Tiki luxury on Nob Hill.

A still functioning vaudeville carousel that has operated for over a century boasts a colorful menagerie and past.

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

A man-made island in scenic San Francisco Bay.

A decommissioned Naval base now rents itself out for people who want to blow stuff up.

The century-old bell and clock tower at UC Berkeley is the third-tallest in the world, and has fossils.

Where the alchemists dream of transmuting base metal into gold was actually achieved.

A pier that used to act as a busy ferry dock is now a decaying favorite of local fisherman and urban artists.

A 90-acre park on former landfill that hosts an annual kite festival.

A hardware store Buddha statue installed to deter vandalism wound up attracting Vietnamese immigrants who came to pray.

The newsstand that never closes its doors—well, almost never.

An art collective teaching the more fiery, metal-y art forms.

With statues of Nelson Mandela and Harvey Milk this monument has been called the Mount Rushmore of California.

An abandoned convention space that has been left to the homeless and the radical.

This mysterious series of teeny guerrilla installations sheds a whimsical light on street art in Oakland.

A massive ultra-modern church presents a science-fiction view of Catholicism's inclusive future.

Odd stone and concrete monuments in the "Poet of the Sierras" eclectic folly garden.

Oakland's beautiful monumental cemetery.

Neoclassical Revival mansion and set of horror cult classic Phantasm.

This Oakland fairytale kingdom, fiercely devoted to childlike whimsy, was an early inspiration for Disneyland.

Collective dedicated to restoring steam engines.

A crumbling Beaux Arts monument to the Bay Area's age of rail.

Bonsai garden in Oakland is curated by the first non-Japanese female bonsai master in the United States.

Dive bar built out of the remains of a whaling ship.