Highlights in San Francisco

This park offers an incredibly steep climb up to some of the best views in San Francisco. You can easily see all the way to Oakland and watch the freight ships come in and out of the bay, and unlike Twin Peaks it's not so windy. The park is not lit at night, but if you go with a friend it can be a nice and creepy walk up to the top. Beware there are folks who sleep there and it's a cruising site.
Look for the broken gravestones that line the paths from the exodus of the dead in the early 1900s.

Looking for cemeteries in San Francisco? Good luck! There are only two, but historically there were many more, all of which were exhumed in their entirety (or as best as they could) and moved to other places like Daly City, and Colma, which has more than a thousand buried bodies for every living person residing there.
This gorgeous and small Columbarium is one of the few ones that survived the massive exportation of SF's dead for the importance of the people whose remains are held there.

Alfred Hitchcock fans will recognize the Legion from Vertigo, where Madeleine stares at the painting of Carlotta Valdes. The Legion is in a classically designed building, constructed for the Panama Pacific Internat'l Expo, it’s now a fine art museum. The collection includes ancient & modern art, with it’s most famous piece, Rodin’s Thinker occupying the front courtyard. The museum is large, and houses art from ancient sculpture to mural-size paintings from the Renaissance to modern masterpieces.

The Christian cult, led by Jim Jones, and later led to a mass suicide/murder in Guyana, had a temple at this location (now an empty lot).
While they were at location Jones orquestrated an event where he had everyone drink wine that he had brought, once he was sure that they were all drinking he told them that it was poisoned and that they would all be dead in an hour.

Three years later nearly 1000 died by poisoned Kool Aid (and automatic weapon fire) in Jonestown, Guayana.

I've never eaten at this restaurant, but have shown it to anyone I have made trips to chinatown with. I have heard that the food is okay, but what's really interesting about the place is that in 1977 it was the location of a gang-related massacre where three men entered with automatic weapons and mowed down the people dining there.

Out in front of the St. Francis hotel in 1975, Sara Moore of the Manson family took aim and shot and President Gerald Ford. Someone standing near here at the time saw what was happened and pushed the would be assasinator when the gun was firing and they say that for that reason the bullet didn't hit him.
The hotel is still an upscale place, but worth stopping by if you're downtown and in the area for the unusual history.

Sure, this is one of the biggest tourist attractions to San Francisco, if not the entire United States. Not exactly an original find. But the two hours I spent in this park were two of the most delightful hours I'd spent in all of San Francisco. Parts of this park can be quite busy, but it's so massive (the park covers 1,017 acres) that you can easily get away from everything. In fact, you can find nooks in this park where you can sit for hours and not see a single other person.

The ferry that takes you to Alcatraz Island leaves from Pier 33 in the Fisherman's Warf area on the embarcadero. It is a little expensive to go out there, but the tour of the prison and the views from the middle of the bay are well worth it. Plan for it to take at least 3 hours, but you can stay longer if you want. They also have a night tour of the island, which I haven't tried but sounds amazing.
You can buy tickets in advance:
http://www.alcatrazcruises.com/index.aspx
$26-$33