Three million clubbers have passed through this SoMa doorway. 1015 Folsom, at the corner of Folsom and 6th Street in San Francisco's South of Market, is one of the longest continuously operating dance clubs in the United States: a 20,000-square-foot maze of five rooms across three levels, main floor capacity 800 and the whole building around 1,500, that has hosted Madonna, Tiesto, Fatboy Slim, Giorgio Moroder, LCD Soundsystem and Dave Chappelle across four decades. The building's history is pur.....

Tucked into the bustle of San Francisco's Pier 39 waterfront, the 7D Experience is a compact, high-energy interactive ride that fuses the screen-based action of a video game with the physical motion of a theme-park attraction. Part of a small American chain of such rides, the venue opened on the pier in the mid-2010s and quickly became a favourite quick stop for families and groups looking for a punchy diversion between the sea-lion docks, restaurants and shopping along the bay. The format is s.....

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.....

Few prison sites in the world are as instantly recognisable as Alcatraz, the small rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay whose name has become shorthand for inescapable confinement. Originally a military fortification and Civil War-era detention site, the island opened as the United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, in August 1934, conceived as a maximum-security, minimum-privilege federal prison to hold the most disruptive inmates from elsewhere in the federal system. The icy curr.....

At the gateway to bustling Pier 39, the Aquarium of the Bay focuses tightly on the marine ecosystems of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific waters that lap the shore just beyond its doors. Opened in 1996 and operated by a non-profit organisation dedicated to conservation along the central Californian coast, the aquarium has built its reputation on highlighting the dramatic local fauna of cold-water sharks, bay rays, sturgeon, sea anemones and the surprisingly rich life found beneath the famous Gol.....

Occupying a handsomely restored building on Mason Street in San Francisco's Union Square district, August Hall is a multi-level live-music venue and nightlife destination that opened in 2018 on the site of the former Ruby Skye nightclub. Conceived as a modern, design-led space for concerts and events, it pairs a grand main hall with a series of bars and a basement entertainment lounge, blending live performance with a polished social experience. The main room is the heart of the operation, a hi.....

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.....

San Francisco's most glamorous nightclub began as a Prohibition speakeasy with showgirls and backroom gaming tables. Agostino "Bimbo" Giuntoli - nicknamed by a partner who could not pronounce Agostino - opened the 365 Club in 1931 on the third floor of 365 Market Street, promising "open 365 days" and the World's Best Dinner from 3 dollars 65. In 1951 he moved the operation into the Art Deco building at 1025 Columbus Avenue in North Beach, designed by master architect Timothy Pflueger for the riv.....

The little room at the bottom of Potrero Hill launched half the bands on your festival posters. Bottom of the Hill opened in September 1991 at 1233 17th Street in San Francisco, in a two-storey 1911 Edwardian that had served the neighbourhood as restaurant, soda fountain, speakeasy and workingmen's lunch club almost without interruption - the Seventeenth Street Restaurant had already renamed itself Bottom of the Hill back in 1964, feeding warehouse workers and Merchant Marines Italian food. Dave.....

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.....