[Photo from sanfrancisco.travel]

San Francisco is one of the few places in the world people can ride on a national historic landmark. The cable cars are the world's last permanently operational manually operated cable car system, in the U.S. sense of a tramway whose cars are pulled along by cables embedded in the street.

Ever ride a national landmark? It's being done every day in San Francisco. The City's right-out-of-the-Smithsonian cable cars were named a national historic landmark in 1964. Refurbished and equipped with new tracks, cables, turnarounds and cable propulsion machinery, they operate as much as they did on August 2, 1873 when Andrew S. Hallidie guided the first car down the Clay Street grade.