San Francisco's Secret Places

Only a tiny sign with a dangling eyeball tells you you've found it: a single peephole set into a wall on Orange Alley, showing a rotating selection of short silent films to anyone willing to stop and look.

San Francisco Travel, the city's official tourism board, features it directly on its own site as one of the city's real secrets, drawn from local writer Ruth Carlson's book on the city's weirder corners.

Curated by artist Sarah Klein since its creation in 2013 by animator Laurie O'Brien, the film selection changes periodically — a card posted beside the peephole lists whatever is currently showing and its creator.

Mannie, Moe, and Jack are larger-than-life fiberglass dog heads built in 1948, originally mounted on rotating poles outside branches of Doggie Diner, a once-popular San Francisco and Oakland hot dog chain.

When the chain closed in 1986, most of its roughly 30 dog heads were thrown away — San Francisco resident John Law rescued three of them, and they eventually found a permanent, protected home in Golden Gate Park.

San Francisco Travel features the statues directly among its list of city secrets; today they stand along the car-free stretch of JFK Drive, an unmistakable and slightly surreal photo stop for anyone who knows to look for them.

In the 1950s, one proposal seriously considered damming San Francisco Bay to create freshwater lakes. To test whether the idea would actually work, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a working hydraulic scale model of the entire Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta system.

The tests proved the plan would have been disastrous, the Bay was never dammed, and the model itself survived — now housed in a Sausalito warehouse and kept running as both an education tool and, effectively, a free museum.

It remains the only model of its kind in the world, run by the Army Corps' San Francisco District, with self-guided visits and occasional group tours for school and technical groups.