Musée Mécanique

The Musée Mécanique (English: Mechanical Museum) is a for-profit interactive museum consisting of 20th-century penny arcade games and artifacts located at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. The museum owns over 300 mechanical machines, and is one of the largest privately owned collection of such games in the world. Owner Ed Zelinsky began collecting at age 11 and his games were exhibited in the 1920s at Playland. In 1972 Playland closed and Musée Mécanique became a part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The museum moved into the basement of Cliff House, just a few blocks north and across the Great Highway from the Playland site. Zelinsky's son, Dan Zelinsky, took a temporary job in the 1970s maintaining the collection. The Musée Mécanique has a collection of more than 300 mechanical games including: music boxes, coin-operated fortune tellers, Mutoscopes, video games, love testers, player pianos, peep shows, photo booths, dioramas, pinball machines and more. The museum displays about 200 of the machines at their current location. The museum has many rare and historical pieces. A large diorama of a traveling carnival with a Ferris wheel and other rides sits in the center of the museum. The museum owns what is believed to be the only steam-powered motorcycle in the world, built in Sacramento, in 1912. The Royal Court diorama features couples ballroom dancing and was featured in the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. Laffing Sal, which has been described as 'famously creepy', is a 6-foot-tall, laughing automaton. The museum also owns a collection of machines made out of toothpicks by prisoners at San Quentin.