Visiting San Francisco as a kid, I loved Pier 39 and watching the sea lions jostle for a spot in the sun. After I moved here in 2015, though, my image of Pier 39 morphed into a traffic clusterfuck, and like many San Franciscans, I consigned the northeast corner of the city to the same “tourists only” oblivion.
Avoiding touristy spots is a ritual of cementing one’s own image as a local, but sometimes that attitude can backfire. In fact, this corner of the city more than deserves a deeper look, whether you’re boarding a ferry for Alcatraz or exploring the wharf’s odd nooks and crannies.
And then there’s Telegraph Hill. Only blocks away from Pier 39, it’s a distinctly San Francisco gem, often written off by locals as part of the tourist circuit. But the neighborhood offers stunning cliffside views of the bay, hidden gardens, and endless staircases. Walking its meandering paths rekindled the sense of wonder about the city I’d felt as a child a few blocks north.
Exactly what counts as Telegraph Hill is up for debate. North Beach irredentists claim the hill in its entirety. Coit Tower features heavily in North Beach’s iconography. Telegraph Hill Historic District signs, meanwhile, pepper the flatlands east of the hill.
Undeniably part of Telegraph Hill are the Greenwich Steps, where I started my walk, on the hill’s eastern flank. Starting from a nondescript concrete staircase tucked into a dead-end near Levi’s Plaza, these steps disappear above street level into a thicket of trees.
On the path’s left, houses are lodged into the cliff face, connected to the city only by the narrow walk. To the right is a terraced public garden, after which the hill drops nearly vertical, the result of quarrying for ship ballast.
San Francisco typically avoids outward displays of the changing seasons. But on my recent visit, there was an inescapable sense of autumn along the Greenwich Steps. The leaves were dewey from recent rains, and the hill smelled of wet earth. My only companion was a man smoking a cigarette and reading a book at a small table. His presence added to the idyllic mood; I didn’t dare disturb him.
As you climb toward the peak, the steps pause briefly to cross Montgomery Street. From there I headed into a cul-de-sac dominated by Julius’ Castle, which was the second castle built on Telegraph Hill. The first, the Telegraph Hill Observatory, often known as Layman’s Folly, burned down in 1903. Julius’ Castle operated as a restaurant for 84 years before closing in 2007. After a protracted court case and COVID delays, the restaurant continues to push to reopen.
The castle has impressive architectural credentials, but is arguably more famous for hiding some of its features behind a facade during the filming of The House On Telegraph Hill in 1951. Julius’ Castle played the titular house on the hill.
Above Montgomery, the Greenwich Steps resume in brick, and the air carries a combination of scents unique to Northern California: Monterey cypress, eucalyptus, and palm trees cohabitate along the stairs.
At the summit is Pioneer Park and Coit Tower. The 210-foot tower, funded by the estate of Lillie Hitchcock Coit to honor the city’s firefighters, was completed in 1933. As a San Francisco icon, it’s easy to take for granted — again, just another stop on the tour-bus parade. But when you’re this close, stop and look. Its scalloped white column has a powerful simplicity, while the arches around its peak offer neoclassical flair and panoramic views.
Telegraph Hill was known as Loma Alta (“High Hill”) prior to the end of the Mexican-American War. But the hill’s current namesake derives from a semaphore telegraph that was placed at the hill’s crest in 1849, which alerted the city’s harborfront to ships entering the bay.
The semaphore is not the only artifact that’s no longer around. A prominent pedestal at the foot of Coit Tower was noticeably unoccupied by Christopher Columbus, which city workers removed on June 18, 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. A rally set for the following day had planned to tear the statue down and hurl it into the bay. City documents cited public safety concerns for the decision; eight days prior, a protester in Portsmouth, Virginia was left comatose when a statue was pulled down on top of him.
Provocative art has a long history in the neighborhood. The interior of Coit Tower is home to murals commissioned in 1934 by the Public Works of Art Project. The murals portray everyday life in California during the Great Depression in the Socialist Realism style and harbor clear leftist leanings. A violent strike at the time of the paintings led pieces of the murals to be repainted. The entire facility was temporarily padlocked before it ultimately opened to the public.
(The project supervisor, Robert Arnautoff, also painted murals at Washington High, which depict George Washington as complicit in the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. San Francisco’s school board voted to cover up those murals in 2019, but a court ruling said the decision was made without proper review. After the controversial 2022 school board recall, the new board abandoned the cover-up effort entirely.)
Coit Tower visitors have to pay to take the elevator up to the panoramic viewpoint, but the mural gallery is free. The tumult of their era is clear. In Bernard Zakheim’s Library fresco, newspaper headlines announce the deaths of thousands of striking Austrian workers and the rise of fascism in Europe. Artist John Langley Howard is pulling Karl Marx’s Das Kapital off a shelf.
My eye was drawn to the panel next to Library, Suzanne Scheuer’s Newsgathering, for its nod to my profession. The vibrant colors seemingly pop off the wall thanks to a restoration project in 2017.
After taking in the murals, I headed south one block and headed down the Filbert Steps, which run parallel to the Greenwich Steps. Like their sister staircase, the Filbert Steps cascade down through beautifully maintained gardens, originally the work of Grace Marchant, who converted the area near the steps from a dumping ground into a public paradise.
