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

This historic store hides a museum exhibiting a shoe-sizing x-ray machine and a pair of kicks that once belonged to the world's tallest man.

The site of a 19th century "dream city" that almost rivaled Chicago before being swallowed by the Indiana sand dunes.

In this quiet park a rendition of a classic painting graces the outside of a charming restroom.

This is the last hand-cranked chain ferry of its kind in operation in the United States.

In a quiet north Chicago neighborhood rests a stunning relic of the golden age of earthenware design.

A Japanese temple, old German townhouses, and public chess tables offer a peaceful escape from the bustle of the North Side.

This $3 million model train takes you through Chicago, Seattle, and the thousands of miles in between.

This awkward aquarium sculpture is one of the strangest statues in Chicago.

To find the "unicorns of the deep" you've got to go downstairs.

These pretty kitties killed and ate as many as 135 railway workers.

Pumpkin-like gargoyles and grotesques peer down from the rooftop of this unassuming apartment building in Illinois.

A theater sits abandoned on Roosevelt Road, once majestic in splendor, now majestic in decay.

A lush green oasis in the middle of Chicago.

Meant for a railway that was never built because of the Great Chicago Fire, these piers still stand nearly 150 years after they were installed.

Landmark Chicago building narrowly avoided destruction.

Once an ornate movie theater remade by Catholic Charities.

A Chicago Movie Palace Lost to Time.

A bloodstain from "the wound of the transverberation of the heart."

An eccentric park and pool.

Burial mounds of prehistoric Native Americans who lived along the DuPage River.

These Depression-era WPA sculptures have made a couple of stops over the years.

The world's third-largest scale model of the planets.

A collection of 11 million buttons illustrates the human toll of the Holocaust.