Places dorcasdesign Wants to Go

At a museum of everyday objects, it is the act of collecting that is really on display.

Diego Rivera's massive tiled fountain and failed infrastructure project.

Gilded heaven for philatelists and architecture freaks, still in full working order despite sitting atop tremulous ground.

Part bookstore, part café, and part forest.

The hot chocolate here all stems from small, sustainable microproducers in Chiapas and Tabasco.

These haunting ruins of a 700-year-old Prehispanic city have witnessed centuries of wars and massacres.

Visiting this cacophonous collection of vintage novelties is like stepping into the mind of a crazed toymaker.

A quirky and charming restaurant founded by artists.

Meant to be one of the most extravagant hotels in the world, now an eerie, abandoned architectural gem in Mexico City.

Explore the atmospheric ruins of an abandoned convent in the dense forests of Mexico's first national park.

The famous artist couple lived and worked here, in two different houses connected by a bridge.

A Hell's Kitchen synagogue that has counted stars of stage and screen among its congregation.

A posh members-only club with a literally dramatic history.

This historic building housed the surviving crew members of the Titanic, who were left destitute after the wreck.

The artist and New York City icon lived, worked and died in this converted carriage house owned by another iconic artist, Andy Warhol.

Rummage through this sunken ship, but leave your scuba gear at home.

New York City's only preserved family home from the 19th century.

The rough and tumble president's childhood home displays the shirt he was once shot in and the speech that saved him.

This subterranean oyster house has been the pearl of Grand Central Station since 1913.

The New York hotel where tragic visionary Nikola Tesla spent his final hours, destitute and alone but for the pigeons.

The name of this tiny pocket park tucked between two buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side is Latin for its location: "seventy-one."

A hands-on traveling collection of the innovative devices of yesteryear.

A New York garbage depot holds a secret collection of weird and wonderful refuse.

A semi-scholarly approach to sex.