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San Francisco Museums

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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Telephone: 415.357.4000
Fax: 415.357.4037
www.sfmoma.org

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a major modern art museum and San Francisco landmark. It opened in 1935 under founding director Dr. Grace Morley (Grace L. McCann Morley, Director from 1935–1958) as the San Francisco Museum of Art, the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art.
For its first sixty years, the museum occupied upper floors of the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Civic Center. Under director Henry T. Hopkins (1974–1986) the museum added "Modern" to its title in 1975, and established an international reputation.
The museum has in its collection important works by Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp and Ansel Adams, among others. The famous cinema series Art in Cinema was started at SFMOMA in 1946 by filmmaker Frank Stauffacher.
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San Francisco Railway Museum
77 Steuart Street
San Francisco CA 94105
at the Steuart Street F-line stop
(415) 974-1948
(415) 974-1968 fax
www.streetcar.org

The Museum is a local railway history museum located in the South of Market area of San Francisco. This small museum features exhibits on the antique streetcars of the F Market & Wharves and national landmark cable cars that continue to run along the city's major arteries. The museum is located at the Steuart Street F line stop, catty-corner from the Ferry Building. Admission to the museum is free. In addition to the permanent collection of San Francisco railway artifacts from Market Street Railway Company and San Francisco Municipal Railway, the museum produces unique exhibits such as a retrospective on the 1906 Earthquakeand a replicated end of the now extinct MSR '100-Class streetcar'.
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Zeum
221 Fourth Street
(@ Howard Street)
San Francisco, CA 94103
415.820.3320
info@zeum.org

Zeum is an interactive children's art and technology museum located at the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, California. It aims to "foster creativity in young people of all ages, backgrounds and learning styles by providing a hands-on environment for self-expression" [1]. It is mostly known for its exhibits which allow children to create their own media using modern technologies. Zeum began as a San Francisco city project in 1992 and opened to the public on October 31, 1998.
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The New Contemporary Jewish Museum will open on June 8, 2008!
Administrative Office
The Museum's administrative office is located at:
282 Second Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105
Office Hours: Mon-Fri, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
The new facility, due open in June 2008, is located on Mission Street, between 3rd and 4th streets.
Tel: (415) 344-8800
Fax: (415) 344-8815
info@thecjm.org

The Museum is now planning for the grand reopening of its new facility in June 2008. The new building is located on Mission Street between 3rd & 4th streets. Until then, the Museum will offer a wide variety of public programs throughout the community. Our gallery at 121 Steuart Street is now closed.Please check back for updates on our new facility, Museum hours, admission, and tour information.
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Asian Art Museum
200 Larkin St.
San Francisco, CA 94102
415.581.3500
Fax: 415.581.4700
www.asianart.org

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is a museum in San Francisco, California, United States. It has one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world. Until recently housed at the de Young in Golden Gate Park, the Asian Art Museum re-opened on March 20, 2003 in the former San Francisco city library building opposite the San Francisco Civic Center, renovated for the purpose under the direction of Italian architect Gae Aulenti. The collection has approximately 17,000 works of art and artifacts from all major Asian countries and traditions, some of which are as much as 6,000 years old. Major galleries are devoted to the arts of India, China, western Asia (including Persia), South-East Asia, Korea and Japan.
There are 2,500 works on display in the permanent collection. The museum owes its origin to a donation to the city of San Francisco by Chicago millionaire Avery Brundage, who was a major collector of Asian art. The Society for Asian Art, incorporated in 1958, was the group that formed specifically to gain Avery Brundage's collection. The museum opened in 1966 as a wing of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. Brundage continued to make donations to the museum, including the bequest of all his remaining personal art collection on his death in 1975.
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Cable Car Museum
1201 Mason Street
San Francisco, CA 94108
www.cablecarmuseum.org

The Cable Car Museum is a museum in San Francisco, California. It contains historical and explanatory exhibits on the San Francisco cable car system,which can itself be regarded as a working museum. The museum is entered from an entrance at Washington and Mason. The museum contains several examples of old cable cars, together with smaller exhibits and a shop. Perhaps of more interest are two overlook galleries which allow the visitor to overlook both the main power house, and also to descend below the junction of Washington and Mason streets in order to view the large cavern where the haulage cables are routed out to the street.
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California Academy of Sciences
(415) 321-8000
875 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
www.calacademy.org

