The chutes and roller coasters are long gone from Playland-at-the-Beach, an extravagant seaside carnival held near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach from the 1920s until it closed in 1972. Other artifacts are scattered across the city. The carousel, for example, still whirls — at Yerba Buena Gardens. But stroll behind the famous Cliff House, and you’ll spot the Camera Obscura — built for Playland visitors — still in its original location.
Based on ancient technology, this unique attraction is still available to those who pay their $3 cash-only admission — the price has gone unchanged for decades — and enjoy an unusual view of the beach, Seal Rocks, Sutro Heights and the vast area at Lands End.
Walk into this dim 20-by-20-foot room, and you’ll be hard pressed to see anything at first. The room is mostly dark, aside from rays of light projecting down from a small skylight. There are holographic images and historic photographs on the wall, but the main attraction is what that small window in the ceiling provides. Only narrow rays of light squeak through, providing inverted images with rotating views that can be quite stunning.
“These pinhole cameras work because of the ray nature of light,” says Dan Congreve, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. “When you see an object, what you are seeing is light reflected or scattered off it. You need light to be traveling in a straight line and to reflect. You see light coming from different angles, and your eye can make it into an image.
“The way these pinhole cameras work, it forces faraway things to only allow certain rays of light in. It’s a cool project.”
San Francisco’s Camera Obscura is essentially a huge pinhole camera. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group File)
The curated rays of light entering the Camera Obscura provide images of the outside scenery magnified seven times, inverted and projected on a disc below eye level. The colors seem more vivid because of the darkness of the room.
The Camera Obscura was a big attraction when it opened in 1946. Floyd Jennings, a San Francisco businessman, was enamored with the technology and had it built just next to the Cliff House, where it could tempt visitors after a meal.
Soon after it opened, the Camera Obscura was featured in Life Magazine with flashy photos of sea lions sunbathing on Seal Rock.
“These ideas of how to manipulate light rays go back hundreds of years, even thousands of years,” Cosgreve said. “The idea of light traveling in a straight line goes back to the ancient Greeks.”
Leonardo da Vinci is often credited with inventing the camera obscura concept, which was used by artists who traced perfect lines of projected images in the 1500s.
The Camera Obscura is strange and wonderful, but the views and activities just outside are worth a visit themselves. Up the hill at the Lands End Lookout Visitors Center, manager Roberta Walker is always looking out the window, scanning for whales.
“I’ve seen more here in my life than anywhere else,” Walker said. “But I haven’t seen them this year. They’ve been over (by) the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Walker recommends starting your visit to Lands End with a trip to the visitors center, where she can point you in the direction of two main attractions: the ruins of the Sutro Baths, once the world’s largest saltwater swimming pool open to the public, and the Coastal Trail, a 3-mile out-and-back trail that offers spectacular views of the ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge.
On a sunny day, she says, be sure to pack a picnic and find a spot to enjoy the views from Sutro Heights — “and spectacular sunsets in the fall.”
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You’ll have to wait a while longer for the reopening of the once-popular Cliff House restaurant, which has been closed since 2020. A local business was recently awarded a 20-year lease to revive the historic space as well as the cafe inside the visitors center, but the opening date has been pushed back to 2025.
For now, though, you can pick up hot drinks and snacks at the center, then hit the trails and take a peek at the magnificent landscape outside — or get a different perspective inside the Camera Obscura.
Details: The Lands End visitor center is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The Camera Obscura is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, although weather conditions may close it without warning, so call — 415-750-0415 — before you go.