San Francisco doesn’t draw tourists in with its building architecture alone. One bizarre street draws plenty of attention for its design and aesthetics.
Visitors to the famous City By The Bay will naturally want to take in some of the best known tourist sights, like the infamous Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. However, there’s another more residential location that lots of tourists also flock to: Lombard Street. Visitors have some weird Californian traffic laws to be aware of, but also some remarkable sights to see. The thing that’s so unique about Lombard Street, as you may know, is its curved design. This is a regular street in the city, located in between the streets of Leavenworth and Hyde. One area of it sports that legendary series of hair-raising hairpin bends. It’s become a huge tourist attraction with over two million visitors every year, and it’s little wonder why: Its uniqueness, coupled with the sheer beauty of the area, is one of those things that photographs just don’t do justice to.
Lombard Street looks as though it’s simply designed to attract attention and tourists. It has a real wow factor. Its visual appeal aside, though, the street’s design is eminently practical. It was designed in this way mostly for safety’s sake, because, when simply straight, its long, sloping angle made it very difficult and dangerous to traverse. It was so steep, in fact, that a total of eight of these bends were needed in order to tame the slope for local residents and their vehicles. Local property owner Carl Henry is said to have had the idea for this street design in the 1920s, with Clyde Healy, city engineer, spearheading the efforts to make it happen.
