Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live

The Architecture of Deceit

0
0

Camouflage: it's not just for cuttlefish. From Paris to Los Angeles, many cities are home to secret structures that aren't quite what they seem. The reasons span from the Cold War conflict to general urban beautification, but whatever the rationale, these fake facades are all pretty convincing.

Hiding in Plain Sight

article-image
Entrance to the Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker (photo by Genesisman26)

In a medieval farming village in Essex called Kelvedon Hatch, a structure that appears to be a single-family bungalow is actually the entrance to a nuclear bunker. Built in 1953, the bunker was intended as a possible regional government headquarters should the Russians decide to attack. Part of the elaborate ROTOR defense system, the bunker is entered through a 100-foot tunnel and extends 125 feet underground. It was well-equipped, with the capacity for a hundred people, and came with its own radio mast, A/C, and water supply. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the bunker was decommissioned and the land sold back to the family who owned it originally. They converted it into a museum, and today, it’s open for tours. 

Stealthy Saltboxes

article-image
Disguised electric substation in Toronto (photo by Plainurban)

Starting in 1911, it was Toronto Hydro's standard policy to build electrical substations in grand Edwardian style, so they resembled English estates more than utility buildings. But just before WWII, when building resources were starting to become less available, a colonial saltbox became Toronto Hydro’s de rigeuer substation incarnation, to match the general architectural styles of the neighborhoods. Some of the substations were even replete with shutters and white picket fences. About 45 of them remain standing today, some in formerly tony neighborhoods where the nicer homes have gone to seed; there, the utility buildings, well-maintained by the city all these years, stand out in sharp relief. Some have even been transformed into retail shops.

A few other cities practiced this art, although to a lesser degree. Raleigh, North Carolina, has a pumping station inside of a little neighborhood-looking house (if a little humbler than most of Toronto’s) that's still standing at 3215 Wade Avenue, while Oyster Bay, New York, hides one in an adorable cottage. Manstique, Missouri and Virginia Beach, Virginia, have examples as well, in variously unassuming architectural styles. 

The Listening Tree

article-image
Cell phone tower disguised to look like pine tree in Georgia (photo by Tom Spinker)

Examples of this kind of architectural subterfuge are everywhere, from South Africa to Portugal, and especially in the United States. Telecommunications companies have realized that nobody wants to look at their towers in all their naked glory, and plenty of people concerned about cancer risks don’t want phone towers in their neighborhoods and school zones.

So telecoms have gotten creative. There are lots and lots of fake saguaro cactus cell phone towers in California and Arizona, and various palm tree editions abound through the southern half of the U.S. Towers are frequently camouflaged as flagpoles too, a which is a brilliant ruse—it wouldn’t be very patriotic to second-guess someone who just wanted to fly the Stars and Stripes in your neighborhood.

The sneakiest trick, though, is the cell phone towers inside of existing church steeples. Both parties win here: the company gets their tower, and the church gets a little extra scratch by leasing the space. Dozens if not hundreds of churches do this, although when confronted, some claim to use the extra money for charity.

Sometimes they’re not even so slick: One weird wooden tower stands along I-5 just north of Seattle all by its lonesome, kind of a little triangular house on a stick (well, three sticks) and decorated with a Christian cross but not advertising any particular church or denomination. Upon researching, it’s just as we suspected: Shoreline Christian Church owns the property it’s built on and gave the telecom its blessing to build it, as long as they could disguise it any way they wanted.  

article-image
Church-owned disguised cell phone tower in Seattle (photo by grossi)

Subway Subterfuge

article-image
58 Joralemon Street (photo by Matt Green)

This one seems to be the Internet’s favorite: On Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights, an 1847 Greek Revival townhouse stands in a row among more of the same, but this one has blacked-out windows and a very industrial door for a private home. Famously, it conceals a subway ventilator. The structure was a residence until it was procured in 1904 by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, which operated the original New York City Subway; it was then outfitted with machinery guts in time for the subway system to open the same year. Of secret subway structures, this one is pretty well-known and loved, if only for how very incognito it is. Well, was. Once.

However, Paris sees Brooklyn’s tricky townhouse and raises it: On the grand Rue la Fayette that runs through Paris’s 9th and 10th arrondissement s, a dummy façade at number 145 contains a vent for the B line of the RER transit line. (This one was referenced in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.)  Around the corner, 174 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis does the same, hiding a ventilation shaft for the Magenta Line, and the 2nd arrondissement has another shaft at 44 rue d’Aboukir.

 article-image145 rue la Fayette (photo by Geralix)

Oil up in Your Grill

article-image
Beverly Hills oil well (photo by Vaguely Artistic)

Los Angeles has seemingly gone the opposite route of everyone else with these strange triangle-shaped towers. You see them all over town, from Beverly Hills to West L.A., abutting a shopping mall or on the campus of a high school, decked out in festival murals and looking a little too sunny (and smokeless) to be smokestacks. 

They’re oil wells. Active, functioning ones, sprinkled throughout the city and dolled up in floral print like they’re headed to Easter brunch. (To be fair, a few of them are actually concealed inside old office buildings, the usual way.) Los Angeles is the third-largest oil field in the country, in fact, although the city has very strict safety and noise regulations on the wells by this point and they're not much of a danger to the townsfolk. Makes sense that they've got a system in place, seeing as people have been drilling in L.A. for over a century.

Whoever thought of this is a fracking (heh) genius; if you can’t hide it, just flaunt it. Click here to watch a fascinating documentary on the drilling that’s still going in L.A. now.

