You're looking at the crookedest street in the world. Except it's not.
Vermont Street in the Potrero Hill neighborhood — about three miles south of here — is measurably crookeder. A TV show brought measuring equipment a few years back and settled the question: Vermont Street's sinuosity is one point five six, Lombard's is one point two. Vermont wins. Lombard has better publicists.
Before the early twenties, this was a straight road with a twenty-seven percent grade — so steep that the automobiles of the era couldn't climb it and residents couldn't drive to their own homes. A property owner named Carl Henry proposed adding switchbacks to bring the grade down to a manageable sixteen percent, and the red bricks were a functional choice — they gave car tires better traction on the tight turns.
The street wasn't famous for decades after the switchbacks went in. Nobody cared. What changed was the hydrangeas. A parks commissioner named Peter Bercut replaced the original plantings with blue
and purple hydrangeas across twelve flower beds — over two thousand of them. The switchbacks were built to solve a traffic problem and the beauty was an afterthought added decades later. The most photographed street in San Francisco was an engineering fix that accidentally became gorgeous.
Now two million people a year come here — six thousand a day in summer. At peak times, two hundred and fift
