This unassuming city park is home to three different types of Native American mounds.

This baseball diamond was home to the Rockford Peaches, a team featured in the hit film "A League of Their Own."

The city of Rockford, Illinois is symbolically protected by a quartet of fittingly stony sentinels.

This lush 12-acre site was once named the finest Japanese garden in North America.

This small-town opera house has appeared much more in national culture and history than its charming setting might suggest.

First planned industrial community in the United States.

A spectacular remnant of an Adler and Sullivan masterpiece that was destroyed in 1972.

Proto-CIA agents trained with grenades in the sand traps and fired machine guns from the fairways.

This rare triple-jurisdiction drawbridge passes through Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.

The longest escalator in the Western Hemisphere takes over three minutes to ride down.

Just outside of Nairobi lies a large estate surrounded by endangered Rothschild giraffes, who have been fed from the window by Mick Jagger and Walter Cronkite.

The granddaddy of all tourist traps, built on ice water, jackalopes, and a giant dinosaur.

The world's largest mountain carving could fit all of Mount Rushmore inside it many times over.

The first declared National Monument in the United States.

The world’s largest truck stop includes a barber shop, chiropractor, and a huge museum with antique trucks.

A memorial dedicated to the victims of the Columbine High School shootings.

A downtown park built on top of unclaimed graves.

This midcentury chapel is a bold architectural statement and a symbol of Indiana's Lutheran heritage.

A sprawling outdoor museum filled with larger-than-life works of art.

Where a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse met one Saturday and changed their lives forever.

Chicago's North Park Village was once the largest municipal sanatorium in the country.

A 19th-century horse lover's bequest led to the construction of this unique fountain in Chicago.

A hollow cement depiction of time's inexorable effect on the human body.

This cheerfully-named branch of the Chicago River is the fetid result of years of blood, entrails, and meatpacking waste.