These banned cigarette vending machines now sell little pieces of pocket-sized art.

The bullet-riddled wall from the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, bloodstains enhanced for your viewing pleasure.

This former lieutenant governor's home is brimming with curiosities.

Dyed by iron oxide over centuries, these sandstone rocks rise thousands of feet into the sky.

This incredible collection of vintage pinball machines can be played at 25 cents a pop.

Stepping away from the glitz of mobsters and casinos to learn about the other history of Vegas.

James Turrell's total color immersion art installation, hidden on the top floor of a luxury handbag shop.

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

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

An essential stop before plundering, BYO Cutlass.

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

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

Tiki luxury on Nob Hill.

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

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

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

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

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

A tiny theater hidden in an alley plays a constant stream of short silent films for anyone willing to peer through the peephole.

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

This once-palatial plantation may have been the site where a draft of the Declaration of Independence was written.

Born a slave on the Arlington estate, Parks dug the first graves at Arlington National Cemetery, and was buried there, too.

Over 20,000 sets of spice shakers reveal the surprisingly telling history of our most basic spices.