The Lyon Street Steps run up the boundary between Pacific Heights and the Presidio. SFGate reports they were built in 1916 by architect Louis M. Upton, who also designed many of the neighborhood’s mansions. Nob Hill Gazette describes the steps as having “formal landings, elegant beaux-arts balustrades and superb landscaping.”
How many steps?
SFGate calls it a 332-step public staircase, but the count depends on who is doing the counting. Mary Burk, co-author of Stairway Walks in San Francisco, told SFGate she counts 288. Either way, the climb is steep. Burk told SFGate the stairs were built for a practical reason: to get back and forth between different parts of Pacific Heights.
The views
The steps start at a cul-de-sac at Vallejo and Lyon streets and climb to Broadway. Nob Hill Gazette writes that the top at Broadway has the most panoramic view. Directly below is Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, built a year before the steps for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, with the bay beyond it.
The notch in the Presidio wall
Nob Hill Gazette points out that the Presidio wall jogs inward between Vallejo and Green streets, where the steps begin. Six houses sit in the notch, and the paper traces it to Juana Briones, one of the most notable women in early California. Briones was born in 1802 at Villa de Branciforte. In 1833 her husband, Presidio soldier Apolinario Miranda, was granted land on a spring called El Ojo de Agua Figueroa, and the grant included a small piece of Presidio land, which explains the notch. Briones later ran a dairy in what is now Washington Square and a cattle ranch in the Santa Clara Valley. She died in 1889 at 87.
For more on Briones’ North Beach dairy, see our Washington Square guide. For another of the city’s staircases, see the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps.