Places j501 Wants to Go

This innocuous-seeming building is actually the remnant of a major wartime brothel.

Once a 19th-century brasserie, this McDonald's exterior celebrates Alsatian design and the "King of Beer."

Original cabaret handbills, posters, and feline artwork are a purrfect highlight of the Museum of Montmartre.

Inside a former cabaret, seven floors of erotic art.

Paris' linguistic guide to the international language of, yes, love.

Remains of Roman amphitheater hidden in a sleepy quarter of Paris.

This modest marker near Notre Dame identifies the very center of Paris.

This former “ante-chamber to the guillotine” has been refurbished to illustrate the brutal history of French justice.

A counter-culture bookstore like no other hides in plain sight in the streets of Paris.

One of the oldest medical collections in Europe focusing on rare surgical instruments.

An overlooked marble is the only surviving in-place 18th century example of the measurement that changed how we define distance.

This bridge was constructed from the rubble of the infamous Bastille.

Twelve grave-faced marble angels guard the emperor's tomb at Les Invalides.

The curious underground history of keeping Paris clean.

High atop the Eiffel Tower is a small apartment built exclusively to entertain the science elite and make the rest of Paris jealous.

A short distance from the Eiffel Tower is the final resting place of several of the city’s more well-known and interesting characters.

Walk upon the mementos of the dead in this Parisian courtyard paved with medieval tombstones.

The subterranean "lake" below the Paris opera house inspired the Phantom of the Opera's lair.

The ruins of a Duke's bucolic dream, where camels once roamed alongside "Dutch" windmills and faux-Italian vineyards.

The oldest stone house in Paris was built by its most famous alchemist.

A mud statue stands in the dark tunnels, seeming to hold up the weight of the city above.

A Dutch museum preserves the world's most diverse collection of vertical slices of soil.

The European equivalent of the Hollywood Walk of Fame is slowly spreading over the entire city.

A curious collection dedicated to human and animal anatomy and pathology.