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.

Early prototype for Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim.

Each of these gorgeous, intricately decorated rooms is painstakingly crafted to the scale of 1 inch: 1 foot.

This small, but long-running hobby club has built one of the largest model rail lines in the US.

This morbid, delightful curiosity shop offers everything from animal bones to human teeth.

This ambitious attraction was the brain child of a lake resort impresario, and built by the WPA.

Eight "Guardians of Health" protect this art deco water tower from pollutants and bacteria.

An old soap company building now houses one of Minneapolis’s oldest independent non-profit art galleries.

Direct, creative challenge to Mother Nature's winter wrath.

Secret hideaway for an alternative beach experience.

These Great Lakes sea caves accessible by boat in the summer turn into temples of ice reachable by foot in the winter.

An abandoned bus station transformed into a museum dedicated to the history of Greyhound Lines, in the place where it all began.

Minnesota's oldest and deepest mine is now an underground physics laboratory.

This tiny Minnesota city tried to secede from the Union as a last-ditch effort to fix its crumbling water system.

This rare vessel mixed luxury with labor before being converted to a museum and sometimes haunted maze.

This posh mansion began as a family's estate and ended as the site of a murder ripped from the pages of a pulp novel.

Minnesota's highest point is a scenic vista marked by a plaque and armies of mosquitoes.

Half of a waterfall goes into the river while the other half seems to disappear.