The California Academy of Sciences is one of the ten largest natural history museums in the world, and one of the oldest in the United States of America. It is located in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The Steinhart Aquarium and the Morrison Planetarium are housed within its walls. The Academy began life in 1853 as a learned society and still carries out a large amount of original research, with public exhibits and education becoming significant endeavours in the 20th century.The Academy's main buildings in Golden Gate Park are closed for major refurbishment until 2008, though it has reopened in temporary accommodation at 875 Howard Street as of May 1, 2004.
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California Palace of the Legion of Honor
Lincoln Park
34th Avenue & Clement Street
San Francisco, CA 94121
www.famsf.org/legion/index.asp

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor (often abbreviated to simply "Legion of Honor" by locals) is a fine art museum in San Francisco, California.The name is used both for the museum collection and for the building in which it is housed. The Legion of Honor was the gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels,wife of the sugar magnate and Thoroughbred racehorse owner/breeder Adolph B. Spreckels. The building is a three-quarters scale imitation of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur in Paris. The design was based on a model of the Hôtel de Salm that appeared at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition,so it is not an exact copy. It was given to the City of San Francisco by Alma de Bretteville Le Normand Spreckels and designed by George Applegarth and H. Guillaume.
The museum building occupies an elevated site in Lincoln Park in the northwest of the city, with views over the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of the surrounding Lincoln Park Golf Course is on the site of a potter's field called the "Golden Gate Cemetery" that the City had bought in 1867.
The cemetery was closed in 1908 and the bodies were relocated to Colma. During seismic retrofitting in the 1990s however, coffins and parts of skeletons were found[1]. The plaza and fountain in front of the Palace of the Legion of Honor is the western terminus of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America.The terminus marker and an interpretive plaque are located in the southwest corner of the plaza and fountain, just to the left of the Palace.
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Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
Phone: 415/CAR-TOON (415/227-8666)
cartoonart.org/index.html
Hours: Daily 11:00 - 5:00
Closed Mondays, New Years Day, Easter, July 4, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The first Tuesday of every calendar month is "Pay What You Wish Day."

The Cartoon Art Museum (CAM) is an art museum in San Francisco, California, specializing in the art of comics and cartoons. It is the only museum in the western United States dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of all forms of cartoon art, and holds approximately six thousand pieces—including original animation cels, comic book pages, and early newspaper comic strips—in its permanent collection.The museum was organized in 1984 by comic art enthusiasts. Its first incarnation had no fixed location, instead organizing showings at other local museums and corporate spaces. In 1987, with the help of an endowment from Charles Schulz, it established a home on the second floor of the San Francisco Call Bulletin Building at 814 Mission Street in the South of Market area.
In 2001 it moved to a ground floor location at 655 Mission Street which had been vacated by the Friends of Photography Ansel Adams Center.Besides its galleries, the museum also operates a research library, a classroom, and a museum bookstore. It hosts seven major exhibitions per year, classes for children and adults, and lectures.
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The Exploratorium

3601 Lyon Street
San Francisco, CA 94123
(415) EXP-LORE
www.exploratorium.edu/index.html

The Exploratorium is a public science museum, located in the Marina District at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California. It is one of San Francisco's most popular museums, drawing over 500,000 people each year. Founded in 1969 by the physicist Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, the Exploratorium is dedicated to teaching science through hands-on exhibits. Many of its exhibits are created by visual and performing artists as well as scientists and educators. Exhibit designs that have been created at the Exploratorium often are duplicated for other science museums worldwide. Some exhibits, of course, can't be duplicated, such as the off-site Wave Organ, a unique sonic experience located on a nearby point of land jutting into San Francisco Bay. The Exploratorium also features the Tactile Dome, a three-dimensional pitch-black labyrinth that visitors must navigate using the sense of touch.
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Golden Gate Railroad Museum
1755 East Bayshore Road, Suite 19A
Redwood City, CA 94063
Office: (650) 365-2472
Fax: (650) 385-2473
www.ggrm.org

