A collection of 20th-century automata, penny arcade games, and musical contraptions.

This concrete tangle of square pipes has stood as a proud thorn in the city's side since the '70s.

Prone to disastrous fires, the city of San Francisco has the Guardian, a fireboat gifted by residents, to watch over them from the bay.

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

Approximately 250,000 people left homeless by the great earthquake and fires found shelter in Golden Gate Park.

The remains of a ruined mansion memorialize the 1906 earthquake.

A playground built by the kids that is a child's wonderland, and a helicopter parent's nightmare.

A working model of the entire San Francisco Bay and much of the Sacramento River Delta, complete with regular tides that change every 14 minutes.

The Victoria-era quarantine station for Sydney.

This former Roman Catholic Church still contains the embalmed hearts and organs of 22 popes.

A Looff creation in Santa Monica best described as “a California-Byzantine-Moorish-style fantasy.”

The final resting place of the great navigator, or maybe his brother.

Installed in an act of one-upsmanship, the annual sundial in this church is also a symbolic victory for the Gregorian calendar.

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

Cheap pizza and all of your naughty bedroom needs housed in a stunning example of Art Nouveau architecture.

A statue commemorating the heroic life of a Viking postman who was the Godfather of California skiing.

I Street Bridge is the heaviest swinging center bridge in the United States.

This cemetery has graves dating back to the 17th century, including the city's oldest carved tombstone and an ominous cryptogram.

The fifth-longest suspension bridge the world, connecting one Michigan peninsula to another.

Macabre astrological automaton clock dating to the late 1400s.

Home to the infamous "Typhoid Mary" and the worst loss of life in New York's history prior to September 11, 2001.

The newsstand that never closes its doors—well, almost never.

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

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