The San Francisco locations of Hitchcock's Vertigo

Hitchcock shot the exteriors of Vertigo in sixteen days in 1957, then built the interiors on soundstages, so what survives in San Francisco is a set of façades, alleys and street corners rather than rooms. This traces the ones you can still stand in front of, with a note on what has been bricked up, rebuilt in concrete or torn down since the camera left, and on which of them the film only pretends to be.

Places in this collection

  • Mark Hopkins — The 1926 hotel on the Nob Hill lot where Mark Hopkins's mansion burned in 1906, named in dialogue early in the film and barely visible in t…
  • Pacific Union Club — The brownstone James C. Flood mansion, the only Nob Hill mansion to come through the 1906 fire, now the Pacific Union Club and closed to no…
  • Ernie's — Scottie first sees Madeleine across the red dining room at Ernie's, which was a real restaurant at this Jackson Square address and, unusual…
  • Coit Tower — Arthur Brown Jr.'s concrete shaft of 1933 on Telegraph Hill, 64 metres tall, works in the film as a piece of geography rather than a set: M…
  • Palace of Fine Arts — Built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in staff and plaster and kept when the rest of the fair came down, then rebuilt in poured conc…
  • Claude Lane — The film cheats its geography here. Madeleine turns off Grant Avenue into a passage that is now gated, but the alley Scottie actually walks…
  • Brocklebank Apartments — Weeks & Day put up this ten-storey block on the summit of Nob Hill in 1925, and its entrance court with the heavy flanking lamps is what th…
  • Fort Point — The brick fort under the south anchorage of the Golden Gate Bridge, begun in 1853 to guard the strait against sea attack, still standing be…

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