🛸 Weird & wonderful

A home museum holding the world's largest collection of LSD blotter art. Wait, that exists?

Pitch-black theater where 176 speakers move sound around 49 seated listeners. Genuinely surreal.

A wave-activated acoustic sculpture whose pipes gurgle and hiss with the tides.

A geodesic maze you crawl through in total darkness, navigating only by touch.

An ornate 1898 domed rotunda holding thousands of cremation urns in stained-glass niches.

Tiki kitsch in a hotel basement with an indoor lagoon and a thunderstorm every half hour.

Curiosity shop of taxidermy, carnivorous plants, and costumed taxidermied mice.

A Norman stone castle from 1870 with a brewery basement fed by a spring. Wait, that exists?

A 1901 bronze of five nude muscular men straining over a giant metal punch press.

Two steep concrete slides hidden in a pocket park, fast enough to need a cardboard sled.

A 100-foot spire of lashed cypress trunks rising from a forest of replanted trees.

A sinuous serpentine line of eucalyptus branches snaking across the forest floor.

A whole room of working coin-op antique arcade machines, still playable. Oddly time-warped.

A bar and library run by people building a 10,000-year clock. Wonderfully strange.

A giant Victorian pinhole camera projecting the live coast onto a parabolic table.

A lesser-known 148-step mosaic staircase tucked into the quiet Sunset slopes.

163 neighbor-made mosaic steps climbing from sea to stars up to a hilltop view.

The first stand-alone LGBTQ history museum in the US, in the heart of the Castro.

One of the few US museums devoted entirely to cartoon art. Niche and delightful.

Ruins of a giant Victorian bathhouse crumbling into the sea, with a cave and tide pools.

A neo-Gothic cathedral with two walkable labyrinths and occasional yoga under the rose window.

A lush garden stairway down Telegraph Hill past cottages and wild parrots.

A roller disco spinning inside a converted old church. Odd and joyful.

A cliffside park on the old Sutro estate with weathered statues over Ocean Beach.

The densest concentration of murals in the city, decades of Latino political art.

An idiosyncratic private library of ephemera and maps, organized geographically. Buzz in.

A hidden garden footpath weaving past Victorian cottages, ferns, and pines.