Academy of Art University Automobile Museum

Technically this isn’t a review because I didn’t go in.
* Admission $ 10
I wanted to check it out but it wasn’t worth $ 10 for me. But I thought I’d post this so one else would be surprised when they showed up and realized it wasn’t free.
* Hours — Tuesdays from 11 AM to 1 PM, Thursdays from 2 PM to 4 PM
Cars look cool from the outside.

The Academy of Art University has one of the best collection of classic cars I’ve ever seen, and this is where you can come to see them for yourself!
The museum is open to the public, but the downside is that it is only open for **four hours a week** — two hours on Tuesday and two on Thursday. So it’s been at least a year before I had an idle Tuesday when I could stop by to check it out. (and I took almost the full two hours!). You are supposed to call or go online to schedule a visit, and the website implies that the tour starts at 11… well, there’s not actually a tour, and nobody seemed to care if I made a reservation or not. You just wander around at your own pace, which was fine with me. A few docents were around to converse with and ask questions, and, they’d even open up the doors or hood for you to get a better look! (and the only rule was a very Bluth-​like, «No Touching!»).
There are supposedly ~200 cars in the collection, but less than 50 will fit in the museum (the rest are stored somewhere else and are cycled through the museum once a year or so). They’ve got the best collection of Duesenbergs I’ve ever seen on display! They seem to mostly focus on pre-​WWII era cars; Packards, Cadillacs, even a Bugatti and a Lagonda, along with the aforementioned Doozies. A Daimler limousine was particularly impressive! Sometimes you’ll see their cars at other local events, like the SF International Auto Show, or the Hillsborough or Pebble Beach Concours.
All in all, a great place to check out… you just gotta work with their odd hours.
Logisitics: Even though the address says Washington Street, the entrance is around the corner on Van Ness. The glass door is locked, but the museum people will open it up to let you in. It’s street parking only, but if you go a few blocks west, there are no meters. I lucked out even more and found that they do street-​sweeping on Gough Street on Tuesday mornings, so there is no parking until 11am, which coincides perfectly with the museum opening! Other than that, parking seemed very scarce. Admission was $ 10, CASH ONLY, but is supposedly donated to charity.