Finding King Kandy
on Lombard Street
Hasbro makes over San Francisco's twisty-turny street
By Toni Fitzgerald
Aug 25, 2009
When adults look at San Francisco's Lombard Street, famously the crookedest street in America, they note the eight zig-zagging turns and marvel at the sharpness of those curves.
When kids look at Lombard Street, they see something entirely different, a board game. The twists and turns mimic the familiar layout of Candy Land, in which players follow a twisty, brightly colored road to find King Kandy.
So it seemed like a natural fit when Hasbro, the game’s maker, decided to turn the San Francisco tourist attraction into a life-sized version of Candy Land to celebrate the game’s 60th anniversary and promote the release of the new 3D version of the game.
The idea was to make the street look like the Candy Land board, with real children actually playing a game on the street.
So last Wednesday Hasbro covered the length of Lombard between Hyde and Leavenworth streets with some 3,000 interlocking colored mats. Like colors were connected in order to form 41 total colored squares.
The colors of the squares alternated between red, purple, yellow, blue, orange and green, just like the real game.
A couple squares were done in pink with the likenesses of a gingerbread man and a candy cane on them, mirroring the candy treats that players meet along the pathway to King Kandy in Candy Land.
Hasbro workers began making over the street at 4 a.m., and by 10 a.m. they had covered 575 feet of street.
Then four teams of six kids ages 6 to 10 assembled on the life-size board to play the game. The kids were selected from patients at University of California’s San Francisco Children’s Hospital and the nonprofit Friends of the Children, which mentors at-risk children.
A designated drawer chose cards for each team and held them up for all to see. The kids ran, jumped and sometimes slid down the hill, advancing to the color of the square displayed on the card.
The stunt worked on two levels, first because it was such an imaginative recreation of Candy Land as a perfect larger-than-life visual of the game.
But it also worked because it got a ton of attention.
Even when it’s not covered with blue and green squares, Lombard Street is a major tourist attraction. It’s been featured in chase scenes in movies from “Herbie the Love Bug” to “Bullitt,” and thus visitors often drive down the street to test their own acumen at the wheel.
Because Lombard is so well known, the giant Candy Land game received a huge amount of coverage from California newspapers, local radio stations and especially television, which ran wide shots of the whole stunning visual.
For those keeping score, the yellow team won the game and a candy prize as well. But all participants got a piece of the Candy Land birthday cake, an intricate 2-foot-tall icing-laden reimagination of King Kandy’s castle by Debbie Does Cakes, an Oakland bakery.
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