Places lepainperdu Wants to Go

This futuristic airport terminal was abandoned for decades before reopening as a hotel—with a vintage plane of its own parked out back.

This post-war motel embodies a little-known, Miami-born architectural style.

The city's oldest Chinese restaurant offers local history and seriously good food.

The oldest restaurant in Portland serves fiery coffee cocktails and an astounding amount of turkey.

On East Burnside, a 24-hour vending machine distributes world-class pastries.

This serene oasis in an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood holds some of Gandhi's ashes and got Elvis into Eastern Philosophy.

Space program, pneumatics and more, bits and pieces, for movie sets or the common man.

Pizza joint known for labor-inducing salad dressing.

Along the side of the road on a small Japanese island is an extensive garden of uniquely designed Shisa statues.

This sculpture presents commentary on a life in pursuit of profits.

The real faces of Venice beach captured on Romanesque columns.

This nine-story building can be played like an instrument.

Hollywood's oldest hotel is the site of the first Academy Awards, the birthplace of Marilyn Monroe's career, and the home of Montgomery Clift's ghost.

Built in 1899, this luxurious home was part of one of the first gated communities in Los Angeles.

A miniature train theme park, free to the public, laying at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Come crisp December nights, this fairly plain neighborhood becomes a holiday dream world.

Large but largely ignored, these 42 life-size Liberty Bell replicas were a peculiar, unexplained feature on the facade of a Macy's department store.

One of the world's largest collections of rare and magnificent bird specimens.

The tragic heiress Barbara Woolworth Hutton built her seventh husband this Japanese-inspired palace in Mexico.

From pre-war whiskey cocktails to prohibition-era speakeasy secrecy, this bar has seen it all.

A library of rare occult books in Los Angeles.

A historic hydroelectric power plant serves as the unusual backdrop for a public park.

A once-groundbreaking power plant turned into a hotel and mini-museum of archeological and geological wonders.

The tech giant built three enormous glass orbs in Seattle so employees could work inside a rainforest greenhouse.