Photo: Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
A beautiful 1930s building, the Beach Chalet is open for lunch, drinks, or dinner overlooking Ocean Beach and its brave surfers. Inside the Park Chalet are some exhibits with artifacts related to the history of the Golden Gate Park and San Francisco.
The Beach Chalet is a historic two-story Spanish Colonial Revival-style building, located at the far western end of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The building is owned by the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department; and the tenants are the Beach Chalet Brewery and Restaurant, and the Park Chalet.
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Once used for park irrigation in the past, now a scenic oddity at the western end of the park. A lesser-known windmill, the Murphy Windmill, is located at the southwestern corner of the park, but is under restoration. Near the windmills is the lovely Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden.
On the hill above the Cliff House is the former grounds of the estate of Adolph Sutro, the wealthy landowner who built the Cliff House and Sutro Baths. Today the mansion is gone, but the beautifully landscaped grounds remain as a public park, with splendid views over the coastline and down to Golden Gate Park. Nestled within the foundations of the old mansion is a WW2 era bunker.
An unusual attraction is the herd of buffalo which have been here for over a century after being presented as a gift from the government of Texas.
The Cliff House, a well known landmark at the extreme western end of San Francisco, provides fantastic views of the coastline and the jagged Seal Rocks just off-shore and also contains the Camera Obscura, a fascinating room-sized device which projects an image of the surrounding scenery inside.
Overlooking the Cliff House and the Sutro Baths is this new visitor center, where you can find information about the Land Ends area as well as a pretty decent gift shop and cafe. The lookout also contains the statue of Diana that once stood in neighboring Sutro Heights, which was relocated inside of the lookout after it was extensively vandalized.
Wedged in a small beach inlet between the Cliff House and Point Lobos, these stone ruins were once a massive 19th-century public bath house that held multiple swimming pools, which fell into disrepair before being destroyed by fire in 1966, leaving only the concrete foundations and a pool flooded with seawater. The crumbling ruins make for some fun exploration, with a long tunnel into the cliff that leads to a view of a cove. Mind your step: the trails that descend to the site are steep and the ruins themselves pose hazards if you're careless.