 









Morbid Monday: A Nightmare at Murder Farm

0
0

article-image
Belle Gunness and her three children. (Photo via Wikipedia)

Children in La Porte, Indiana, grow up listening to graphic horror stories about the gruesome murders committed by Belle Gunness on her farm at the end of McClung Road. The most disturbing part about these grisly stories is that the gory parts are not fiction. Belle Gunness (also known as Lady Bluebeard, The LaPorte Black Widow, The Mistress of Murder Farm, and Hell’s Belle) was probably one of America’s most prolific serial killers. She likely killed between 25 and 30 people, including women and children, at the turn of the 20th century.

Belle’s crimes were discovered on April 28th, 1908, when authorities were called out to the Gunness farm to investigate a fire that razed the farmhouse. When officials combed through the ashes they found the remains of a headless woman and three children. The woman was said to be Belle herself, and the children's remains were thought to belong to her children Lucy and Myrtle Sorenson, ages 9 and 11 respectively, and Phillip Gunness, 5. 

During the investigation, Asle Helgelien showed up and insisted that his brother, Andrew, had been murdered by Belle earlier that year. When investigators searched the property, they unearthed the butchered remains of at least 11 people buried near the hog pen on the farm.

For the next 100 years, rumors circulated that Hell’s Belle didn’t actually die in the fire and probably faked her death. So in 2007, forensic anthropologist Stephen Nawrocki and a group of graduate students from the University of Indiana exhumed Belle Gunness’ grave at the Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, near Chicago. The goal was to see if they could positively identify her body.

When the team exhumed Gunness’ coffin and sifted through the bones and dirt, they found the bones of children comingled with Belle’s remains. This was odd, because the remains of the three children recovered from the farmhouse in 1908 had been buried separately.

Nawrocki and his team returned to the cemetery the following year, and exhumed the graves of Lucy, Myrtle, and Phillip—the children found dead after the fire. The forensic team had some lingering questions to answer: Did Belle Gunness really die in the fire in 1908? Did the children’s bones found in Belle’s coffin belong to her own children, or did they belong to additional victims? 

“Come prepared to stay forever.”

Belle Sorenson Gunness (November 11, 1859 – April 28, 1908) left her native Norway in 1881, at the age of 21, to travel to Chicago. She married her first husband, Mads Sorenson, three years later in 1884. The couple opened an unsuccessful confectionery store that burned down under strange circumstances almost a year later. Belle and Mads collected the insurance on the business to pay for a new home. They had two biological children that survived infancy, Myrtle (b. 1897) and Lucy (b. 1899), and one foster child, Jennie Olsen.

Mads died on July 30, 1900, coincidentally, on the only day his two life insurance policies overlapped. The first doctor to examine Mads’ body believed he suffered from strychnine poisoning. But the Sorensons’ family doctor, who had been treating him for an enlarged heart, overruled the first doctor and determined that Mads died of heart failure. Shortly after Mad’s death, Belle moved to LaPorte, Indiana, where she purchased the 42-acre farm at the end of McClung road.

She soon met a local butcher, Peter Gunness, and they married in April 1902. One week after the marriage, Peter’s infant daughter died while Belle was watching her. Peter died less than a year later, when a sausage grinder and jar of hot water allegedly fell on him. In this case the coroner believed Peter had been murdered (the body showed symptoms of strychnine poisoning), and so he ordered an inquest.

Because Belle played a convincing widow in mourning, and there was no hard evidence to convict her, she walked away a free woman and collected on Gunness' life insurance policy. But she was pregnant at the time of Peter’s death, and in 1903 gave birth to a son, Philip Gunness.

However, the La Porte Black Widow was quick to recover and put ads in the “matrimonial columns” of Midwestern Norwegian-language newspapers.

“WANTED: A woman who owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, wants a good and reliable man as partner in the same. Some little cash is required for which will be furnished first-class security.”

Many men answered these ads and traveled to La Porte to meet Belle. In December of 1907, Andrew Helgelien, a bachelor farmer from Aberdeen, South Dakota, was one of these men and exchanged letters with Gunness. In January of 1908 he received a passionate letter from Belle that closed with the ominous line, “Come prepared to stay forever.” Andrew promptly emptied his bank accounts and left South Dakota to meet Belle. That was the last his family ever saw or heard from him.

Gruesome Discovery

Early in the morning on April 28th, 1908, a fire destroyed the Gunness farmhouse. When the embers cooled, town authorities found the headless body of a woman, believed to be Belle, and three of her children: Lucy and Myrtle Sorenson, and Phillip Gunness.

Initially, investigators believed Gunness was the innocent victim of foul play, until Asle Helgelien arrived in La Porte to look for his brother, Andrew. Asle insisted his brother had met with foul play at the hands of Belle, and demanded they needed to search the farm for his remains. Investigators soon found the dismembered bodies of at least 11 people, including three adolescents, an infant, and a woman. One of the bodies belonged to Belle’s foster daughter Jennie Olsen, who was last seen in 1906. The butchered body parts were found in gunny sacks buried near the hog pen.

Belle’s dentist said that if Belle’s head or dentures were found, he could positively identify her by examining her teeth. After searching the burnt-out remains of the house, investigators found a piece of bridgework consisting of two human teeth, some porcelain teeth, and gold crown work in between. The dentist identified them as the bridge he designed for Belle. Based on this evidence, the coroner’s inquest ruled that the headless female body found in the house belonged to Belle.

