The San Francisco Historium Spotlight is so big it’s hard it’s hard to tell where it ends. Make it through the game booths, artisan shops, snack stalls and performance stages in the Gold Rush-era immersive experience at Pier 35, and there’s still more.
It keeps going. And going.
Past audiences decked out in corsets, suspenders, hoop skirts, bustles, vests, armbands, overalls, bandanas, tassels, top hats with cards tucked in the band, netted fascinators, bonnets and more. Look closely, and one guy operating a gold-panning station might have a (prop) stick of dynamite tucked into his back pocket, the better to loosen pay dirt.
Zoom out again, and the endless warehouse that is Pier 35 – where Red Barn Productions, the company behind the annual Dickens Fair, has moved in for two days starting Saturday, Aug. 22 – looks like a San Francisco prospector’s version of the Mall of America.
But Dickens Fair veterans might make a pointed comparison: “Dickens Fair is bigger.”
This came from Matt Ambauen, 40, of San Francisco, who wore two holsters along with his vest and hat. Instead of prop guns, they carried a banana and a pickle – both of which turned out to be flasks.
The first annual San Francisco Historium Spotlight features 46 structures including a general store, the Alta California newspaper office and saloons as well as vendor and game booths. (Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle)
“Want a nip of my pickle?” he said as we waited in line for Kai’s meat pies with mince, lamb and beef (fortifying enough for a trek to one’s claim in the foothills).
A Dickens devotee of seven years, he acknowledged that the San Francisco Historium Spotlight is still in its pilot phase. “They get a lot of grace for that,” he said, already hopeful about an expanded scope for next year. “The right folks are going to keep comin’.”
Still, some stumbles were perhaps inevitable.
Atendees enjoy drinks at White Star, a saloon modeled after those in the Gold Rush at the San Francisco Historium Spotlight on Saturday, Aug. 22, 2026. (Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle)
A saloon sold Josh wines, a punch line in any era. Acoustics were challenging in the cavernous space, where the general din often drowned out the sea chanteys or banjo picking happening feet away. Holding forth in the office of the Alta California, a real newspaper of the era, was San Francisco journalist Mark Twain. Although actor Jeffrey Weissman looks like a walking photograph of the man himself, all unruly white hair, he was stumbling on almost every sentence as he read aloud from a binder with tabs – not exactly period-specific.
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San Francisco Historium Spotlight: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 23. $15-$40. Pier 35, 1454 The Embarcadero, S.F. https://sanfranciscohistorium.com
Much more successful was Josh Kaplan as businessman Matthew Turner, who shook my hand and improvised with me while we watched hopeful gold panners gently shake wet silt in handheld basins and pipette choice granules into tiny vials.
He wasn’t just telling me about Matthew Turner’s various business ventures in lumber, shipbuilding and “salted cod.” He brought me in as if he were weighing a great many urgent cares and appreciated having someone to talk to about them.
It wasn’t that phony thing that a lot of immersive shows do, where the actors wrench you away from what you’re doing, no matter what it is, and force you to suddenly watch a stagey show. He sidled up gently and spoke naturally. When he expressed worry about a new industry – steel – one day forcing him to move out of his prime waterfront property, it felt like having a contemporary conversation with any longtime San Franciscan.
Attendees play games inside the gambling parlor at the San Francisco Historium Spotlight. (Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle)
When he realized I’m a journalist with the Chronicle, he briefly dropped character. Researching this role, he said, “I’m learning things about a city I grew up in that I never knew.” Like Ambauen, he was already looking to future iterations, when the Historium might include more from groups who “are still fighting for their voice.”
Looking around, he saw many fellow Dickens Fair performers whom he’s used to seeing only during the holidays. “I have to be very careful not to wish people a happy Christmas,” he said.
He wasn’t even the only Matthew Turner featured at the event. Docked outside on the pier was the historical vessel of the same name, owned and operated by the nonprofit Call of the Sea and modeled on a brigantine built by the actual Matthew Turner. Audiences could walk the plank to tour it whenever they needed a break from the sensory overload of cancan dancing, square dancing, fortune telling, ring tossing and other hubbub inside.
The Matthew Turner, a ship owned and operated by the nonprofit Call of the Sea, docked outside of Pier 35 for the San Francisco Historium Spotlight on Saturday, Aug. 22, 2026. (Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle)
It rocked in the bay at the gentle pace of breathing. Below deck, its cubby-sized berths gave a sense of what prospectors might have endured on their journeys to San Francisco.
Above, its two wooden masts seemed to be etching the cirrus clouds in the sky, with the Transamerica Pyramid and Salesforce Tower catching each wisp’s other end. Here, the past and present commingled. Clearly humans have always been trying to build their way to the heavens.
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This article originally published at S.F.’s new Gold Rush immersive experience deserves to come back next year. Here’s why.