Musee Mecanique

Step inside this place and you'll find over three hundred antique arcade machines, coin-operated automata, and mechanical curiosities spanning more than a century of American amusement. And every single one of them still works. Bring quarters.

The collection belongs to one man, Edward Zelinsky, who started collecting when he was eleven years old. That's not a typo — eleven. He began with a single machine and just never stopped. Over decades, he accumulated what became the largest privately owned collection of coin-operated mechanical amusements in the world. Laughing Sal, the giant cackling figure that once greeted visitors at Playland at the Beach, lives here now. So do fortune tellers, mechanical dioramas, early pinball machines, and a terrifying contraption called the Opium Den that's exactly as unsettling as it sounds.

The collection was originally housed in the basement of the Cliff House, out on the western edge of the city near the Sutro Baths ruins. It lived there for years, perfectly situated in that slightly spooky, fog-wrapped coastal setting. Then, in two thousand and two, a dispute over the Cliff House renovation forced the collection to move. Twelve thousand people signed a petition trying to keep it at the Cliff House. Twelve thousand signatures for an arcade museum — that tells you something about how deeply San Franciscans feel about this place.

It moved to its current location at Pier Forty-Five on Fisherman's Wharf, which is admittedly a more touristy setting but means more people discover it. Admission is free. The machines take quarters and half-dollars. You could spend five dollars or fifty — it depends on how deep you want to go into the rabbit hole of early twentieth-century mechanical entertainment. Fair warning: Laughing Sal's cackle will follow you home.