When authorities determined the fire was caused by arson, Gunness’ farm hand, Ray Lamphere, became the prime suspect. In November 1908, Lamphere was convicted of setting the house on fire, but he wasn't convicted of any of the murders. In January of 1910 Lamphere made a deathbed confession to a clergyman. He claimed that although he didn’t kill anyone, he did help Belle dispose of the bodies. 

Lamphere said that when a man answered an ad and came to the farm to meet Belle, she would invite her prey to dinner. During dinner she would either drug her date and hit him over the head with a meat cleaver, or poison the food with strychnine. Belle would butcher and dismember the corpse, then either feed the remains to the hogs or bury the body parts near the hog pen.

Lamphere also claimed that they traveled to Chicago a few days before the fire to find a body double for Belle. They brought back a “housekeeper,” who Gunness killed and decapitated.

In the years that followed, some came to believe there were further victims left on Gunness' farm. The number of men who had visited Gunness and subsequently been reported missing outnumbered the bodies recovered, and it's said the authorities never searched the property thoroughly in 1908. (A list of Belle’s suspected victims can be found here.)

Resurrection of a Killer

Many people believed that investigators mishandled and misinterpreted the evidence in the early twentieth century, letting The Mistress of Murder Farm escape unscathed. Like Leatherface or Hannibal Lecter, who survive to kill another day, Gunness was reportedly seen for years after the fire.

The last sighting was in 1931, when a woman named Esther Carlson, who had an uncanny physical resemblance to Belle, died in Los Angeles while awaiting trial on charges she poisoned a man for his money. Not only did Carlson resemble Gunness, she was about the same age Belle would have been in 1931. Esther also killed with Belle’s M.O., and there was no record of her before 1908.

To find out if Belle and Esther were the same woman, Stephen Nawrocki and a team of University of Indianapolis graduate students exhumed Belle’s coffin in November of 2007. They hoped to use DNA analysis to identify the remains, but samples from the still-sealed flap of an envelope that Belle had sent to one of her suitors proved too degraded to be useful. A woman from Norway, a direct descendent of Belle’s grandmother, offered her DNA to compare to the bones in Belle’s grave. But there was not enough money to get the samples examined, and they remain untested in a crime lab in Texas. 

The team had also been surprised to find the skeletal remains of two children in Belle's coffin. Nawrocki and his students returned in 2008 to exhume the bodies of Gunness' three children, hoping to see if they were missing the bones that were found in the coffin. If not, it could mean Belle killed more children than initially believed. However, at the time of this writing the osteological exam of the children found in “Belle’s” coffin in 2008 was unavailable.

Whenever and wherever she was when she died, Belle seems to have taken her secrets to the grave.

References:

Belle’s Story: The Short Version (2012). Retrieved on May 18, 2014 from:http://www.laportelibrary.org/genealogy/bellegunness.html

Bien, K. (2011 November 14). HOMETOWN SECRETS: Mystery still surrounds 100-year-old LaPorte serial killer story. Retrieved on May 16, 2014 from:http://www.orlandosentinel.com/topic/wsbt-mystery-still-surrounds-100-year-old-laporte-serial-killer-story-20111114,0,7428674.story

Hartzell, T. (2007 November 18). Did Belle Gunness really die in LaPorte? Retrieved on May 16, 2014 from: http://articles.southbendtribune.com/2007-11-18/news/26809754_1_exhumed-three-children-dna

Kridel, K. (2008 February 17). Unlocking secrets of Indiana “murder farm.” Retrieved on May 16, 2014 from:http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2004186653_farmmurders17.html

Kridel, K. (2008 May 14). Children’s remains exhumed in 100-year-old murder mystery. Retrieved on May 16, 2014 from: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008-05-14/news/0805130697_1_exhumed-murder-mystery-three-children

McFeely, D. (2008 January 6). DNA to help solve century-old case. Retrieved on May 18, 2014 from: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-06-GNS-murder-me_N.htm

For more fascinating stories of forensic anthropology visit Dolly Stolze's Strange Remains, where a version of this article also appeared








The (Really) Great Gig in the Sky

0
0

 article-imageThe altar at Il Gesu (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

When someone told me I had to see the light show at Il Gesu, I thought they were out of their mind. A light show is something you see after hours at a planetarium with a bunch of stoned teenagers, not at the mother church of the Jesuit order in Rome. And yet every day at 5:30 a small crowd gathers to have their minds blown, albeit in a way that has nothing to do with Pink Floyd.

I recommend going on a rainy, overcast day like I did. When I walked in, I found the church barely lit. A pale yellow gloom dulled the gilded columns and hung like a cloud over the massive nave. In the right transept, the mummified arm of St. Francis Xavier went practically unnoticed. Everyone was focused on the altar in the left transept dedicated to the founder of the Jesuit order, St. Ignatius Loyola.

 article-image
St. Francis Xavier's mummified arm (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

At exactly 5:30, spotlights hit the gold altar and a recorded version of Kyrie blared through the speakers. The light reflected off all of the gold was nearly blinding after I had adjusted to the late afternoon gloom.

This was the Counter-Reformation at its finest. When Protestant reformers stripped away what they saw as excess and idolatry, the Catholic Church doubled down on art and ritual. They employed the great artists, architects, and theatrical designers of Rome to translate religious concepts into stunning Baroque visuals like this one.

