Decades before the scandal, this staircase on the river was a literal "water gate."

The oldest continuously operating fish market in the United States.

The national park was once a plantation estate.

Home to a vast and influential collection of Shakespeareana.

Largest Roman Catholic church in North America.

A Victorian cemetery in the heart of Brooklyn remains a popular mecca of morbid curiosity.

One of the most enjoyable bits of history at Coney Island and “the most romantic ride in the world.”

A massive, majestic mammal watches over pedestrians from his perch atop a former B.P.O.E. lodge.

An obscure federal monument honors the French diplomat who served as Ambassador to the U.S. during WWI.

Enormous piles of historically significant stones, dumped by Congress in a forest, and abandoned for 60 years.

The well-preserved remnants of a bridge that once made up a WW1-era military railroad.

This church is known as "The Home Church of George Washington and George Mason."

The only remaining African American schoolhouse in northern Virginia is now a museum dedicated to formerly enslaved people.

Standing for over 200 years, the abandoned home of a Revolutionary War hero and later a succession of prison superintendents.

This field of concrete was once an active defense site armed with nuclear warheads.

A girls' boarding school inspired by the Chicago World's Fair, once abandoned, now restored to strange and scenic glory.

The last of nine massive kilns that produced many of the red bricks for buildings in Washington, D.C. and northern Virginia in the early 20th century.

A weathered, American Foursquare-style house originally built for lumber merchant William Wimsatt.

Burke’s oldest cemetery also houses the victim of the county's grisliest murder.

The last early 20th-century schoolhouse in Fairfax County has galvanized the community and engendered a spirit of service among residents.

This homestead was occupied by Union soldiers, who believed the owners were signaling Confederate forces.

An out-of-place Air Force radar dome is all that denotes this park as a former missile launch site.

The narrowest house in America is seven feet of pure spite.

The 72-foot giant escaped confinement in a large patch of mulch only to be reburied in the sandy shores of the Potomac River.