Places mcdermany Wants to Go

The curious underground history of keeping Paris clean.

The first green space constructed on an elevated viaduct.

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

A subterranean shelter remains intact under a busy Paris railway station.

Paris' fabled purveyor of exotic taxidermy and natural history curios.

A majestic lion statue guards this Parisian botanical garden, and feeds on an unsettling item.

Known as the "Dodo Manège," this carousel features a herd of animals that have disappeared—or may be gone soon.

Down a cobblestone alleyway is a museum dedicated to Romanticism, with a secret garden.

A museum on the history of Paris, including a set of Napoleon's toiletries, Proust's room, and relics of the Revolution.

This Parisian café sticks almost exclusively to an ethos of reuse.

Indents in the pavement are all that remain from a grisly death machine in Paris.

Egyptian Revival movie palace abandoned for decades and restored in 2013.

This museum houses an imposing skeleton army comprised of creatures great and small.

A Parisian cemetery where the elite and artistic are interred beneath an eccentric collection of tombs.

A favorite Paris bar for U.S. expats, including Gershwin, Hemingway, and James Bond.

France's national museum of scientific and industrial instruments.

A museum of magic with a Sadist past.

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

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

A haunting collection of the vanished and disappearing natural world.

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

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

A museum of carnival attractions where you are invited to ride the rides.

A horde of stray cats rule in this secluded Parisian cemetery under a bridge.