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The third level is devoted to the Gallery of California Art, featuring works by artists who have studied, lived, and worked here. Included are works by 19th-century landscape painters, California Impressionists, members of the Bay Area Figurative movement, and later works by the likes of David Hockney.

The new Asian Art Museum is set in the entirely restructured and seismically retrofitted old Main Library in the Civic Center. The vast and important collection of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Himalayan, and Southeast Asian works is displayed according to their country of origin. But the layout also demonstrates the flow and transformation of Buddhist art from India and outward into the entire Far East. Included is the fabulous Avery Brundage collection of Oriental jade.

This brick, warehouse-like structure houses the nuts and bolts machinery that keeps the entire cable car system operating. Don’t miss a look downstairs at the giant, spool-like sheaves winding the fat cables round and round.

The largest collection of decorative work, including murals and furniture, by California Arts and Crafts practitioners Arthur and Lucia Kleinhaus Mathews.

On the first level the Hall of Ecology features “A Walk Across California,” including a diorama of a Sacramento delta marsh showing fish, bird, and insect life, and another of a mountain lion and its prey, demonstrating nature’s food chain.

With an endowment from Peanuts creator, the late Charles M. Schulz, the museum is the only one in the US dedicated to cartoon art in all its forms, with approximately 6,000 pieces in its permanent collection.

“Seekers, Innovators and Achievers” celebrates the “California Dream,” in which the automobile played so large a part in the postwar boom. A drive-in restaurant sign, jukebox, and gleaming hot-rod capture the feel of the 1950s.

A collection of objects that pertain to the 1906 earthquake are on display here, including porcelain cups and saucers fused by the heat of the fire that destroyed so much of the city.