Urban explorers embraced America's now demolished first suburban mall, south of Chicago.

This alley in downtown Chicago held the bodies of over 600 people after the fateful Iroquois Theatre fire.

This architectural stunner is one of the few surviving Egyptian Revival theaters in the U.S.

A six-story-tall golden pyramid, surrounded by a moat.

A little-known subterranean street runs under some of the best-known buildings in Chicago's River North.

River pirates, murderous bandits, and serial killers used this Illinois cave as their debauched hideout.

Years of archaeology, just chillin' by the water cooler.

What was once one of the country's largest confectionary plants is now an abandoned ruin, but is still pretty sweet.

A Bibliophile's Dream.

Shop of curiosities with a dinosaur museum tucked in its basement.

The Midwest's reigning king of surplus stores is full of nothing you need and everything you want.

An architecturally-focused antique shop.

This lab's maddening silence is good for business but bad for sanity.

A museum within a museum, devoted to history's most questionable medical devices.

The final resting place of a famous 19th-century murder victim whose identity is still a mystery.

An FDR-era tuberculosis sanatorium has stood abandoned in the suburbs of the U.S. capital for over 30 years.

The U.S. Fish Commission’s effort to mass produce carp.

Literal "money laundering."

The bank that helped fund the Mexican-American War and the purchase of Alaska met its downfall after helping Augusto Pinochet launder money.

The iconic D.C. restaurant where the Cuban Missile Crisis was negotiated, now a Walgreens.

America's Most Wanted's set resides in this tribute to the history of crime and punishment.

Bar full of oddities, specimens, artifacts and homages to the great dime museums of the past.

A memorial to a shareholder activist feared by CEOs around the United States.

After his presidency, George Washington planned to live only a few blocks from the Capitol building.