The remains of a ruined mansion memorialize the 1906 earthquake.

San Francisco's urban bison herd has persisted in the face of extinction, development, and disease.

Big gun installations, built over a massive cemetery, now abandoned & hidden in trees.

In this century-old literary safehouse, print is alive and well.

A 300-ship graveyard, with a few still visible at low tide.

A modern mechanical planetary system, part of a 10,000 year clock.

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

The randomness of this wall of lava lamps helps encrypt up to 10 percent of the internet.

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

An essential stop before plundering, BYO Cutlass.

A shop full of natural curiosities, carnivorous plants, and costumed taxidermied mice.

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

The one-time watch house for incoming ships at the Golden Gate now stands abandoned and hidden in trees.

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

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

A walk-in working camera obscura produces 360-degree live images of the San Francisco coast.

The only theatre in the world constructed specifically for sound movement.

Relics of the 1894 Midwinter Exposition continue to delight visitors today.

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

A favorite haunt of dinosaur loving children and hallucinogen loving hippies alike.

A pair of slides and a tree-lined stair corridor have been an urban oasis for nearly 40 years.

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

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

This Japanese treats shop may have been the first business to mass-produce fortune cookies in the United States.