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

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

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

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

A classic advertising icon immortalized in regal bronze.

A Barbary Coast watering hole built into a Gold Rush shipwreck.

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

A shining, cold, black organ lies in San Francisco's financial district.

Not merely a museum – but a whirring powerhouse that offers a subterranean peek into the heart and soul of cable car operations.

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

Tiki luxury on Nob Hill.

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

Furniture tries to escape an abandoned building in San Francisco.

This subtle Berkeley paving stone actually marks off a lawless tube of air that extends into space.

The only museum of sake in the United States is nestled in an unlikely California college town.

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

A shape-shifting buy-sell-trade bookstore, born to Beatnik Era spirit.

An vast warehouse of everyday treasures in Berkeley, CA.

A storybook European village in Berkeley.

A Florida college boasts the world's largest single-site collection of structures designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

This small museum gives visitors a chance to soak up the history of the "sponge capital of the world."

A building so large that it has its own weather.

A Circus legend leaves an unexpected endowment.

Former utopian colony based on the belief that the universe exists in a hollow sphere.