Bay Model Visitor Center

The layout is confusing and it's hard to know where to start. Finally I asked a guard and she suggested to start at the top floor, 7th floor, and work your way down. I did this and she was right. A very eclectic collection. I loved the collection of astronaut suits, both historical ones and ones used in films.

This is a really cool attraction where you can see the entire Bay area on a model (like a map) that you can walk around. Definitely a unique thing to do.

This amazing place combines 3 loves: Cartography, geography and water. I first visited the Bay Model during a high school field trip. In the intervening decades, the Bay Model has been "decommissioned" from official work by computer simulations, but it is still under the aegis of the US Army Corps of Engineers and serves as an educational piece. It's just fascinating to me. You are immersed in the full magnitude and interconnections of the Sierra snowpack/Delta/Bay. They also host other exhibits - during this visit, one exhibit was about Marinship, the facility on this site that produced Liberty Ships during WWII, and another exhibit was art made of Bay/ocean litter. If you have the opportunity to visit, budget at least 90 minutes...if it wasn't for my group's schedule, I could've spent 3 hours here!

This is an interesting thing to see. It's a scale replica of the San Francisco Bay that engineers used before computer simulations to understand how changes to the bay (filling/dredging/etc.) would affect the flow of water. It's gigantic which makes it really cool. It's great for a rainy day.

Pumps circulate 100,000 gallons of water to simulate the San Francisco Bay tides. The Bay Model Visitor Center is a neat spot for kids and adults who want to know how the bay works.