Over the course of the show, an Italian narrator took us through the life of St. Ignatius, although Andrea Pozzo, the designer of the transept (along with one hundred or so assistants) had already done the real work back in 1695. Thanks to him, you didn’t have to understand a word to comprehend the importance and piety of St. Ignatius. In the painting above the altar, Ignatius was shown kneeling before Jesus in heaven. Below the altar, his large bronze casket glowed in an amber light.

article-imageAltar painting (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

 article-image
St. Ignatius' casket (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

As the music segued from Kyrie to Gloria, the narrator explained that the Jesuits were missionaries who specialized in converting people in particularly dangerous and far-away places. This is how they earned the nickname “God’s marines.” However, the visuals revealed a more complete truth, at least to modern viewers. In the bottom part of the painting over the altar, an angel tended to four allegorical figures representing the four corners of the Earth: Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. I bet you can guess which of those allegorical figures looked most like the angel. 

Then an allegorical figure of Religion lit up. She brandished a cross like a vampire hunter and appeared to be shoving two poor guys named Heresy off the marble podium with her foot (Heresy happened to look an awful lot like Protestant reformers Martin Luther and Jan Huss).

article-image
Religion shoving Heresy off the podium (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

It was then I realized sculptures of Jesuits always seem to be stepping on (allegorical) people. Just look at the façade of Il Gesu over the side doors, and you can see St. Ignatius stepping on Heresy and St. Francis Xavier stepping on Paganism. Or look at this statue of St. Ignatius from Sant’Ignazio down the street (picture below). Perhaps it's fitting: though Jesuits were known for learning the language and customs of the people they converted, they also did their share of trampling anything in their way—including indigenous culture.

article-image
St. Ignatius stomping on Heresy (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

These uncomfortable truths were completely upstaged by the final act in the show. As the music swelled and the lights dimmed, a Baroque piece of stage machinery designed by Pozzo lowered the painting into a hidden slot beneath the altar. When the spotlights turned back on, they revealed a gleaming, larger-than-life silver statue of St. Ignatius where the painting used to be. (Unfortunately the statue currently on display is a silver-leaf replica, since the solid-silver original was melted down to pay off Napoleon.) The gold-and-lapis niche combined with the statue’s bejeweled chasuble to complete the altar in a way the painting didn’t quite achieve.

 article-image
Painting lowering into a hidden slot beneath the altar (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

 article-image
Statue of St. Ignatius (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

I only had a moment to take the statue in when the ceiling overhead lit up and showed us St. Ignatius ascending into heaven in forced perspective. The fresco was painted on stucco and wood applied over the ceiling coffers, which gave the impression of St. Ignatius busting straight through. Then the entire ceiling illuminated, filling the space with light and letting the gold leaf on every surface shine. The effect was overwhelmingly beautiful and about as subtle as the Kool-Aid Man entering though the wall.

 article-image
Ceiling fresco (photo by Elizabeth Harper)

But that’s the Counter-Reformation for you. Although Andrea Pozzo could have never imagined the addition of LED lighting to his masterful trick transept, I think he’d be pleased with the effect. It beats the planetarium anyway.

Elizabeth Harper writes about saint relics at All the Saints You Should Know. You can also find more on the remains of the holy departed at the new All the Saints You Should Know Facebook page

 








Meadowcroft Rockshelter: North America's Oldest Human Settlement

0
0

article-imageMeadowcroft Rockshelter archeology site (image by Jim Cheney)

One day in 1955, Albert Miller made his way up to a hillside rock overhang on his farmland in Avella, Pennsylvania. There he noticed several curious objects in a recently dug groundhog hole. Picking them up, he realized they were of Native American origin. However, Miller had absolutely no idea that he had stumbled upon a find that would ultimately change our understanding of the entire history of people in the Americas. 

It wasn't until 1973 that the first archeologist, James M. Adovasio, finally came to the property to properly dig the site. Once work started, Adovasio was shocked at what he uncovered. This wasn't any ordinary Native American site. In fact, it was older than any other site found in the New World, dating to somewhere between 16,000 and 19,000 years old.

Given that 1970s understanding of human migration to the Americas had human habitation dating back only 10,000-12,000 years, this was a major find. Even more remarkable is that the rock shelter showed signs of continuous human habitation up until the 18th century, making it not only the earliest known place of human habitation in North America, but also the longest continually used site.

article-imageMeadowcroft Rockshelter (image courtesy of Meadowcroft, copyright Ed Massery)

However, it's worth noting that while a plurality of scientists agree with Adovasio's age for the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, according to a recent study roughly one in five think that the results are inaccurate and the site is much more recent. This doubt isn't entirely surprising given how much the discovery of Meadowcroft has changed the understanding of human migration to the Americas.

But this small amount of dissent hasn't discouraged Adovasio and his team of archeologists. Digs at what became known as the Meadowcroft Rockshelter were done every summer from 1973-1979 and have been done ever few years since. During this time, over 20,000 artifacts have been recovered. The discovery of items such as wood and bone tools, baskets, pottery, and deer bones have helped to fill out the story of the pre-Clovis peoples that occupied the site. Archeologists have even discovered a 12,000-year-old spearhead—the oldest ever found in North America.

article-image 12,000-year-old spearhead (image courtesy Meadowcroft Rockshelter)

For 25 years, visiting the rock shelter was a challenge, since you had to climb a steep hillside from Cross Creek below to Meadowcroft Rockshelter above. However, in 2008, a staircase and modern facility were constructed on top of the shelter. This not only stabilized the site, but also made it significantly easier for visitors to see.

