A bigger-than-life pun that has become a beacon of altruism.

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

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

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

A storybook European village in Berkeley.

The final resting place of a space program monolith.

In a city filled with Frank Gehry buildings, one stands out as one of the architect's weirder works.

The "world's biggest dinosaur" once housed a creationist museum in its abdomen.

An unfortunate geological resemblance to Satan has labeled this Pasadena gorge as a passage to the underworld.

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

A nondescript building that's been functioning as a speakeasy for nearly a century and a half.

Historic funicular railway, believed to be the shortest railroad in the world.

An essential stop before plundering, BYO Cutlass.

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

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

Aqueducts have dramatically changed this old lake, now home to tufa towers and its very own species of tiny brine shrimp.

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

Quite simply the largest tree in the world (by volume).

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

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

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

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.