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It was a sunny March day when I found myself virtually alone in the stairwell of a private social club, looking at one of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s most beautiful frescoes. Apart from the woman who had let me in and a waiter setting a table in the dining room nearby, there wasn’t another soul in sight. Outside, people passed on the street, heads down looking at phones or carrying guidebooks. I suspected most of them, even locals like myself, had no idea that Rivera left his mural art hidden throughout the city.

I called San Francisco’s top-rated tour guide to see if I was right. “Do you know about the Rivera murals here?” I asked. “I know that he has one in some building. I can’t remember what it is, but it’s a big one,” Gary Laufman, who has guided over 500 professional tours in the city, told me. He was half right. Rivera’s murals are in “big buildings,” but there is not one but three of them scattered across this hilly, foggy city. 

Determined, I called another tour guide, Ryan Curtis. He’s given well over 1,000 tours. “The Rivera murals are very unknown,” Curtis told me. He’d been to one of them on his own but never led a tour to any of the three, even though he does take tourists to see some of the city’s many public artworks. When he does, he usually focuses on art that people can go right up to, like murals and sculptures. “People like art they can interact with,” he told me. “Pieces like that are successful. People like the fact that they can go up and touch them. They’re more tangible.” Because the Riveras are all in different districts, Curtis said, it’s challenging to fit them into a tour. Plus, it’s rare to get a request from customers to see them, because barely anyone knows they’re there.