Places Edited by David Plotz

The only runway directly into the magic kingdom has been closed since 1972, but it still sings to you if you drive fast enough.

A gothic palace of endless stalagmites and pseudoscorpions waits within one of the world's most beautiful caves.

The floor of the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas is entirely covered in sand.

Beneath a Virginia City bar is the entrance to an abandoned gold mine.

The most magnificent bottle house in a town strangely full of them.

These huge stone ovens in the desert fueled the Nevada silver boom, and may have also been a hideout for outlaws.

Enormous piles of historically significant stones, dumped by Congress in a forest, and abandoned for 60 years.

This enormous Hindu temple in Queens serves incredible dosas in its basement canteen.

Mysterious library of an infamous financier and spiritual seeker.

A deserted 20-lane highway runs through Myanmar's empty capital city.

This knobby, drooping New Orleans oak is a favorite place both for climbing and for meeting giraffes.

A once crucial portion of the Long Island railroad still lays abandoned, waiting to be turned into an urban park.

Brooklyn's most iconic restaurant, resurrected.

This stream-carved gorge has inspired poets, hidden smugglers, and trained soldiers, all without losing its beauty.

This one-man homegrown eatery may be the world's most exclusive restaurant with its five-year waiting list.

The only presidential monument to display a late POTUS's actual casket.

This crescent-shaped sliver of sand is a magical haven for a herd of feral horses.

A girls' boarding school inspired by the Chicago World's Fair, once abandoned, now restored to strange and scenic glory.

Bizarre lunar-like landscape with thousands of large stone "hoodoos."

WWI hospital ship lost in a cyclone turns up on the coast of Fraser Island, where she remains rusted and forgotten.

A steam trawler with a whiskey-soaked history driven ashore in 1960 resides rusty but still standing on the shoreline.

Blighted Irish field and the ruins of a 19th-century cottage on the edge of urban Manhattan.

On a quiet suburban street stands a peculiarly decorated house covered in mosaics.

The oldest surviving bridge in New York City, which reopened to pedestrians in 2015.