San Francisco's City Hall is one of the most beautiful civic buildings in America. The Beaux-Arts dome, modeled on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, dominates the Civic Center skyline and is even taller than the US Capitol. Inside, the grand rotunda and sweeping marble staircase are open to the public and genuinely worth seeing.
The building carries heavy history. It was here that Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978, and the memorial busts inside honor both men. The current structure replaced an earlier City Hall destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and was itself retrofitted after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake with a base isolation system that lets the entire building move up to three feet during a tremor.