Places Edited by Jonathan Carey

From under the bed of one of the co-founders, this server helped launch the notorious file-sharing website.

A natural rock formation believed to be a cure-all.

A spiritual center in the Santa Monica Mountains founded by Alice Coltrane after the death of her husband and fellow jazz musician John Coltrane.

About 80% of all U.S. avocados are descendants of Rudolph Hass's glorious tree.

Saint Joseph was said to heal the deaf and blind, but it was a much smaller miracle that got him canonized.

This tiny museum's sizable collection is jammed into a former underground public toilet.

This abandoned school has had many lives since the early 1900s, and all of them doomed.

This poor little statue is the most vandalized memorial in Washington.

Activists are fighting to preserve these unfinished highway ramps as a tribute to the citizen revolt that halted their construction decades ago.

A distillery built on (and above!) mobster Dutch Schultz's Prohibition-era underground moonshine business.

A Catholicism-themed restaurant where sacrilege is on the menu.

To honor his gardening wife, this yard artist turns bowling balls into playful, colorful sculptures.

The Arctic Circle runs through this isolated spot north of Iceland.

Trace the history of writing at this unusual North Carolina destination.

A 19th-century subterranean reservoir repurposed as a contemporary art cave.

The unbelievably opulent home built for an infamous newspaperman.

A dilapidated psychiatric facility on the outskirts of Milan where electroconvulsive therapy was developed and Napoleon once lived.

Iceland's largest geothermal mud pool is a little bit haunted and a little bit dangerous.

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

On any given day this sprawling market houses literally tons of government-regulated gold, gems, and precious metals.

Beautiful mosaics cover the first stations opened on New York City's newest subway line.

The library's graceful rotunda is like a bibliophile's temple.

A sea cave with a waterfall and Viking past

There are two dozen tanks just sitting in an open field in Lower Saxony.