The annual pre-Valentine’s Day custom of 400-pound, six-foot-wide hearts showing up in SF beats on for its 21st year, but don’t get your heart set on a big display, because there aren’t that many of them this year.

It’s a San Francisco Valentine's Day tradition that not long before February 14, the beloved 400-pound, five-foot-tall Hearts in San Francisco are put on public display in the city. Last year they started a little early by putting the hearts out on January 8, and that heart display at the Ferry Building also featured a heart made of 88,000 Lego bricks plus another that had previously belonged to Robin Williams.

On Monday, the 2025 Hearts in SF were also unveiled at the Ferry Building, all of them up for auction in a benefit for the SF General Hospital Foundation.    

But wait, are there only two of those jumbo, 400-pound hearts among this year’s crop? After all, there were eight large hearts in 2024, six of them in 2023, and four of them in 2022. Have they just not installed the rest of them yet?

It appears there will indeed only be two jumbo hearts this year. A look at the hospital foundation’s website lists only these two “Large Hearts,” though there are 20 other hearts on display which are much smaller sizes.

But still, let's have a  look at the big ones. Painter and graphic designer Isabelle Hung’s Japanese Tea Garden evokes the pagoda and surroundings of the actual Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.  

Dev Heyrana’s SŌL is the other large one outside a southeast entrance of the Ferry Building. And in a first for Hearts in SF, we have the artist’s family members also contributing their own separate (smaller) hearts, as Heyrana’s daughters also made a heart in this collection, as seen in this Instagram video.

Heyrana’s daughters Quinn and Rowan Heyrana de Leyos (ages 11 and 7) created the hearts Spark In Our Hearts, which is the small heart with stars on it in the above image. It’s not the only heart this year that comes from “up and coming” youngster artists.

Jessica Rosenfeld’s third grade César Chávez Elementary School art class created this heart Pájaros de la amistad (which means “Birds of Friendship”). This one has already sold, and has the distinction of being the only 2025 heart that’s sold as of its first day on display.

And we were intrigued by this Table Top Heart called Seismic by Ella Rochelle-Lawton, with its shout-outs to the Piedmont Boutique “legs” sculpture on Haight Street, and other local SF landmarks. The Table Top Hearts are all 16 inches tall and 17 inches wide, and the bidding on them starts at $10,000.

Meanwhile, some of the seven-inch tall, six-inch wide Mini Hearts are seen around the four corners of the above Table Top Heart. Bidding on the Mini Hearts starts at $5,000.

So why is the hospital having auctions and asking for donations after Mark Zuckerberg paid $75 million to put his name on it? It’s because  Zuckerberg SF General Hospital and the SF General Hospital Foundation are two completely separate entities. The hospital is run by the city, is part of the Department of Public Health, and therefore cannot accept donations no matter how badly its programs need funding.

But the SF General Hospital Foundation can take donations to pay for care for the “unhoused, new immigrants, and people who are totally uninsured,” SF General Hospital Foundation CEO Kim Meredith explained to SFist last year. “We can do things that only philanthropy can do,” she added, noting an Addiction Care Team that the state and feds initially refused to fund. “We can be society’s strategic risk capital, because we are private funds giving to a public institution.”

While there are only two of the new giant, 400-pound hearts out for 2025, there are still dozens of other giant hearts from previous years on display at landmarks and in lobbies all over town. (This map shows you where all of them are.) These include several by Sirron Norris, one by Jeremy Novy, and of course, the heart by singer Tony Bennett in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel.  

The 2025 Hearts in San Francisco will remain on display at the Ferry Building, and up for auction, through February 3, 2025.

Related: Meet Your 2024 'Hearts in San Francisco,' Including One That Once Belonged to Robin Williams [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist