Places ciffergan Wants to Go

Dive bar built out of the remains of a whaling ship.

Bonsai garden in Oakland is curated by the first non-Japanese female bonsai master in the United States.

This restaurant offers the original California cuisine.

A shape-shifting buy-sell-trade bookstore, born to Beatnik Era spirit.

This subtle Berkeley paving stone actually marks off a lawless tube of air that extends into space.

The Laureates here get something even more coveted than a Nobel Prize: free parking for life.

Where the alchemists dream of transmuting base metal into gold was actually achieved.

A sparse, solitary sequoia still stands as a living tribute to the famous conservationist who planted it—but it's dying.

A free, public museum dedicated to the fascinating science of sight.

Art in the form of a winding, man made crack in stone.

Thirteen trees representing the original thirteen colonies were planted with soil from historic Revolutionary battlefields.

An abandoned, unfinished mansion on grounds strewn with lava rocks.

The oldest alley in San Francisco is paved with a reminder of the city's original shoreline.

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

This museum in San Francisco's Chinatown is one of the oldest and largest archives of Chinese American history and culture.

The first AIDS memorial chapel in San Francisco and one of only a few in the U.S.

One of the smallest parks in San Francisco honors the legacy of the "Mother of Civil Rights in California."

One of the last remnants of the city's Chinese nightclub scene is now a dive bar selling killer mai tais.

This Japanese treats shop may have been the first business to mass-produce fortune cookies in the United States.

An art supply shop holds the secrets of this quiet neighborhood's raucous Barbary Coast past.

Chevron maintains one “Standard” brand station per state so it doesn’t lose the trademark.

An invitation-only museum of items natural and bizarre, arcane and exotic.

Half of a house.

The grand, column-fronted, sculpture-adorned home of the ambitious digital library.