But made from wood, they have their own personality. Through the tree canopy, stair walkers can glimpse flashes of the bay, while the evergreens, fallen yellow leaves, and the brown of the staircase paint an earthen scene, with vibrant purple Glory Bush flowers accenting certain levels. I caught the block between the Halloween and Christmas seasons, but once the strings of lights are out, there are few places more enchanting at dusk.
Past Montgomery, the wooden boardwalks connect the Filbert Steps to densely-packed cliffside houses like wharves. This is far from a coincidence. Before landfill expanded the city, the bay lapped against Telegraph Hill’s eastern flank, and the neighborhood served as a waterfront village for dockworkers. Echoes of this period remain. The neighborhood emerged mostly unscathed from the Great Fire of 1906, leaving Telegraph Hill dense with historical houses. The Napier Lane boardwalk’s houses date from 1875–1890.
The steps end at Levi’s Plaza, headquarters of the world-renown jeans company. I’ve previously visited The Vault, a collection of the company’s rarest articles, but it was closed the day I visited. Two small parks sit next to Levi’s headquarters. Hard Park is a paved open space with concrete fountains. Soft Park next to it has a lush grass field and small stream, perfect for a picnic stop.
A Beat window
My parking spot was about to expire, so I drove back to the top of the Filbert Steps near the Malloch Building at 1360 Montgomery. This Streamline Moderne apartment complex — a cool architectural riposte to the gaudiness of Julius’ Castle just down the street — served as the setting for Dark Passage, a Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall noir classic from 1947. The exterior plaster panels by Alfred Dupont depict explorers, Earth, and California.
A half block south, look for a plaque at 1309 Montgomery that dates the house to 1863, one of San Francisco’s oldest surviving structures. Across the street, on the corner of Montgomery and Union, is Midge’s apartment from the 1958 Hitchcock thriller Vertigo. A view of the Transamerica Pyramid bookends the street, and if you squint you might fall for the whimsical illusion that the pyramid’s been cut down to neighborhood size.
It was time to explore the hill’s western flank. I started with a brief sojourn down the Montgomery Street steps, which provide a direct route from Telegraph Hill to the Financial District. From the bottom of the stairs, look for a small face carved into the concrete.
I walked back up and headed west on Union Street towards North Beach. At 1562 Grant Avenue, I found a small window display in a closed storefront. It turns out City Lights’ publishing and editorial office was based there from 1967 to 1978, and a variety of small objects were on display, including a copy of Howl, the Allen Ginsberg poem published by City Lights in 1956 that drove America crazy, turned Beats into household names, and led to an obscenity trial.
The window, perhaps SF’s most random mini-museum, also displayed a can of paint and a heatsink, perhaps from a ship, with a cryptic trivia message for passers-by:
Near this intersection are two more Beat reminders: Bob Kaufman Alley and Jack Micheline Place, both named for poets that never gained the same profile as Ginsberg. Kaufman was known as “The Original Bebop Man,” a founder of Beatitude magazine who recited street poetry until a vow of silence between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the end of the Vietnam War. Micheline was a poet and painter who wrestled with his place in the literary world.
Marconi plays the mamba
To get back to the hill’s peak, I took a right on Greenwich and climbed stairs through Pimentell Garden. The garden is smaller than its counterpart on the Greenwich Steps, but adds a lushness to the more urban side of Telegraph Hill.
I also found a statue honoring Guglielmo Marconi, whose experiments led to the development of radiotelegraphy, later condensed into the word radio, often in the San Francisco area. I can’t help but think this statue inspired the local band Starship, whose 1985 much-loathed hit “We Built This City” included the baffling line “Marconi plays the mamba” and led a generation of pop-radio listeners to believe that he invented one of the world’s most poisonous snakes. “We Built This City” may be a frequent contender for worst song of all time, but I remain a defiant fan.
Passing a sign warning of recent coyote activity (which might have made for a more interesting walk), I wound my way past exquisite houses along Lombard, Julius, and Whiting Streets to the northern tip of Telegraph Hill. Well-manicured, fenced-off hedgerows lined the peak of the Chestnut and Kearny Open Space, which offers good views from Chestnut Street but is mostly an inaccessible cliff face.
I ended my walk at the tiny Jack Early Park, which is nothing more than stairs that lead to a north-facing view. Early spent 25 years developing the park himself, which has barely enough room for a couple at the viewpoint. It’s an eccentric testament to unusual constraints — how San Francisco is that?
Two hours in, I felt like I’d only started to scratch the surface of the neighborhood, but the excursion was also a workout, and it was time to head down to North Beach to refuel — perhaps lunch at Italian Homemade, followed by some old Beat inspiration with coffee at Caffe Trieste.
How to get there
If you drive, there will likely be room near Levi’s Plaza, on the east side of Telegraph Hill. It’s also easy to reach from the Embarcadero if you take the Muni F historic street car line. If you’re busing to North Beach, take the 30 Stockton or the 45 Union. If you refuse to climb stairs, and somehow you’ve made it to the end of this article, you can also take the 39 Coit up to the tower.