This small and serene place for quiet reflection on Staten Island was built in China based on the gardens of the Ming Dynasty.

What happens here stays here – unless it affects the whole world.

This plot of old-growth forest is the largest surviving remnant of New York City's original woodland.

One of the few remaining American elm trees in New York’s Tompkins Square Park was the birthplace of a new religion.

Down a stairway in the East Village, you could once read a plaque describing an alternate history of a fictional version of Manhattan.

There must be a pun in this haystack somewhere...

A Manhattan Episcopal church with an eerie underground crypt.

This iconic tattoo shop has its own onsite museum with artifacts from the early history of modern body art.

A staggering collection of photographs depicting medical, social, and historical change.

A good place to research the Freemasons, esoterica, occultism, and hermeticism.

This historic address is home to the beloved ball and is an almost totally empty building among the most expensive real estate in the world.

The crown jewel of the Queens Museum is a nearly 10,000-square-foot architectural model of the city originally built for the 1964 World's Fair.

This hidden library of physiological ephemera contains centuries worth of knowledge on the vim and viscera of the human body.

New York's oldest and possibly grandest keeper of books.

Manhattan's lighthouse, erected at the insistence of the unsinkable Molly Brown.

A living archive of urban activism and space reclaimed.

Lady Liberty's first beacon of enlightenment is now displayed in a museum near the statue.

The remnants of two World's Fairs are here, complete with a 12-story globe, a mini-Manhattan, and a UFO-shaped pavilion.

The beautiful tunnel that ran from the lobby to Penn Station is still hidden underneath 34th Street.

Abandoned power station once home to a squatter community, now being developed into an arts center.

One of the last few places in Manhattan that employed a pneumatic systemic keeps it on display.

Leaf through over 30,000 artists' sketchbooks in what may be the world's largest collection of doodles

An uber-secure, windowless tower of doom in the center of Manhattan is an NSA spyscraper.

Tucked in a nondescript downtown Brooklyn mall is a bar containing a remarkable turn of the century anatomical wax collection last seen in 1920s Berlin.