A popular tourist cave with a dark past.

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

San Francisco's oldest surviving monument and meeting place for 1906 survivors.

The unbelievably opulent home built for an infamous newspaperman.

An extraordinarily ornate museum in San Diego holds wondrous anthropological treasures.

Hundreds of trees made from glass bottles make up this forest on Route 66.

California's own medieval Italian castle, authentic down to the 300-year-old iron maiden in the dungeon.

After starting as a whimsical tourist attraction that eventually found its way to ruin, these renovated canals offer a lush and exotic locale on the Pacific Coast.

A modern day curiosity cabinet.

A faux European lane smack dab in downtown L.A.

The last remaining relic of San Francisco's glittering 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition.

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

These delicate buggers are some of the rarest fossils that have bubbled up from the Tar Pits.

The seawater playground of gilded-era San Francisco burned to the ground in 1966.

San Francisco's newly reopened hands-on science museum.

Carnivorous plants, medieval aphrodisiacs, and the largest original wood structure glass conservatory in the western hemisphere.

Once a purveyor of Santeria supplies, religious products , and household sundries, now closed.

World War II-era Nazi compound nestled in the Santa Monica hills.

A few iconic structures are all that remain of America’s first outdoor shopping mall.

This centerpiece of the Hollywood & Highland shopping center is a recreation of a long-lost movie set.

The decor of this Hollywood movie palace just barely predated the opening of King Tut's tomb.

A beautiful memorial tells the story of a formerly enslaved woman whose kindness shaped a burgeoning city.

A cult following celebrates the legend that belies this curious podiatrists' office sign which has worked its way into song, literature, animation, and the visual arts.

The space-age building is home to one of the few remaining rotating restaurants in America, and the only one that inspired a 1980s sitcom.