• Grace Cathedral
• Huntington Park
• Cable Car Museum
• Fairmont Hotel

Nob Hill takes its name from “nabob,” a term for a person of great wealth, applied to the Central Pacific Railroad’s “Big Four” — Crocker, Stanford, Hopkins, and Huntington — who built their mansions atop the hill after the California Street cable car line opened in 1878. Before that, the rise was known simply as California Hill. Fortunes made building the transcontinental railroad transformed a steep, undeveloped summit into circa 1880s San Francisco’s most exclusive address.

The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed nearly every original mansion, but Grace Cathedral later rose on the former Crocker estate, its twin towers and labyrinths anchoring the hill today. Huntington Park, laid out on the site of the razed Huntington mansion, remains the neighborhood’s central green space, framed by survivors of that era like the rebuilt Fairmont Hotel.

Nob Hill's climb from a bare summit to a railroad fortune's address is written into its cable car tracks and church bells alike, and MY-NHD's collection carries that climb forward for anyone who calls this hill home.