater at 1127 Market Street opened on 27 October 1917 as the Jewel, a 725-seat silent-film house on San Francisco's Great White Way; it spent the mid-century as a neighborhood cinema, found cult fame in the late 1970s with revival programming and Rocky Horror midnights, slid into adult-film squalor through the 1990s, and was finally shuttered by a city raid in 2003 - the last movie theatre standing on Market Street, abandoned t.....

The house that the 1915 World's Fair built now headlines for the promoter who remade rock. The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium at 99 Grove Street opened on 2 March 1915 as the Exposition Auditorium of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition - a 1.7-million-dollar Beaux-Arts stone-and-steel hall by John Galen Howard, Frederick Meyer and John Reid Jr., gifted to San Francisco when the fair closed and standing ever since among the nine landmark buildings of the Civic Center historic district, dire.....

A beloved independent room in San Francisco's Mission District, Brick and Mortar Music Hall is a small but influential venue on Mission Street that has become a hub for emerging and adventurous music. Occupying a characterful building with exposed brick and an intimate layout, it opened in the early 2010s and quickly established itself as a vital part of the city's grassroots live scene, championing new and underground artists across a wide range of genres. The room is compact, holding a couple.....

Hidden in the basement of the historic Swedish American Hall on Market Street, Cafe Du Nord is one of San Francisco's most atmospheric and enduring live-music venues. Built in 1907 for the Swedish Society of San Francisco, the subterranean space has lived many lives, serving as a speakeasy during Prohibition, a Scandinavian restaurant and a gentlemen's club before becoming the beloved music room that generations of city music lovers know today. The venue is prized for its intimacy and character.....

In the heart of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the California Academy of Sciences is one of the largest natural history museums in the world and the only such institution to combine an aquarium, planetarium, rainforest and natural history museum under a single roof. The academy itself was founded in 1853, making it one of the oldest scientific institutions in the western United States, but its current building, a striking Renzo Piano-designed structure topped by a celebrated living roof of na.....

San Francisco's great movie palace came back from a 41-million-dollar rebuild as a concert hall that still runs film. The Castro Theatre at 429 Castro Street opened on 22 June 1922 with an invitation-only screening attended by Mayor "Sunny Jim" Rolph - the first solo commission of Timothy L. Pflueger, who went on to design Oakland's Paramount and much of the Bay Area's Jazz Age skyline. The Spanish Baroque fantasy, with its Churrigueresque facade, leatherette ceiling evoking an open-air Roman am.....

In the eastern reaches of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the Conservatory of Flowers is the oldest public glasshouse in North America and one of the most photographed buildings in the city. Built in the late 1870s and opened to the public in 1879, the gleaming white Victorian glasshouse is patterned on the great Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London, with intricate wood-and-glass framing assembled originally in New York and shipped around Cape Horn to the city by a wealthy lo.....

In Golden Gate Park, the de Young Museum is the principal fine-art museum of San Francisco and one of the most architecturally striking buildings in the city. Founded in 1895 as a permanent legacy of the California Midwinter International Exposition by newspaper publisher M. H. de Young, the museum has occupied several iterations of building on the same Golden Gate Park site, the current copper-clad structure designed by the celebrated Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron opening to enormous acclaim .....

Stretching three miles westward from the Haight to the Pacific Ocean and just under a half-mile wide at its broadest point, Golden Gate Park is the great urban park of San Francisco and at 1,017 acres around twenty percent larger than New York's Central Park. Conceived in 1870 by the city's Park Commission on land widely considered an unpromising stretch of shifting sand dunes, the park was painstakingly transformed by the chief engineer William Hammond Hall and his successor John McLaren, whose.....

The oldest nightclub in San Francisco was built in 1907 by a French-quarter impresario fresh out of jail, and its balconies, frescoed ceilings and marble columns have survived every reinvention since. The Great American Music Hall, at 859 O'Farrell Street in the Tenderloin, is a roughly 600-capacity Victorian ballroom that ranks among the most beautiful small venues in America. It opened as Blanco's Cafe amid the post-earthquake rebuilding boom, a bordello-adjacent palace of gilt and plaster ru.....