This concrete tangle of square pipes has stood as a proud thorn in the city's side since the '70s.

Tiki luxury on Nob Hill.

The oldest dim sum restaurant in the United States is a nostalgic jewel.

Gold Rush ship-turned-hotel buried underneath San Francisco's financial district.

This museum in San Francisco's Chinatown is one of the oldest and largest archives of Chinese American history and culture.

One of the oldest producers of hand-folded fortune cookies still uses its original secret recipe.

Staircase winds down the side of Telegraph Hill through gardens, wild parrots flying overhead.

A free, public museum dedicated to the fascinating science of sight.

A collection of 20th-century automata, penny arcade games, and musical contraptions.

America's oldest Italian restaurant is a San Francisco institution.

Visible below the waves are memorials to the city's Gold Rush dead.

In all of the 29 years it was in operation, no prisoners ever escaped successfully... or so they claim.

One of America’s oldest and spookiest hotels, thanks to the residency of ghosts, dead presidents, and Alfred Hitchcock.

The shattered remnants of a meteor that struck Santa Fe more than a billion years ago.

The most powerful laboratory radiation source in the world pulses with 1,000 times the electricity of a lightning bolt.

The official atomic museum of the United States explores the explosive and productive history of a much maligned energy source.

These aggressively sustainable art homes look like something out of 1970's science fiction.

A multi-storied adobe complex has been inhabited for more than a thousand years.

Volunteers spent years restoring a vintage steam locomotive to operating condition.

Apparently, the whole cosmos emanates from this plain concrete tower.

A burnt-out motel with priceless Native American artwork in the basement, redeveloped into apartments.

A 6,888-carat piece of turquoise that bears a striking resemblance to the first President of the United States.

The only Native American comic shop in the world.

This opulent Pueblo Deco movie palace melds Art Deco and Native American motifs.