Lombard Street (San Francisco)

Lombard Street
Lombard Street seen from Coit Tower
Maintained by:	SF DPW
West end:	Presidio Boulevard
Major junctions:	US 101
East end:	The Embarcadero

Lombard Street is an east–west street in San Francisco, California. It is famous for having a steep, one-block section that consists of eight tight hairpin turns.

External images
	This early image shows Lombard Street in 1933, before the hydrangeas were planted.
	This early image shows the houses on the south side of the block were destroyed to create a fire break during the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. In this photo taken during street construction, the south side is still not built up.

A car entering the famous hairpin turns of Lombard Street, from The San Francisco Fountain, a sculpture by Ruth Asawa

Route description

Lombard Street begins at Presidio Boulevard inside The Presidio and runs east through the Cow Hollow neighborhood. For 12 blocks between Broderick Street and Van Ness Avenue, it is a principal arterial road that is co-signed as U.S. Route 101. Lombard Street then continues through the Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill neighborhoods, breaks off at a point becoming Telegraph Hill Boulevard. That leads to Pioneer Park and Coit Tower. Lombard Street starts again at Winthrop Street and finally terminates at The Embarcadero as a collector road.

Lombard Street is best known for the one-way section on Russian Hill between Hyde and Leavenworth Streets, in which the roadway has eight sharp turns (or switchbacks) that have earned the street the distinction of being the crookedest [most winding] street in the world (though this title is contested - see "See Also" links). The switchback's design, first suggested by property owner Carl Henry^{[citation needed]} and instituted in 1922, was born out of necessity in order to reduce the hill's natural 27% grade, which was too steep for most vehicles to climb. It is also a serious hazard to pedestrians, who are accustomed to a more reasonable sixteen-degree incline. The crooked section of the street, which is about ¹⁄₄ mile (400 m) long, is reserved for one-way traffic traveling east (downhill) and is paved with red bricks. The speed limit in this section is 5 mph (8 km/h).

In 1999, a Crooked Street Task Force was created to try to solve traffic problems in the neighborhoods around the winding section of Lombard Street. In 2001, the Task Force decided that it would not be legal to permanently close the block to vehicular traffic. Instead, the Task Force decided to institute a summer parking ban in the area, to bar eastbound traffic on major holidays, and to increase fines for parking in the area. The Task Force also proposed the idea of using minibuses to ferry sightseers to the famous block, although residents debated the efficiency of such a solution, since one of the attractions of touring the area is driving along the twisting section of the street.

The Powell-Hyde cable car line stops at the top of this block.

Famous past residents of Lombard Street include Rowena Meeks Abdy,^{[citation needed]} an early California painter who worked in the style of Impressionism.

In media

In his film Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock chose to make 900 Lombard Street the home of John "Scottie" Ferguson.

The street, and the difficulty of driving it, is parodied in the Bill Cosby sketch "Driving in San Francisco" on the album Why Is There Air? (recorded in Las Vegas):

"They built a street up there called Lombard Street that goes straight down, and they're not satisfied with you killing yourself that way—they put grooves and curves and everything in it, and they put flowers there where they've buried the people that have killed themselves. Lombard Street, wonderful street." (audience reacts with knowing cheers and applause).

It was also included in the comic car chase scene in Peter Bogdanovich's film What's Up, Doc? (1972) starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.

The street is included in a car chase sequence in Clint Eastwood's crime drama Magnum Force (1973) starring Clint Eastwood, Hal Holbrook, and David Soul.

In 1994, the MTV reality show ″The Real World: San Francisco" was filmed at 949 Lombard Street.

In the final scene of The Simpsons episode Lisa the Tree Hugger (2000), a log is shown traveling down the street on its way to the Pacific Ocean.

In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Garbage Strike," there is a scene where Adrian Monk goes to the Mayor's office during a citywide sanitation union strike. He suggests his idea of evacuating the whole city, burning it down, then burning the ashes, and rebuilding the city, saying "Think of it, we rebuild San Francisco ...from scratch. Start fresh, everything clean. Everything brand new. Gonna have that new city smell. Fresh off the lot, we can even straighten out Lombard Street while we’re at it." In the tie-in novel Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, when Monk and Natalie Teeger visit the Mayor's office during a major police strike, Monk brings up his request to straighten Lombard Street again. By coincidence, Monk is a man of order and cleanliness, so the crookedest portion of Lombard is a violation of his standards.

The street features in multiple video games, including the 2000 video game Midtown Madness 2, and the 2004 video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as Windy Windy Windy Windy street.

In 2010, the street was briefly featured in an episode of MythBusters. The MythBusters "delivery crew" encountered problems during an experiment when their step van could not complete the tight turns on Lombard Street, culminating with the delivery truck stalling and holding up traffic at the bottom of the hill.

The game San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing shows Lombard Street as a shortcut on the circuit 3.

In the game Driver: San Francisco, there is an Achievement/Trophy for driving down Lombard Street at at least 20 miles per hour without hitting any obstacles.

Gallery

• 

  Lombard Street's famed twists

• 

  Cars moving on Lombard Street

A panoramic view of Lombard Street

Major intersections

Note: Except where prefixed with a letter, postmiles were measured in 1964, based on the alignment as it existed at that time, and do not necessarily reflect current mileage.

The entire route is in San Francisco.

Postmile	Destinations	Notes
	Presidio Boulevard
	US 101 north (Richardson Avenue) – Golden Gate Bridge	West end of US 101 overlap
	US 101 south (Van Ness Avenue) – San Francisco Civic Center, San Jose	East end of US 101 overlap
Gap in route
	The Embarcadero	Former SR 480

See also

• 49-Mile Scenic Drive
• Lombard banking, after which the street was named
• Vermont Street, the other San Francisco street claimed to be the "most crooked" has seven turns instead of eight, but its hill is steeper than Lombard's
• Snake Alley in Burlington, Iowa, once recognized by Ripley's Believe It or Not! as "The Crookedest Street in the World" Like Lombard Street it has eight turns but over a shorter distance.

External links

• Tourist Trapped: The Crookedest Street In The World, SFGate Culture Blog
• Lombard Street view from Telegraph Hill, with Candyland promotional striping, August 2009
• Lombard Street, SF GuideLines
• Down Lombard Street view in Video on Kinomap, interactive map