Fisherman's Wharf is one of the main avenues for tourists in San Francisco.

There's all these wooden piers running along the waterfront with some pretty famous landmarks.

Pier 33 is where you catch the ferry to Alcatraz.

Pier 39 is where you go to watch the sea lions barking and flopping around.

And then there's pure 45. That's where you'll find the Musee Meccinee, French for the Mechanical Museum.

It's a Penny Arcade filled with hundreds of antique machines that you can still play.

The storefront entrance is

decorated with this carnival-like font, but you hear the arcade way before you see it.

In the background is a machine called Laughing Sal that I think has been around since the early 1920s.

She originally was on location at Playland at the Beach in San Francisco.

Playland at the Beach was a sprawling amusement park that opened in

1921 and operated for 50 years.

Laughing Sal is just one of the games here.

Sal is a nearly seven foot tall, paper mache, animatronic woman with a gapped tooth

grand. She's trapped behind this huge glass case and wears this Victorian-style green hat that sits sideways on her red curly hair.

And she was kind of like the welcoming committee.

She was right in the front main entrance of Playland.

And she would laugh 17 hours a day every day of the year. So if you lived in that

neighborhood you heard this all day long. When you press the button

Sal's entire body convulses, she starts to lurch side to side and lets out this laugh that honestly, it still pops into my head from time to time.

I've got a sign in there that says she's been making us laugh and or terrifying children for almost 100 years. I'm Alexa Lim and this is Atlas Obscara, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible and

wondrous places.

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