Thriving meadows span a rooftop in one of Brooklyn's most heavily industrialized neighborhoods.

A Manhattan office building is home to the world's largest chess board.

Salute the leader of the proletariat.

Walk into the 19th century without leaving Brooklyn.

An easy to overlook storefront hides some of the most authentic and regionally diverse Chinese food in New York.

An annual extravaganza of Broadway theater memorabilia.

Two New York rooftops are home to the largest rooftop soil farms in the world.

A small peaceful park and waterfall tucked amid the urban grind of Midtown Manhattan.

Touching mementoes from those who didn't make it back from World War I still hang in one of New York's oldest bars.

The name of this tiny pocket park tucked between two buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side is Latin for its location: "seventy-one."

A hyper-luxurious, 12,000- square foot home might be buried beneath Queens, still waiting to protect you from nuclear missiles.

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.

Unrepaired walls from a 1920 anarchist bomb attack.

The oldest living tree in Manhattan comes shrouded in sinister legend.

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

Once America's longest-manned military fort, now an abandoned hulk.

This enormous Hindu temple in Queens serves incredible dosas in its basement canteen.

Sniff the Titan Arum's rotting flesh.

Though its celestial ceiling is impressive, the true star is the vast collection of French books.

Unique antiquarian shop specializing in globes, maps, and prints.

A terrific purveyor of natural history objects and curios.

A tiny museum housed in a New York freight elevator specializes in the "overlooked, dismissed, or ignored."

A celebration of capitalism in Midtown.

Avoid gangster interaction while window-shopping.