Today, the facility includes a short video that explains the site, allows visitors to get closer to the dig locations, and shows them some areas where ancient campfire sites were found. Visitors also learn a bit about the natives who later inhabited the area, as well as what it was like to be a European settler in western Pennsylvania.

article-image
Meadowcroft Rockshelter Interior (image courtesy of Meadowcroft, copyright Ed Massery)

One area of the grounds includes a reconstructed prehistoric Native American Indian village that gives you a great opportunity to see how the local Monongahela tribe lived in the 16th century. This group of natives disappeared prior to European settlement, so the village is one of the few places where you can learn what archeology has told us about their lifestyle and culture. There is also a 19th century village on site that gives you a great chance to learn about what life was like for the first European settlers to the region. 

article-imageReconstructed 16th century Native American village (image courtesy Meadowcroft)

However, while both the 16th century and 19th century villages are worth visiting, the clear highlight of any visit is Meadowcroft Rockshelter. After all, how often do you get to see a site that literally rewrote the history books?

 

 








The Fates of Famous Brains

0
0

Human brains are notoriously difficult to preserve. They're watery and slippery, and have been likened to the insides of a watermelon. But after the process of preserving them for study was perfected in the mid-19th century, scientists began to seriously collect and study brains, searching for clues about what makes humans work they way they do. Below, the fates of four famous brains, and our attempts to find meaning in them.

article-imageVladimir Lenin (image from Library of Congress)

Lenin

The precise cause of Lenin's death is still being debated, but the doctors who sliced open his brain during his autopsy found severely hardened arteries that contributed to a massive stroke (when knocked with metal tweezers, the arteries in his brain reportedly "sounded like stone"). Soviet officials, primarily Stalin, had other diagnostic plans for the brain—they wanted scientists to study it to "prove" Lenin's genius.

The brain lingered in a glass jar of formaldehyde at the V.I. Lenin Institute for two years while the right experts were found. In 1926, officials finally proposed turning the brain over to pioneering German neurologist Oskar Vogt at the Kaiser Wilhem Institute of Berlin. Vogt was seen as the world's leading expert on brain anatomy, but he was also a foreigner, and so he was allowed to take only a single sample back to Berlin. The rest of Lenin's brain remained in Moscow at a newly-created Institute of the Brain, which also began collecting, slicing, and dicing the brains of other Soviet notables.

Vogt travelled back and forth between Moscow and Berlin to study the brain, but his foreignness continued to be a problem. The Soviets made repeated attacks on his creditability, especially when he went so far as to give public lectures comparing Lenin's brain with those of criminals. Internal memos recommended sending some comrades to Berlin to retrieve the lone specimen at Kaiser Wilhem Institute, but before the Soviets could act, Hitler had dismissed Vogt from his post.

It's not immediately clear what happened to the brain sample in Berlin, but study on the rest of Lenin's brain continued at the Moscow Brain Institute for decades. Most of it was kept under wraps until 1993, when the institute's director, Oleg Adrianov, published the first public account of the brain in Successes in Physiological Sciences, the journal of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. Adrianov failed to find anything earth-shattering, and told the UK's Independent, "'Cognitive activity, even less behaviour, does not directly relate to brain morphology." 

Lenin's brain is still kept, in thousands of sliced and dyed sections, at the Moscow Brain Institute, alongside the brains of Stalin, Tchaikovsky, and many other Soviet luminaries, as well as those of monkeys, bears, lizards, and swans. At one point the brain went on display at Lenin's Mausoleum, where the rest of Lenin's body can be seen on waxy display in the middle of Moscow.  

article-image
Image of Einstein's Brain courtesy of the Mutter Museum, used with permission.

Einstein

Einstein never wanted to be worshipped for his discoveries. He disliked all the personal attention he received, and the whole "cult of individuals" that singled out certain people for veneration because of their accomplishments. “I want to be cremated so people don’t come to worship at my bones,” he told friend and biographer Abraham Pais. His wishes were carried out, but there was one organ that escaped the crematorium's ovens—his brain.

The pathologist who performed Einstein's autopsy, Dr. Thomas Harvey, snipped out Einstein's brain for study, preserving it in formaldehyde, slicing into more than a thousand cross-sections, and encasing it in a plastic-like substance called celloidin.

Harvey has often been portrayed as a common thief, but it's worth noting that at the time (the 1950s), pathologists routinely kept interesting organs and other specimens from the dead for study. Einstein's family pitched a fit when they heard the news, but Harvey managed to convince them to let him keep the brain as long as it was used only for scientific analysis. It took decades for studies on the brain to start appearing—Harvey initially had trouble letting the brain out of his sight—but in recent decades there has been a trickle of papers attempting to find the source of Einstein's genius rooted somewhere in the structure of his brain. The results are controversial, in part because of the chicken-and-egg question: Was Einstein so smart because of the way his brain was shaped, or did his brain change shape as a result of his thinking? The other problem is the lack of samples to which Einstein can be compared; with the brain being the most complex and unique organ in the body, it's impossible to generalize from a single case.

In 1998, Harvey returned what was left of the brain to Princeton Hospital, where Einstein's initial autopsy was conducted. And in late 2011, forty-six slides slides of the brain went on display at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, donated by neuropathologist Lucy Rorke-Adams, whose colleague had been given the slides by Harvey decades earlier. 

article-imageMussolini (image from State Library of New South Wales)

Mussolini

After Mussolini was captured and executed in the closing days of World War II, both Italian and American doctors wanted a look inside his skull. His brain was reportedly sent to the Institute of Legal Medicine in Milan, and Mussolini’s widow Rachele described seeing it there in 1946, stored in a chalice-shaped glass jar and labeled with a false name. She was encouraged to take it home, but told the authorities that she had nowhere to put it. The brain was returned to her in 1957, alongside the rest of Mussolini's body, but was not entirely intact.

