Tucked inside a warehouse just off Pier 45 at the Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco is a magical emporium of impossible wonders. Mechanical ingenuity cherished against the fading passage of time, the Musée Mécanique is an arcade straight out of the late 1800’s and early 20th century. Anyone can walk through its doors, no admission, and insert a quarter into any of the 300 plus amusements still alive from the heyday of the nickelodeon and the penny-arcades. The Fortune Tellers have new prophecies to offer, the claw machines fresh candy to give, and the player pianos are still in tune. It simply shouldn’t exist, but having visited it myself I can assure you, it’s quite real.

The magic is all Daniel Zelinsky’s. The museum is his own private collection, something he started when he was just a little boy and has maintained throughout the decades. He’s the one who learned how to restore the machines and it’s been his astonishing commitment to keep them in working order, enough to offer them up for use to the public. His collection includes penny-skill games, automatons, picture machines, stereoscopic viewers, mechanical pianos and animated dioramas beyond description. The best part is that every quarter and dime visitors plug into the artefacts goes towards their maintenance and the restoration of the more delicate items kept safe within Zelinsky’s home.

The Treasures

My favourite machine in the public collection has to be the Knock Out Fighters. Purely mechanical and first released in 1928 this boxing simulation pits two players against each using metal manikin boxers. Each player is given two triggers to control, one for each of their boxer’s arms. They can move their fighters back and forth and whoever can land a punch against the other’s chin sends that player back for a knock out. 

There’s no point system, you play until you’re knocked down, but can insert another coin to jump back up. Very popular, it received the most attention from visitors during my visit and Zelinksy says it requires constant maintenance and tinkering just to keep in working order. I simply love the look of the game, the style of the boxers and the way the ring is cast in light. It looks fantastic when the museum is dark.

The mechanical horse is like nothing I’d expect to see in an arcade. So very large and beautifully engineered to incorporate the style and look of the horse in its mechanisms, this piece really comes to life when you feed it some coins, smoothly capturing the gallop of hose and somehow using a poetry of movement to include a sense of speed.

I can’t say I’ve ever heard of the coin-operated dioramas. The museum has several of these masterpieces, each about the size of a department storefront display. they bring to life minuscule details of a large life settings. One offers the different activities within a carnival, another acts inside a circus tent, another life across a village. You can walk all the way around these glass displays, meaning that for a few coins an entire crowd can participate, with each person noticing their own animated detail.

The oldest machine on display is this 19th century Paxinoscope by Emile Renaud. An early exploration into moving pictures, the revolving hand-drawn stills form an animation of a little girl skipping rope in the centre mirrors. Zelinsky doesn’t have a specific date for the machine’s manufacture, but notes that by 1889 Renaud found a way to combine the machine with a magic lantern to actual project it, allowing him to create a theatre around the idea, that is until the 1900’s when movie technology began to properly take off.

Easily the tallest of the machines in the museum is Laughing Sal, a.k.a “Fat Lady”, a mechanical clown who cackles maniacally while looming over visitors with arms raised in teasing mockery. She was first released on the public in 1940 as part of San Francisco’s Playland, becoming quite the landmark until 1972. Now she’s back to terrify small children once again.

Picture Viewing Machines

There’s a lesson to be had in marketing from the nickelodeon viewing machines of the early 1900’s and Zelinsky’s diverse collection delivers some of the most tempting pitches to get people to see what’s hiding inside those viewers. The basic machines simply flip through a slideshow of picture slates, mainly lingerie models in various poses (tame by today’s standards), while the more advanced machines had users turn a crank to move the pages of a printed flip book offering scenes from news reels and Harold Lloyd films.

Considering the current push for 3D in theatres today, it’s curious to see some of the first machines playing with the idea of stereoscopic images, offering scenes from earthquakes and devastating fires (along with the usual girly scenes) to really push the effect.

Fortune Tellers

Everyone who has seen the Tom Hanks movie Big is quite familiar with the mechanical gypsies and Arabian wizards who are supposed to be able to predict your future, but would it surprise you to learn that half of the museum’s collection in this category is made up of prophecy grandmas? No magical powers there, for many families Grandmas is the holder of folk remedies and experience, certainly the one most capable of telling you what you’re doing wrong with your life. For my 25 cents, the prophecy grandma I chose says I’ll receive a letter with good news and I have a bad habit of trusting others, especially those who flatter me.

Roller Organs And Player Pianos

If you really want to wake the place up put a couple of coins into one of the museum’s many music boxes. The pianos can play a selection of different tunes with considerable high energy, while the roller organ, operating off of a bellows system has an ominous level of resonance that simply sends shivers down the spine. The Engelhardt Orchestration machine is a mixture of different instruments including flutes, pipes, snare drums, wooden block, tambourine, piano and far too many more to mention. Not only do they all work, but the museum sells CD recordings of all the tunes too.

Animations And Automatons

The strangest and perhaps the most curious machines in the collection are these puppet-like theatres. Some depict cheerful barbershop quartets, dancing clowns, and musical monkeys, the kind of themes you’d expect, but others delve into more sensational stories like hangings, guillotine executions, the hardship of the open plains, and, my favourite, the iniquity of the opium den where those who imbibe begin to see dead bodies and tongue-flicking serpents emerge from the walls. In the early 1900’s public hangings and sensational tales of crime were still very much the rage and so these early machines had to reflect those interests.

Generosity And Ingenuity

There is a large community of people today dedicated to restoring arcade video games from the 80’s and pinball machines from the 70’s who find such tasks a real challenge. How do you repair something for which there are no longer replacement parts? Imagine, then, the work needed for machines that are more than a hundred years old. Not simply to bring them up to museum quality, but to a working order that can take the abuses of today’s tourists. There’s a strong dream that powers the Musée Mécanique, one that puts a priority on creating the sensation of going back in time, enough to either trust the public to be gentle in a way they normally are not with vending machines, or more than likely to put in the extra maintenance work simply to maintain the illusion. Either way it is an extraordinary place and should you find yourself strolling along Pier 45 in San Francisco, take your coins to the museum. It’s less expensive than any other attraction on the strip, and more magical too.