A former hardware store near Yerba Buena is the official home of California's history.

This one-block alleyway is stuffed with street art that is colorful, cultural, and intensely political.

A century and a half of research in the sciences and natural history, still going strong.

A playing field for a popular French past time can be found tucked away in a quiet corner of Golden Gate Park.

San Francisco's oldest operating hotel, with a Victorian atmosphere and a "haunted" fourth floor.

Alleyway plaque commemorating the death of a fictional character in The Maltese Falcon, not far from the author's home.

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

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

Tiki luxury on Nob Hill.

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

This strange bovine gargoyle is said to have been put in as a passive aggressive form of revenge.

Renaissance hospital featuring a rotating door into which unwanted babies were dropped.

This private skyway is filled with art and was expanded explicitly so that Hitler could appreciate a river.

The oldest operating pharmacy in the world features 800-year-old recipes.

The largest and most famous wax anatomical collection anywhere in the world.

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.

The programmatic glory of LA's giant whiskey barrel building has become an upscale reminder of the city's kitschy roadside past.

Non-profit time travel mart sells goods you would need for a trip through the fourth dimension.

A series of abstract, silly sculptures represent the works of a great modern classical composer.

The floorboard scrawling of a tragic madman is on public display outside a Paris hospital, much to the dismay of its opponents.

Noirish green neon marks the location of one of the oldest private detective agencies in France.

Egyptian Revival movie palace abandoned for decades and restored in 2013.

A surrealist timepiece by the artist of melting clocks.

A 16th-century fountain marks the site of a lost medieval cemetery once filled with mass graves.