Filbert Steps

What you need to know

What’s There

A stairway street climbing the east face of Telegraph Hill from Sansome Street up toward Coit Tower, roughly 400 steps in total. The lower flights are concrete set against a near vertical rock face. The upper flights are wood, and they pass directly between the cottages of Napier Lane and Darrell Place.

The wild parrots of Telegraph Hill are often in the trees overhead, and you will usually hear them before you see them.

The Story

The cliff the steps climb is not natural. It was cut by quarrying for ship ballast that continued into the early 1900s, which is why the hill drops away so abruptly on this side.

Grace Marchant began planting the hillside in 1949, when it was effectively an unofficial dump, and tended it for 33 years until she died in 1982 at the age of 96. Gary Kray carried it on until 2012, and a volunteer caretaker has kept it since. When a neighboring expansion threatened the garden in 1989, neighbors organized and secured protection for it.

Visiting

Neighborhood: Telegraph Hill

Cost: Free

Hours: Always open. It is a public street.

Best time to go: Mid morning, when the light reaches into the garden.

What to know: This is somebody’s front path. The houses on Napier Lane and Darrell Place have no other way in, and the garden either side is privately owned under easement, so stay on the steps. Not wheelchair accessible and there is no step free alternative.

Getting There

Transit: The F-line or the E-line along the Embarcadero to Sansome Street, then walk to the foot of Filbert.

Parking: Difficult. Levi’s Plaza has paid parking at the bottom.

Combining: Coit Tower is at the top, and the Greenwich Steps run parallel one block north, which makes an obvious loop.