This beautiful building in the heart of Manhattan's Financial District was empty for decades.

A treasure trove of artifacts, books, and artwork from the "golden age" of exploration.

Tucked in the back of this amazing antique store is an important piece of medical history.

A crumbling hospital from the 1850s on Roosevelt Island.

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's "Dream House" will immerse you in an ever changing world of sound and light.

A terrific purveyor of natural history objects and curios.

A beautiful and abandoned New York subway station from 1904, complete with chandelier.

One of the largest pieces of scientific equipment ever carried on a NASA space shuttle sits in a Chicago alley.

This cheerfully-named branch of the Chicago River is the fetid result of years of blood, entrails, and meatpacking waste.

This bronze sculpture on a former squash court marks the secret origins of the Atomic Age.

This historic-shipwreck-cum-diving-spot can still be seen poking its boiler out of the Lake Michigan waters that claimed it.

The iconic Chicago sculpture hides a beautiful and easily overlooked plaque on the backside.

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

A shining sculpture made of 3,115 lights, the number of visible stars in the Northern Hemisphere.

Chicago's North Park Village was once the largest municipal sanatorium in the country.

Chicago's museum dedicated to the history of bondage and fetishism is more textbook than titillation.

This historic hotel invented the chocolate brownie.

Internationally known record store and purveyor of "dusties."

What's left of the ruins of the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, or World's Fair, also known as the White City.

A century-old hotspot for jazz, frequented by everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Al Capone.

Chicago's largest cemetery is full of beautiful Victorian monuments and more than a few ghost stories.

All of Chicago's wood-paved streets are long gone but two alleys remain.

This unauthorized stone mermaid was secretly carved out of public stone before being permanently preserved.

A gothic church spire sits atop this skyscraper, the tallest church in the world.