Places Edited by Molly McBride Jacobson

The Kenyan town where the best distance runners in the world are trained.

Things roll uphill on this Mexican street that seems to defy gravity.

All that remains of this small town is its mass grave and a myth of a voodoo priestess who predicted its demise.

America's oldest Eastern European synagogue provided the immigrants of crowded Lower East Side tenements a space of sanctuary.

In the mid-19th century, an eight-sided house was the latest fad.

A 19th century family buried their dead among the pines, beneath gravestones styled after ancient Scottish cairns.

The profile of one ill-fated deacon was emblazoned forever on this church window during the Halifax explosion.

Abandoned since the 1950s, the streetcar lane beneath the heavily trafficked bridge lays empty and unused.

People have been living in the cave houses on this Italian hillside since the Neolithic era.

A (slightly) grownup take on the classic retro arcade.

The highest point in Belgium is a staircase to nowhere.

An anthropological theme park that depicts the cultures of around 20 different countries.

The abandoned bathhouse is all that remains of the hot springs considered Florida's original tourist attraction.

A small Montana town commemorates the dog who waited at the train station every day for his owner to return.

The romantic garden was the epicenter of the Hungarian art scene in the 1880s.

A DIY art gallery/music venue/lecture hall dedicated to video game culture.

The oldest family-run luncheonette in New York, last renovated in 1948, still serves food and drinks the old-fashioned way.

This unusual piece of Renaissance art depicting the bodily horror of crucifixion and skin disease may have been inspired by fungus-induced hallucinations.

A museum dedicated to the German scientist who revealed the significance of the mysterious Peruvian Nazca Lines.

The bottle house obsession struck a Florida man in his retirement, and now he can't stop building.

300-year-old villagers houses and traditional churches preserve a nearly lost piece of Russian history.

A factory director designed what was the world's longest suspension footbridge in 1923 so his employees could get to work safely.

The masses at this church incorporate enough moonshine and animal sacrifice that they are no longer recognizably Catholic.

An abandoned theme park with a strange and tumultuous past.