19th-century operating theatre in which the use of ether was first demonstrated - plus, a skeleton and a mummy!

The thousands of shades on display — some toxic, others impossibly rare — are a library of more than just color.

Friction between grains of sand cause a curious "singing" sound.

The Boston square dedicated to the dark poet who was born nearby.

An eccentric inventor's castle home with its own indoor weather system.

Two thousand artifacts from around the world collected by one woman who loved to travel.

An enormous, inside-out glass globe built in 1935.

On this island, you suck away your garbage via an elaborate pneumatic tube system.

The home of the first American-born saint is one of the only curved buildings in New York.

Manhattan's Thirteenth Avenue was made on landfill then deliberately destroyed — apart from one small, obscure block.

This study room in the New York Public Library saw the creation of one of contemporary America's greatest traitors.

Hordes of precariously balanced stone figures crowd the shores of the Hudson River.

A Gothic-style abode built to accommodate the church's three resident peacocks.

A strangely angled West Village home is the only monument to an explosion that took the lives of three American revolutionaries.

This small New York museum celebrates the mountainous artwork of a Russian mystic.

This Fifth Avenue church has long been the favored worshiping place of Broadway actors and vaudeville performers.

The highest point on the island known for buildings that touch the sky.

Beautiful mosaics cover the first stations opened on New York City's newest subway line.

The artist and New York City icon lived, worked and died in this converted carriage house owned by another iconic artist, Andy Warhol.

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

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

The mummified relics of an American missionary.

This wall on a street corner in Lower Manhattan has been a blank canvas for a rotation of renowned artists since the 1980s.

A Manhattan Episcopal church with an eerie underground crypt.