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The city’s stylish home for 20th-century European and American art and contemporary multimedia works is a sparkling cultural hub in the South of Market area. Its collections span the whole modern spectrum, from proto-Impressionists to cutting-edge digital installations.

From 2004–8 the site of this museum at Golden Gate Park is to be renovated and the collection relocated to a temporary home. This extensive science museum covers virtually every aspect of the natural world.

This museum, located above Land’s End, is one of the city’s major venues for pre-modern Western art. It is also a beautiful building in a gorgeous natural setting, so well worth the time it takes to get to. It contains mostly European works, including masterpieces by Rubens, Rembrandt, Georges de la Tour, Degas, Rodin, and Claude Monet.

The old de Young was too damaged in the 1989 earthquake to be saved, but a new state-of-the-art facility is due to open in October 2005. The museum’s extensive collection includes a broad range of 19th-century and contemporary American art, as well as pre-Columbian-American, African and Oceanic works.

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 burgeoning collection traces the city’s history, from its low-key Spanish beginnings, to the ‘49er boom town hoopla, to the modern, complex metropolis it is today. The mementos consist of photos, old newspapers, scale models of buildings, and posters, but one of the most arresting relics is the 3.5-ft (1-m) head of the Goddess of Progress. Her full figure, with electrically illuminated crown, adorned the old City Hall until the 1906 quake toppled her.

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.

A quaint, time-warp experience awaits you here. As you approach the lower level, you’ll be greeted by the loud guffaws of Laughing Sal, the enormous, buxom figure that is a relic of the old Playland at the Beach. There are also many other often ingenious mechanical devices that once crowded the arcade, so have your quarters handy – and don’t miss the re-creation in miniature of a Chinese opium den. In addition, there is a small collection devoted to the art of holography.

This museum has fascinating historical exhibits of 19th- and 20th-century California. The upstairs gallery displays furniture, sculpture, and paintings.

The Wells Fargo stagecoaches are the stuff of legends, above all for the tales of their stalwart drivers and the robbers who held them up. Visitors can hear how it must have been to sit on little more than a buckboard for day after jostling day by listening to the recorded diary of one Francis Brocklehurst. Other exhibits include Pony Express mail, gold nuggets, photos, and Emperor Norton’s imperial currency (see Joshua Abraham Norton).