Hillside Hollywood and Secret Stairways: An Ashbury Heights Tour

Within San Francisco’s hills, you’ll find a network of secret stairways that connect Hollywood legends’ former homes. On this walking tour, you’ll discover how earthquakes, urban planning, and social movements shaped communities and architectural styles from the Victorian era until today.

Starting at the corner of Duboce Avenue and Buena Vista Avenue East, you’ll stroll through Buena Vista Park, where cemetery headstones were repurposed for the walkways. You’ll wind through the exclusive Ashbury Terrace neighborhood with its multi-million-dollar homes. You’ll have an opportunity to use several secret stairways that feel like private passages but serve as public throughways, connecting San Francisco’s otherwise isolated hillside communities.

As you walk, you’ll see filming locations from Marvel’s Ant-Man, climb the Monument Way and Vulcan stairways and enjoy sweeping vistas from atop Mount Olympus Park, where a statue once marked the city’s geographic center. The tour ends in the Castro District at the Pink Triangle Memorial, where you’ll find out how the neighborhood evolved from Eureka Valley (or ‘Little Scandinavia’) to the heart of America’s LGBT movement.

On this 90-minute tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• View Ambassador James Hormel’s former home and see the Too Close for Comfort TV show house from the 1980s
• Hear the remarkable story of Edith Cook, who was found perfectly preserved in a casket during a 2017 home renovation
• Visit the Buena Vista mansion where Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash lived, later home to Don’t Worry Be Happy singer Bobby McFerrin
• Stand outside Rudolph Valentino’s modest bungalow and learn how the Latin Lover launched his career
• See the mini-mansion of Norma Talmadge, a superstar of the Silent Screen
• Learn about the brothers who made their living blowing up parts of the city, and how their greed ended in murder

By the end of this tour, you’ll have discovered San Francisco’s vertical neighborhoods where every stairway tells a story of the city’s cinematic past.