According to documents in Italian archives, a psychiatric consultant working with the US Fifth Army after World War II wrote to Italy’s National Liberation Committee requesting a small specimen of Mussolini’s brain “as a great favor.” The request was granted, and the specimen was studied by pathologists at the Army Medical Museum in Washington DC. At the time, some scientists believed Mussolini was suffering from general paresis—brain syphilis—but the sample proved far too small and battered to prove or disprove that theory. It reportedly remained in a jar of alcohol at the Army Medical Museum, later renamed the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, for the next twenty years. 

In 1966, Mussolini’s widow wrote to the U.S. ambassador in Italy requesting the return of the brain fragment. It was not immediately clear where it was, but after some searching, US officials located it at the institute and shipped it back to Mussolini’s family via diplomatic pouch. It arrived in a yellow-orange envelope marked, “Musolinni [sic], fragments of brain.” 

Other fragments of the brain, and some of Mussolini’s blood, also went up for sale on eBay in 2009. The listing was removed before within hours, before anyone bid. (eBay forbids sellers from listing most human remains.)

article-imageWalt Whitman in 1887 (photo from Wikipedia)

Whitman

Walt Whitman was fascinated by anatomy and physiology, as well as phrenology. After having his skull read at the Fowler and Wells Phrenological Cabinet in New York City in 1849, he was so enamored of the results that he had his chart reprinted in some editions of Leaves of Grass. Several of his physicians were more interested in brains than skulls, however, and belonged to the American Anthropometric Society (aka "the Brain Society"), a group of eminent medical men in Philadelphia who were devoted to advancing brain science by donating their own grey matter for study. (There were hundreds of such brain donation societies around the world; the first, in France in 1876, was the Societe Mutuelle d' Autopsie, or The Society of Mutual Autopsy.)

Whitman may or may not have been a member of the American Anthropometric Society himself, but after his death in 1892, several of his physicians felt justified in removing his brain for study. In 1907, the Philadelphia North American prompted a minor panic by reporting that the brain had been somehow destroyed. The official version is that a clumsy lab assistant dropped it, although there other reports that it was damaged either during the autopsy, while being conveyed to the specimen jar, or during the preservation process. However, the writer and mathematics professor Brian Burrell maintains some hope of the "possibility, however remote, that the brain will show up some day in a dusty attic or dank cellar vault."








Mars in the Mojave

0
0

Google Maps helped me locate the Goldstone 70 meter antenna in Mars, California, but it couldn't help me get there. The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex (GDSCC) sits inside Fort Irwin, the U.S. Army’s National Training Center, which appears on the map as a vast, gray expanse in the Mojave Desert. Yet despite its air of mystery, it was quite easy to get directions to the complex by using the phone to call and schedule a tour. Hoping for a signal from the Red Planet, I set out to see NASA’s massive structures and to explore our own nearby martian landscape, Rainbow Basin.  

article-image
The antennas at Goldstone communicate with spacecraft exploring planets, asteroids, and interstellar space. (Image via NASA)

Entering a high-security zone makes you feel a bit like a secret agent. Driving alongside tanks and men in uniform, I passed through two checkpoints requiring license, vehicle registration, and proof of insurance. Foreigners receive special badges (perhaps in case they’re spies?). Pets, weapons, and alcohol are forbidden. Finally, after gaining clearance and receiving safety instructions, we began our three-hour tour.

article-image
Storms behind the Echo-DSS 12 antenna and Goldstone Museum. Photo by the author.

The dishes of GDSCC communicate with various spacecraft, including the “most distant human-made object in existence,” Voyager 1, currently traveling over 11 billion miles away from the Earth in interstellar space. These super-sensitive antennas can receive signals as weak as a single attowatt.

GDSCC is one of three complexes that make up NASA’s Deep Space Network. Located at equidistant positions across the world, this network allows constant communication with spacecraft as the Earth rotates. The other two complexes are in Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia. Each is set inside a geographic depression, sheltered from interfering radio signals.

 article-image
The lonely landscape was rumored to be inhabited by burros, desert tortoise, cougars, and rattlesnakes. Photo by the author.

Our caravan made several stops within the 53-square-mile complex, including the museum, the Signal Processing Center, the Apollo Station, the Beam Waveguide Cluster, and finally, the Mars Station, the largest antenna at GDSCC. Standing 24 stories high, the Mars Station’s large parabolic dish measures 70 meters in diameter; too large to fit in the frame of my camera. It communicates with many spacecraft, including the Curiosity Rover on Mars.

 article-image
The Mars Station received astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous quote:“That's one small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind." Photo by the author.

To my great disappointment, no secrets of extraterrestrial intelligence were revealed. But the evidence of human intelligence was astonishing. Standing beneath the looming dish of the Mars Station, I was reminded of how recently the Space Age began. Today, technology continues to push forward at lightning speed. In fact, the non-profit Mars One Foundation plans to send a manned crew to settle on Mars by 2024. Last fall, their call for astronauts resulted in over 200,000 applications. Would you volunteer for a one-way trip Mars?

article-imageCuriosity's tracks on Mars. (Image via NASA)

 article-image
Rainbow Basin Natural Area, Barstow, California. Photo by the author.

Since I was resolved to my earthbound status, I traveled 30 miles south to the Rainbow Basin, where lack of precipitation and extreme temperatures have created a fantasy landscape that's as inhospitable as the mountains of Mars. In fact, this geological wonder is so barren and isolated that the US Bureau of Land Management recommends telling a friend or family member where you are going and when to expect you back, just in case someone needs to look for your body.

 article-image
Loop Road. Photo by the author.

