The most visited and least loved part of the city — but the sea lions, the historic ships at Hyde Street Pier and the Musée Mécanique are worth a morning, and the Alcatraz ferries leave from Pier 33, not from here.
Tickets sell out weeks ahead, the ferry leaves from Pier 33 rather than Pier 41, the operator changed in 2006, and the Birdman of Alcatraz kept no birds on Alcatraz.
The oldest Chinatown in North America, where the picturesque pagoda architecture is not ancient and not Cantonese but a deliberate strategy, after 1906, to stop the city evicting the community and taking the land.
The last manually operated cable railway in the world, saved from closure in 1947 by Friedel Klussmann and twenty-seven women's civic groups — and the line worth taking is the one nobody queues for.
A thousand acres of former sand dune holding two major museums, the oldest public Japanese garden in the country, bison and two windmills — with its main eastern road now permanently closed to cars.
Joseph Strauss took the credit, but Charles Ellis did the mathematics and was sacked for his trouble, Leon Moisseiff conceived the suspension design and Irving Morrow chose international orange over the Navy's black and yellow stripes.
Downtown is the part of Las Vegas that is actually in the city. The Fremont East district, Container Park, the Mob Museum in a courthouse that held a Kefauver hearing, the Neon Museum boneyard and the Arts District.
Reclaiming Spanish VAT as a non-EU resident, the liberalised Sunday trading rules, the shopping districts from Gran Via to Malasana, El Rastro and the reopened Mercado de San Miguel.
Three fires and Villanueva's closing of the square, the autos-da-fe, the Casa de la Panaderia and its 1992 murals, the Philip III bronze, and what the square is like now.
The square rebuilt and pedestrianised in 2022 and 2023: what moved and where it is now, the false etymology of Madrid's name, the 1808 rising, and the New Year grapes.
What a visitor can actually see at the national library, how the collection was really built, the figures on the facade, and the archaeological museum through the wall.
The two royal convents and the basilica of San Francisco el Grande: how the Descalzas collection was formed, the Relicario at La Encarnacion, the corrected dates and dome claim, and the Goya in the third chapel.