Climb the Greenwich Steps at dusk and you pass the same turret you've been passing for years: shuttered windows, a hillside that always looked one storm away from sliding into Montgomery Street, and a building shaped like a castle that never quite got to be one. Cross over to the Filbert Steps instead, one block south, and the walk delivers something different every time. Roses spilling over Napier Lane. The parrots making themselves heard before you see them. A garden someone has clearly tended for decades.
For nearly two decades, Telegraph Hill's two parallel staircases up the eastern slope have not been an equal choice. One had a living destination. The other had a dead end with good bones. That's the part of this fall's biggest neighborhood story that's easy to miss if you only read the headline about a restaurant reopening.
Two Stairways, One Uneven Deal
Both routes start within a block of each other near Sansome Street, both climb the same steep grade toward Coit Tower, and both offer the same views back toward the Bay Bridge on the way up. Where they diverge is in what waits at the top of the climb, and that's shaped how residents actually use them.
The Filbert Steps run nearly 400 wooden treads through the Grace Marchant Garden, a hillside that a former Hollywood stuntwoman named Grace Marchant began clearing of dumped trash and planting with baby tears in 1949, at age 63. The garden survived her, protected today through an endowment and a resident group called Friends of the Garden, and it's still the reason most people recommend this side of the hill to anyone visiting for the first time. Halfway up, the steps cross Napier Lane, a boardwalk lined with 1850s cottages that outlasted the 1906 earthquake.
The Greenwich Steps, one street over, have offered the same climb without the same payoff. For most of the last two decades, walkers taking that route have passed Julius' Castle at 1541 Montgomery Street knowing it as a curiosity rather than a place. One local hiking guide described it flatly as a restaurant that was "collecting cobwebs" on recent passes, noting only that there was "news of plans to reopen" without much confidence attached. That's not a knock on the block. It's just what a vacancy stretching close to two decades does to how a stairway gets talked about.
What's Actually Reopening at 1541 Montgomery
That vacancy is ending. Julius' Castle, closed since 2007 and dark for what Hoodline describes as nearly two decades, is targeting a September 2026 reopening. Paul Scott, the attorney who bought the building in a 2012 bankruptcy sale, has spent most of the years since untangling permits, a lawsuit, and a discovery partway through the project that a portion of the original 1920s structure had been built over the property line. Straightening that out alone cost roughly two years.
The renovation itself has been substantial. Crews rebuilt a fire-damaged turret, stabilized a hillside that had been sliding for years, and restored interior wood paneling believed to date back to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Reports differ slightly on the new exterior color: Hoodline describes a repaint in tan, dark green, and gold, while SFist reports a gray scheme inspired by the Lower Haight's Nightingale House, replacing a prior pale yellow. Either way, the building is getting a different face than the one Telegraph Hill has looked at for a generation. Interior design work fell to Jon de la Cruz, known locally for his work on Wayfare Tavern and Che Fico.
Scott has been candid about how long the project took.
"It's been for the good, because it's such a big part of San Francisco history."
The reopening will start with dinner service only. Scott has confirmed a chef is hired without naming who will run the kitchen. And per the terms of the Planning Commission's 2017 approval, the restaurant will operate under negotiated restrictions on trash pickup and delivery hours, the product of years of back and forth with neighborhood groups who had real concerns about a commercial kitchen reopening on a residential stairway.
The Garden Nobody Expected
Here's the detail that changes the calculus for anyone who actually lives on this hill, not just anyone visiting it. Alongside the structural work, Scott's team stabilized the hillside next to the building and added a terraced edible garden directly beside the public stairway.
That's not a landscaping footnote. It means the Greenwich Steps are getting their own tended green space for the first time since the restaurant went dark, something the Filbert side has had, in one form or another, since Grace Marchant started pulling tires and old furniture off that hillside in 1949. The two staircases climbing this hill have operated on different terms for nearly twenty years: one with a living garden and a destination, one with neither. A terraced garden next to a working restaurant kitchen doesn't erase that gap overnight, but it's the first structural move toward closing it since the building closed.
For residents deciding which route to take on an evening walk, or which stairway to send a first-time guest up, that's the thing worth knowing before the debate about which restaurant reservation to book even starts.
The Rest of the Fall Calendar Isn't Waiting on a Restaurant
None of this is happening against a quiet backdrop. North Beach's First Fridays gallery walk continues on its usual monthly rhythm, with the next one set for August 7, 2026, when local galleries stay open into the evening for anyone wandering down from the hill.
October brings the bigger fixture. San Francisco Fleet Week runs October 4 through 12, 2026, with the air show scheduled for October 9 through 11, headlined again by the Blue Angels in a year organizers are framing around the team's 80th anniversary and the nation's 250th. Telegraph Hill's elevation has always given residents a version of that show without needing to fight the Aquatic Park crowds for a sightline. It's one of the few weekends a year when the hill's steepness works entirely in its own favor.
None of that is new information for anyone who's lived here more than a season. What's new is that this October, for the first time in almost two decades, a walk up from Fleet Week toward Coit Tower on the Greenwich side ends somewhere other than a locked door.
What Actually Changes This Fall
The restaurant itself will draw its own attention. Julius' Castle spent decades as a fixture for Hollywood regulars and political dealmaking before it closed, and its 2017 approval only came after what Wikipedia's own account calls a hearing marked by "a litany of complaints." People on this hill have long memories about that building, and a fair number of them will want a table once it opens, whether out of nostalgia, curiosity, or simple neighborhood loyalty.
But the quieter shift is the one that has nothing to do with reservations. For close to two decades, choosing between the Filbert Steps and the Greenwich Steps meant choosing between a garden and a ghost. That choice is closing. Both routes up this hill will soon have a tended green space partway up and a reason to keep climbing once you reach the top. That's not a small thing on a hill defined almost entirely by which staircase you take and what you find when you get there.
If you're weighing what a home on either side of Telegraph Hill is actually worth to you day to day, the answer has quietly gotten more complicated, and more interesting, than it was a year ago.
Adelaida Mejia has spent 25 years watching San Francisco's neighborhoods change one block at a time, and she brings that same eye for detail to every listing she represents. If you're curious what a home on Telegraph Hill, or any of the city's staircase neighborhoods, is actually worth in today's market, reach out to Adelaida Mejia for a conversation grounded in the block, not just the comps.
