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

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

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.

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

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

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

Statue of Lenin, from Cold War era Czechoslovakia, now in a neighborhood of Seattle.

Residents of Fremont in Seattle have considered it the center of the universe since the 1970s.

A wall of chewing gum moonlights as collective art.

A giant Troll lurks under one of Seattle's oldest bridges.

The "lovely red Vega" of the legendary record-settling pilot.

The actual model from the original "Star Trek" series is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum.

Largest Roman Catholic church in North America.

In a city that boasts four separate inclined cable railways, this is one of the busiest funicular lines in the world.

The block of aged dairy is probably still edible after 2,300 years in a peat bog.

An ominous concrete cube cuts a dystopian silhouette atop this California mountain.

The world's first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory continues to report on the stars.

San Francisco Bay's ghost town.