Vermont Street is the poor man’s Lombard Street. Lombard gets all the love. It’s the twisty street planted with flowers that you see in all the postcard pictures. Tourists flock to Lombard, so many that the city recently toyed with the idea to charge people a toll to drive down it. Most of the tourists take the cable car up Hyde Street, a ride that’s so steep and high that oxygen masks drop from the ceiling before you reach the top. Then you take in the scene: Lombard Street’s tight serpentine and the misty heights of Oakland in the far distance.

Most postcard pictures lie, or at least they stretch the truth. They crop out the parking lots and airbrush away the graffiti. When you go to a place, you don’t really expect it to look like the postcard picture. So it’s surprising to me that a lot of places in San Francisco look like the postcard pictures of San Francisco. Maybe that’s what makes the place feel unreal. That and the fog. And the second-hand pot smoke.

But I’ve never seen a postcard picture of Vermont Street, or at least not the curvy part up on Potrero Hill. By some measures, the stretch of Vermont between 20th and 22nd Streets is even more crooked and curvy than Lombard. I read online that Vermont has fewer switchbacks, but the turns are sharper and snakier. Plus, Vermont has a cameo in the 1973 film Magnum Force, when Dirty Harry goes bombing down the hill with a motorcycle in hot pursuit.

So what gives? Why don’t the tourists flock to Vermont? Maybe it’s because Lombard Street is in a swanky part of the city, while Vermont is south of downtown in an old working class neighborhood. Back in the day, immigrants— mostly Irish— worked on the waterfront and lived on Potrero Hill. But that was a long time ago. Now Potrero Hill is as gentrified as any other neighborhood in this town. So I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that Lombard Street is famous and Vermont Street isn’t, and everyone wants to take a selfie with a celebrity.