Musee Mecanique Pier 45

Raid your stash of laundry or parking quarters and head down to the wharf. Grab an overpriced seafood meal or better yet head to In & Out Burger and avoid all the touristy schlock. Musee Mecanique used to be at Ocean Beach and like Coney Island or Atlantic City, it captures the joy of an amusement park of days gone by. Laughing Sal greets, disturbs and entrances-- her guffaws are haunting and iconic...pictured here with a laminated flat version of my son for a school project chronicling a day in SF.

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A stocky teenager is arm-wrestling a bruiser in a gimp mask; a young girl is asking Ramasees the Great to answer a question for her; a middle-aged couple is paying to see music by the Mountain Boys: “See ‘em whoop it up! Watch ‘em swing it. Drop 2 bits in the box yu’ll git a kick outa it!” The Musee Mecanique, in Pier 45 of Fisherman’s Wharf, is a warehouse stuffed to the nines with dozens of working coin-operated machines. They range from 19th Century mechanical Barbers Shop Quartets, and scary-looking fortune tellers, to more-modern-yet-still-old-skool arcade games, such as Pac-man and pinball! The museum throbs with the sounds of fairground music, clinking money, machine guns, spluttering motors, bells and sirens, and even singing monkeys. But nothing quite drowns out the screams and laughter of the kids, both young and grown up, who are enjoying their immersion in a more innocent era of entertainment.

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Just inside the doorway of a drafty old warehouse on Pier 45, tucked into a corner of San Francisco’s bustling Fisherman’s Wharf, garish 7-foot-tall “Laffing Sal" greets visitors to the city’s Musée Mécanique. She and her hundreds of automaton sisters, with their proudly misspelled names, were made in Pennsylvania in the early 1900s and shipped to amusement parks all across the country. This Sal’s original home was in San Francisco’s now-defunct Playland-at-the-Beach, where she traumatized countless children with her loud recorded laughter (variously described as raucous, irritating, or downright terrifying.) In addition to Sal, in this free museum you’ll find a huge collection of old penny arcade games and other antique amusements, all still functioning.

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