Welcome to the Golden Gate Railroad Museum (GGRM), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of steam and passenger railroad equipment, and the interpretation of railroad history in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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The Haas - Lilienthal House
1886
Peter Schmidt, Architect
2007 Franklin Street, (between Washington & Jackson)
San Francisco

As featured on A&E's America's Castles' "Castles by the Bay," this exuberant Queen Anne-style Victorian was built in 1886. It is the only intact private home of the period that is open regularly as a museum, complete with authentic furniture and artifacts. The House has elaborate wooden gables, a circular corner tower and luxuriant ornamentation. Volunteer docents lead tours through the House and explain the Victorian architecture of the exterior. A display of photographs in the downstairs supper-room describes the history of the home and the family that lived here until 1972.
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Mexican Museum
The Mexican Museum
Fort Mason Center, Building D
Marina Boulevard and Buchanan Street
San Francisco, CA 94123
www.mexicanmuseum.org

The El Museo Mexicano or The Mexican Museum is a San Francisco, California, USA museum created to exhibit the aesthetic expression of the Latino, Chicano, Mexican, and Mexican-American people. The Mexican Museum was founded in 1975 by artist Peter Rodríguez. Its mission was "to exhibit the aesthetic expression of the Mexican and Mexican-American people." This mission was expanded to reflect Mexican, Chicano, and Latino artistic experience. The Museum was originally located in San Francisco's Mission District. In 2001, the Museum was relocated to the Fort Mason Center, Building D, Marina Boulevard and Buchanan Street, San Francisco. A capital campaign is underway to relocated the Museum to a permanent location in the Mission District at Mission and 3rd.Today, the Museum's collection comprises over 12,000 objects.
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Musée Mécanique
Pier 45 at the end of Taylor Street
Fisherman's Wharf
San Francisco, CA 94133
Tel: (415) 346-2000
Mon-Fri 10:00am-7:00pm
Sat-Sun 10:00am-8:00pm
Holidays 10:00am-8:00pm
www.museemecaniquesf.com
Open 365 days a year -
Admission is Free

The Musée Mécanique is a collection of penny arcade games and related artifacts. The museum contains one of the world's largest privately owned collectionsof mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade machines. Many exhibits are over 100 years old. It is presently located at Pier 45 in the Fisherman's Wharf tourist area, but prior to 2002, was previously housed in the lower level of the Cliff House restaurant at Ocean Beach. For a time in between, the entire collection was in storage without the possibility of public viewing.
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Museum of the African Diaspora
685 Mission Street (at Third)
San Francisco, California 94105
phone: 415.358.7200
fax: 415.358.7252
www.moadsf.org

The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) is a new museum in San Francisco, California, USA, dedicated to the diasporan histories of people of African origin and their influence and adaptation throughout the world. Focusing on experience in North America, the Caribbean, and South America, the museum's exhibits trace the history and legacy of the slave trade, fights for freedom in the African continent and the New World, music of African influence or origin, and contemporary multicultural and multi-ethnic societies. It is inside St. Regis's new 42-storey St. Regis Museum Tower next to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.The museum opened in 2005, along with the condo and hotel tower.
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Randall Museum
199 Museum Way
San Francisco, CA 94114
ph: (415) 554-9600
fax: (415) 554-9609
info@randallmuseum.org

The Randall Museum is a museum in San Francisco, California and is owned and operated by the City's Recreation and Parks Department. It focuses on the arts, crafts, sciences, and natural history. On view are a number of live native and domestic animals and interactive displays. The Museum is located in Corona Heights Park on a large hill between the Castro and Haight districts of San Francisco, and boasts stunning views of the city, downtown financial district and the bay.The museum charges no admission and offers events, movies, plays, lectures, exhibits, and classes for ages 3–adult, but is geared mostly toward children and educational field trips.
Originally named the "Junior Museum", the facility was established in 1937 in an old city jail. In 1947, a $12 million bond was issued for the creation of recreation and park capital projects, one of which included a new museum. In 1951, what is now the Randall Museum opened at its current location with exhibits, a theater, classrooms, arts and crafts shops and studios, a live animal room and gardens overlooking the San Francisco Bay.
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