Places Blake Olmstead Wants to Go

Colorful, cheeky signs spill out of legendary New Orleans folk artist Dr. Bob's Bywater studio warning you to "Be Nice—Or Leave."

Decades' worth of lost and forgotten objects make up the collection of this tantalizingly odd little museum.

The crown jewel of the Queens Museum is a nearly 10,000-square-foot architectural model of the city originally built for the 1964 World's Fair.

A memorial to a giant seabird that was hunted to extinction.

Part bookstore, part café, and part forest.

One of the few remaining casualties of the London Blitz, this destroyed church has become an enchanting public garden.

Ship-sized kinetic sculptural fantasy.

A building that survived WWII, possibly on the virtue of its name alone.

Revel in the Victorian splendor of the world's oldest eating establishment inside a museum.

This iconic high-rise residential block was one of the last to be built in the Brutalist style.

New fungal and bacterial species call this deadly lake home.

Ottoman-era houses lovingly preserved.

The ornate miniature mansions were built for Istanbul's feathered residents.

This Central New York ghost town was once a prosperous railroad community.

Experience architect Le Corbusier's modernist design for living in the home he designed for himself.

Noirish green neon marks the location of one of the oldest private detective agencies in France.

This museum houses an imposing skeleton army comprised of creatures great and small.

A public fountain that spouts "health water" from a nearby spring.

A mining town, now abandoned, was built in a canyon so narrow that the railroad ran right through the hotel lobby.

This historic motel standing at the "crossroads of America" offers a radio in every room and was saved by local protesters.

A rare chance to ride one of the few continuous elevators still in operation.

A giant concrete orb in far north Iceland marks the ever-shifting boundary.

The gilded vestiges of a sterling department store can still be found in a Brooklyn shopping center.

Underground vaults of a former brewery beneath Brooklyn's Crown Heights are now used to ripen cheese.