The Musée Mechanique is one of my favorite Bay Area things — right up there with Fry’s, Trader Vic’s, The Company Store at Apple, and Muir Woods. It’s a fantastic free-admission museum of historic coin-op novelties from fortune-tellers to animated carnivals made of toothpicks painstakingly glued together by convicts seventy years ago. Give me a roll of quarters and turn me loose there and I’ll be entertained for an entire day.
The Musée is at Cliff House, a little touristy shopping complex above Ocean Beach. Above it is a mediocre, overpriced restaurant that’s decided to expand its operations and is displacing the wonderful flumgubbery below. When Joey and Paul were here for CodeCon, they snuck off to the museum and got the story: The museum is closing up and putting all its machines in storage for a couple of years while it looks for a new location.
What with all the post-CodeCon mishegas, I plain forgot about this until I read about it on Kottke this morning, and now I’m pretty bummed.