Places userbrent Wants to Go

Its founder calls it a "proletariat art renaissance".

A mine in the Sierra Nevada that produced nothing but barren quartz.

A collection of memorabilia from the Beat era in the back of a San Francisco bookstore.

This private residence was the template for one of the most beloved television homes of all time.

San Francisco's urban bison herd has persisted in the face of extinction, development, and disease.

A modern mechanical planetary system, part of a 10,000 year clock.

The one-time watch house for incoming ships at the Golden Gate now stands abandoned and hidden in trees.

The randomness of this wall of lava lamps helps encrypt up to 10 percent of the internet.

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

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

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.

A museum befitting the city responsible for supplying the majority of the world's LSD.

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

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

The oldest dim sum restaurant in the United States is a nostalgic jewel.

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

One of the oldest producers of hand-folded fortune cookies still uses its original secret recipe.

America's oldest Italian restaurant is a San Francisco institution.

This grinning pup statue is all that's left of what was once a ubiquitous Bay Area diner chain.

A Barbary Coast watering hole built into a Gold Rush shipwreck.

A nondescript building that's been functioning as a speakeasy for nearly a century and a half.

An artsy hidden staircase leads to breathtaking views of San Francisco.

Get lost in this haunting fairytale art walk through a man-made eucalyptus grove.