Places csieminski Wants to Go

There aren't too many operational funiculars around, but Pittsburgh has two!

The residents of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe live without much fanfare within the Pittsburgh Children's Museum.

A quiet, gothic haven nestled between Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill and Point Breeze neighborhoods.

The only way to see Pittsburgh is from the top of this lookout point, just like the ancient members of the native peoples did.

The first American department store, and home to the largest operating musical instrument in the world.

This hidden gem of a garden has one of the only surviving Victorian ferneries in America.

In the bowels of a 19th-century brewery lurks a fine-dining restaurant offering an array of themed feasts.

A mine fire has been burning under the deserted town since 1962, but this church is still going strong.

The universally beloved children's television figure is interred on a high hilltop in one of western Pennsylvania's oldest cemeteries.

This palatial botanical garden is home to one of the largest pipe organs ever installed in a private residence, and a piece of Wood's cycad.

A modern ghost town whose inhabitants were driven away by the growth of nuclear power.

Eccentric concrete mansion and museum designed and built by hand from the inside out.

The oldest surviving botanic garden in the United States.

A restored Pittsburgh house of God has been converted to a marvelous house of suds.

The United States’s oldest funicular railway glides up and down a steep Pittsburgh street.

An abandoned stretch of highway, deteriorating next to the operational one.

Philadelphia boasts one of the best — and most often overlooked — traditional Japanese gardens in North America.

An abandoned cemetery lies in ruins as the surrounding forest swallows it whole.

This elaborate towering structure was once famed for its revolutionary height.

This charming colonial alleyway is one of the oldest continuously used residential streets in the U.S.

A toxic ghost town sitting atop a massive coal fire.

The world’s first penitentiary, meant to be humane, drove men insane.

An isolated island home to one of the oldest English-speaking communities in the region and Maryland's state dessert.

This fort down the Potomac from Washington, D.C. was once the only defensive fort protecting the capital.