Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill

Coit Tower is a 210-foot fluted Art Deco column planted on the summit of Telegraph Hill, and it exists because of one eccentric benefactor. Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a cigar-smoking, poker-playing socialite who had chased fire engines through the city as a teenager and was made an honorary member of Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5, left a third of her estate in 1929 'for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city I have always loved.' The tower opened in 1933. The persistent story that it was designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle is charming and almost certainly untrue — architects Arthur Brown Jr. and Henry Howard denied it — but nobody in San Francisco is in a hurry to correct the record.

The murals in the ground-floor lobby are the reason art historians visit. Twenty-six artists working under the Public Works of Art Project — the New Deal's first federal art programme — covered 3,691 square feet of wall in fresco depicting Californian labour: dockworkers, farm hands, steelworkers, a newsstand, a library, a stockbroker's office. The politics were pointed enough that the tower's opening was delayed amid controversy over Communist imagery, including a hammer and sickle and a visible copy of the Daily Worker. They remain among the finest surviving examples of Depression-era social realism in the country, and admission to view them is free.

The observation deck is the payoff. From 210 feet up on a hill that's already 295 feet high, the panorama runs unbroken: the Golden Gate and Marin Headlands to the northwest, Alcatraz and Angel Island straight ahead, the Bay Bridge and East Bay to the east, and the whole grid of North Beach, Chinatown and the Financial District below. Few city viewpoints anywhere give you a true 360 at this height without glass in the way.

Then there are the parrots. A feral flock of cherry-headed conures — descendants of escaped pets, made famous by the documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill — genuinely lives in the trees around Pioneer Park and the Filbert Steps. You'll hear them before you see them. The Filbert and Greenwich Steps themselves, wooden staircases threading down through private cottage gardens to the Embarcadero, are one of the great urban walks in America and the best way to leave the tower.