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

Each year these high desert hills are absolutely covered with poppy flowers in a surreal show of nature.

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

Where the rich wintered in Pasadena.

Some of the most unusual (and in some cases, disgusting) flavors of soda imaginable.

This centerpiece of the Hollywood & Highland shopping center is a recreation of a long-lost movie set.

This glamorous old building is said to have inspired the Tower of Terror.

This grand mansion has starred in everything from Bones to Buffy.

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

Only hotel where you can legally launder money.

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

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

This turn of the century masterpiece has a mysterious goaty interloper.

The private clubhouse for the members of the Academy of Magical Arts.

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

A lonely Gondola stuck on a traffic circle sits in a spot where it once would have floated down the Grand Canal.

60 feet of towering steel balances gracefully.

A long-vacant Scottish Rite temple in Hollywood has been converted into an art museum filled with Masonic relics.

This stockpile of junked electronic and mechanical gadgets is a favorite among Hollywood prop masters.

America's most famous piece of self-built architecture.

Elevated freight railway turned wildly successful urban park.

A three-story, three-dimensional hobo clown in a tutu welcomes CVS shoppers.

Ingenious bakery opens up the first Cupcake ATM at their flagship location in Beverly Hills.

One of the most scenic stretches of road in America winds between some of the country's oldest trees.