Coit Tower is a view, a set of murals, and a hillside garden walk

Inside the baseThe WPA murals, and why they were briefly controversial

The murals wrap the interior walls of the tower's ground floor, free to view without a ticket (only the elevator ride to the top observation deck requires payment), and they're worth genuinely slowing down for rather than treating as a quick pass-through on the way to the elevator. Painted collaboratively by 25 to 27 artists — accounts vary slightly — under Depression-era federal funding meant to employ artists the way other WPA programs employed laborers, the panels show a specific, deliberately unglamorous vision of California: agricultural workers stooped in fields, dockworkers unloading cargo, a lending library, a newsstand plastered with headlines about strikes and unemployment, and a small but pointed panel showing an armed robbery in a bank.

Several of the muralists had trained under or been directly influenced by Diego Rivera, and it shows in the blocky, monumental figures and the unromanticized treatment of labor. City officials, reviewing the murals before the scheduled public opening, got nervous about a few panels seen as sympathetic to labor organizing and socialism at a politically tense moment, and delayed the opening by several weeks while the content was debated — an episode that's a genuinely interesting footnote about how contested public art funded by government money can become, decades before similar arguments recurred with other federally funded artists.

The murals have been restored more than once, most significantly in a project completed in the 2010s that cleaned decades of grime and stabilized flaking plaster, and they remain remarkably vivid for work now approaching a century old.

The reason most people actually climb upThe 360-degree view, and the wild parrots that might upstage it

The elevator to the top observation deck (there's a modest fee, separate from the free ground floor) delivers a genuinely complete panorama: the Golden Gate Bridge to the northwest, the Bay Bridge and the East Bay hills to the east, Alcatraz sitting in the bay below, and the dense grid of North Beach and downtown's high-rises to the south and west. Because Telegraph Hill is one of the taller and more centrally located hills in the city, this view captures more of San Francisco's actual geography in one turn than almost any other vantage point, including several paid observation decks elsewhere in the city.

The parrots — technically a feral flock of red-masked and mitred conures, cherry-headed and cherry-crowned varieties among them, believed to have started from escaped or released pet birds decades ago and since naturalized and bred wild on the hill — are loud, bright green and red, and travel in unpredictable, noisy flocks through the trees around the tower and down the hill's wooded slopes. They were the subject of a well-known 2003 documentary, 'The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,' about a local man who spent years feeding and studying them, and they've become as much a reason to visit the hill as the tower itself for a certain kind of visitor. There's no way to guarantee you'll see them on any given day — they move around the neighbourhood and aren't tied to a fixed schedule — but a slow walk through the hill's wooded eastern slope improves the odds considerably over a straight beeline to the tower door.

The better way upSkip the queue: the Filbert and Greenwich Street steps

Coit Tower has a small parking lot at the summit that fills up fast and a shuttle bus that runs on weekends and holidays, and most visitors drive or bus straight to the top, wait in a line for the elevator, and never see the hill itself. The better approach, if you're at all able to handle stairs, is to walk up — specifically via the Filbert Street steps on the hill's eastern face, a steep, wooden-and-concrete stairway that climbs through some of the most densely gardened residential blocks in the city, past cottages with hillside plots spilling over with flowers, succulents and fruit trees that residents have tended, informally and without any official mandate, for decades.

The parallel Greenwich Street steps a block north offer a similar, slightly less crowded climb with good views out over the bay partway up. Both stairways deposit you close to the tower's base, meaning you arrive already having seen more of the neighbourhood's character than a shuttle ride ever shows you, and you'll very likely encounter the parrots along the way since the wooded slope around the steps is one of their regular haunts.

The climb is genuinely steep — this is the steepest hill in a hilly city — so it's not a casual stroll, and it's not step-free or wheelchair accessible. But for anyone reasonably mobile, it's a better use of the same twenty minutes most people spend standing in the elevator line instead.

LogisticsParking, timing and getting the whole hill in one visit

Driving to the summit is possible but the small parking lot at the top fills early on weekends and during peak season, and traffic on the narrow, one-way summit roads backs up accordingly; if you drive, go early on a weekday or be prepared to circle. The 39-Coit Muni bus runs from North Beach to the summit and is a reasonable option if the steps aren't feasible for you, though service can be limited depending on the day.

The most complete version of a visit combines the climb up via the Filbert or Greenwich steps, the murals at the base (free), the elevator to the top for the view (paid), and then a walk back down through North Beach — San Francisco's historic Italian neighbourhood sits directly at the base of the hill, and a coffee or a meal there afterward is a natural way to close out the visit. Give the whole loop, steps included, about ninety minutes to two hours if you're not rushing.