Musee Mecanique, and chocolate

On a rainy Tuesday, March 15, 2011, I left work in early afternoon, grabbed Di Yin, and headed to the city to visit the Musee Mecanique.

I took pictures on this outing.

On the way to the museum, while driving down Embarcadero in the city we spotted a chocolatier, Tcho, in one of the old buildings on the waterfront. What an unusual place for a chocolate factory! We decided to stop. We explored it briefly--the factory space was roped off so there wasn't much to see beside the small shop--sampled a few flavors, bought bite-sized nuggets of a few flavors we didn't get to sample, and continued onward.

After driving a bit more, we parked and navigated the tourist shops and restaurants along Fisherman's Wharf until we found the museum.

The museum houses a wide variety of mechanical devices ranging from simple shows (e.g., put money in to cause a model of a man to dance for you) to more complex interactive devices (e.g., use a lever to control the direction and strength with which a model golfer hits a ball, trying to get it in the golf hole) to modern arcade machines. It's a neat place, like a really-old-fashioned arcade. Soon after entering, I realized there were many games I wanted to play and machines I wanted to activate. I stuck a twenty in the change machine.

Although chock full of antiques, it's hard to call this a museum. Few machines have informational signs about them. There is a number of large (poster-sized) information signs scattered through the building, but these aren't connected to the actual objects in the museum. Rather, they're mostly about the history of amusement (as in the history of amusement parks, world's fairs, etc.). In fact, the vast majority of the signs never mention mechanical machines like these. It's almost like the big signs and the physical artifacts aren't connected! Some of these signs had a local bent, describing large recreational facilities on the west side of San Francisco. These are now all defunct, but learning about their rise, their heyday, and their fall was interesting.

Regardless, the focus of the museum is clearly on the machines themselves. For details, refer to the pictures--I took a lot in order to capture the breadth of the collection.