Rainbow Basin can be explored in an hour or several days. If you’re in a hurry, try Loop Road, a scenic ride that feels more like Disneyland than a National Landmark. Four wheel drive and high clearance are highly recommended for this narrow, roller coaster path. If you have more time, stay at Owl Canyon campground, and get lost in the dry riverbeds and canyons. Just remember to bring enough water and proper supplies. It’s not Mars, but you will certainly feel like the last person on Earth.

 article-image
Colored rock layers. Photo by the author.

 article-image
Hiking along a dry riverbed. Photo by the author.


article-image
A yellow wild flower known as the prince's plume. Photo by the author.








Xylotheks: Wondrous Wooden Books That Hold Wooden Collections

0
0

article-imageXylothek in the library of Lilienfeld Abbey, Austria (photograph by Haeferl) 

A xylothek (from the Greek for tree, xylon, and storing place, theke) is an object where the container is a fundamental component of the contents. The term usually refers to books that are both made of wood and filled with wood specimens. Xylotheks (also spelled xylotheques) first began appearing at the end of the 17th century in cabinets of curiosity. As time progressed, they grew larger and more systematic, with hundreds of individual volumes in a single collection, and are now consulted by those working in forestry, botany, forensics, art restoration, and other fields.

Xylotheks were particularly popular in late 18th century and early 19th century Germany. In these constructions, each book in the xylothek was made out of a particular type of wood, the spine covered with the corresponding bark and decorated with associated moss and lichens. Once opened, the book would reveal samples of dried leaves, flowers, seedlings, roots, and branches, with a special compartment in the spine holding a written description of the species' biology and use. The Special Collections department of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences library in Alnarp, Sweden, contains a beautiful example of this type of xylothek, made in Nürnberg, Germany, at the start of the 19th century. Similar xylotheks are also found in France, Austria, Italy, and the Czech Republic.

article-image
Xylotheque at the Strahov Monastery in Prague (photograph by Régine Fabri)

Some xylotheks featured paintings of specimens inside rather than the plants themselves. The Economic Botany Collection at England's Kew Gardens has a 19th century xylothek from Meiji Japan that includes 26 panels, each made from the wood and bark of a particular tree and painted with the leaves, fruits, and flowers of that species. The Botanical Museum in Berlin has a similar painted example from Japan, with 152 panels.

article-imagePear wood example from a 19th century Japanese xylothek at Kew Gardens (via WRBG Kew)

Xylotheks have also provided inspiration for artists. In 2012, Mark Dion created a new display for the 18th century Schildbach Xylotheque in Kassel, Germany, which encompasses 530 wooden volumes of different tree and shrub species. (The piece is on permanent display at Kassel's Natural History Museum.) As part of the 2012 installment of documenta(13), Dion made new oak hexagonal chambers that place each sample in its continent of origin, and introduced his own additions

article-image
Mark Dion's Schildbach Xylotheque (photograph by David Gómez Fontanills)

Today the term xylothek is also used to refer to huge collections of wood specimens not necessarily housed in wooden books (like those at the Samuel James Record Collection of Yale's Forestry School, which contains 60,000 samples). But the origins of such collections lie in these more humble and yet strikingly beautiful objects, which have been made all the more precious as deforestation renders some trees extinct.  


 

Page through more bibliophile wonders on Atlas Obscura >








The Place Where World War II Never Ended

0
0

article-image
One of the Kuril Islands (photograph by Dr. Igor Smolyar, NOAA/NODC)

What if you were to find out that World War II never really ended? That the most cataclysmic event of the 20th century never actually came to a close? That nearly 70  years after Hitler took his life deep underneath the streets of Berlin, and the United States dropped the atom bomb, two of the largest powers involved, Russia and Japan, were still at war?

The clue to this strange story lies in four small volcanic islands in the Pacific. On August 9, 1945, the day of the atomic weapon drop on Nagasaki, the Russian army invaded a collection of Japanese islands known as the Kuril Islands. Lying equidistant between Russia and Japan, the island chain is rich in fish, minerals, and other natural resources. Known in Japan as the Northern Territories and in Russia as the South Kurils, four of these islands — Kunashir, Iturup, Shikotan, and the Habomai islets — have lain at the center of a dispute over ownership that continues to this day. The conflict has led Moscow and Tokyo to avoid signing the peace treaty that would have formally ended the Second World War. 

article-image
A satellite view of the disputed Southern Kuril Islands (via NASA)

Japan started to settle the Kuril islands as far back as the 18th century, seizing them in 1875. By the outbreak of World War II, the chain was home to some 17,000 Japanese. When Russia seized the islands, the Japanese inhabitants were deported, and the Russians began to build up a heavy military presence that exists to this day.

It isn’t some quirk of international law or a diplomatic oddity that never saw the peace treaty signed; strong animosity still exists between the two superpowers over who owns the land. As recently as 2011, the then-president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, declared the islands “unalienable Russian territory.” 

“We will do everything we can to step out our strategic presence on the South Kuril Islands,” he said.

Meanwhile, protests from pro-nationalists in Japan have seen Russian flags being burnt on “Northern Territories Day.”

article-imageFish processing factory on Shikotan Island, 1969 (via RIA Novosti archive)

article-imageA volcano in the Kuril Islands (photograph by Dr. Igor Smolyar, NOAA/NODC)

And this isn’t just some idle land dispute; rumors of large oil and natural gas reserves under the seas surrounding the Kurils have led Russia to step up its military presence. Deposits of the rare and extremely valuable mineral rhenium, used to make military jet and rocket engines, have also been found on a volcano on Iturup. Colonel General Sergey Surovikin, commander of the eastern Russian military district, was tasked with completing “modern, fully autonomous military settlements” on the islands by 2016.

Today, the 30,000 Russian residents on the Kuril islands lie in wait in a state of combat readiness, with surface-to-air missiles, fighter planes, and ballistic missiles pointing in the direction of Japan. As recently as February of 2013, the Japanese air force scrambled fighter planes when Russian jets entered their airspace near the Kurils.

Dozens of potential solutions to the conflict have been floated over the years. A possible compromise emerged in 1956, when former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev offered to return the two southernmost islands, Shikotan and Habomai, and Japan admitted that its claim to the other two islands was "weak." But the deal fell through. Talks between the superpowers over the years have led to a stalemate — which means it seems unlikely that Russia and Japan will ever finally stop fighting World War II.

article-imageKunashir Island (photograph by Leon Petrosyan


Investigate more overlooked World War II history on Atlas Obscura >

 









Morbid Monday: The Game of Thrones Written in Bones, Conquistador Edition

0
0

Pizarro tomb in Lima, PeruChapel for Francisco Pizarro in the Lima cathedral (photograph by Christian Haugen)

The bones of infamous conquistador Don Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1476 – June 26, 1541) rest in an ornate glass, marble, and bronze sarcophagus in a chapel in the Cathedral of Lima in Peru. Though Pizarro’s remains are now in a place of honor for visiting by pilgrims and historians, this wasn’t always the case. A mummy, whose identity was lost to history, stole Pizarro’s post-mortem spotlight for decades due to a case of mistaken identity.

Pizarro tomb in Lima, PeruThe tomb of Francisco Pizarro ( photograph by Brian Flaherty)

Francisco Pizarro was a Spanish conquistador who conquered Peru, decimated the Incan empire, and founded the city of Lima. Pizarro’s life was as treacherous as it was adventurous and could have inspired anything read about in the Game of Thrones series. This conqueror’s death was as violent as his life, and the marks his brutal assassination left on his bones were key to identifying his remains more than 400 years later.

Live by the Sword…

The life of Francisco Pizarro was complicated, rife with treachery, and filled with bloodshed. Here is a quick summary.

Pizarro was born around 1476 in Trujillo, Spain, the illegitimate child of a poor farmer. He was illiterate and looked after his father’s pigs as a child.

In 1510, Francisco Pizarro embarked on a disastrous expedition to Colombia with Spanish explorer Alonzo de Ojeda. Then he joined Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513 on his his voyage to Panama, during which Balboa became the first European to discover the Pacific Ocean. Pizarro was the mayor and magistrate of Panama City from 1519 to 1523, and led two unsuccessful expeditions into Peru — one in 1524, and the second in 1526.

Pizarro statue in SpainStatue of Pizarro in Trujillo, Spain (photograph by David Jones)

When the governor of Panama refused a third expedition, Pizarro decided to return to Spain to appeal to Charles V in person. In 1528, he obtained a commission — the Capitulación de Toledo — from Emperor Charles V and Queen Isabella of Portugal to found a colony in South America.

Pizarro landed on the coast of South America in 1532, and this time he was joined by his brothers — Juan, Gonzalo, and Hernando. In November of 1532, he overthrew the Inca leader Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca, even though Atahualpa and his forces ridiculously outnumbered Pizarro and his men. Atahualpa had an army that numbered 80,000, while Pizarro only had about 168 fighters. According to legend, Atahualpa offered Pizarro a ransom large enough to fill a room if Pizarro spared his life. Pizarro agreed and got the gold, but executed the fallen king anyway.

Execution of Atahualpa woodcutWoodcut of the execution of Atahualpa (via Wikimedia)

In November of 1533, Pizarro and his men marched on Cuzco and conquered the Incan capital. The victor then made himself the governor of Incan territory. Three years later, in 1535, Pizarro founded the new capital city of Lima.

Over the next six years, hostility and conflict arose between the Spanish conquerors. These tensions eventually split the conquistadors into two groups: one led by Francisco Pizarro, and the other led by Pizarro’s former friend, Diego de Almagro.

These rivalries peaked on April 26, 1538, when Almagro engaged Pizarro’s brothers in the Battle of Las Salinas. After the brothers’ victory, Hernando Pizarro captured and executed Almagro. Francisco confiscated Almagro’s territory and riches, leaving his son penniless.

The capture, trial, & execution of Diego de Almagro, depicted by Theodor de Bry The capture, trial, & execution of Diego de Almagro, depicted by Theodor de Bry (via Wikimedia)

On June 26, 1541 in Lima, Almagro’s son and his supporters planned to avenge his father’s death by brutally assassinating Francisco Pizarro after Sunday mass. However, Pizarro heard about the plot and avoided mass that day.

The conspirators changed their plans and attacked the governor’s palace during Pizarro’s Sunday dinner, which had 20 guests, including Pizarro’s half brother Francisco Martine de Alcántara. It was during this brutal battle that Pizarro was violently assassinated.

The killing of Pizarro in an 1891 engravingThe killing of Pizarro in an 1891 engraving (via Library of Congress)

Misplaced Remains

The bodies of Pizarro and Alcántara were buried behind the Lima cathedral the night of June 26, 1541. Pizarro’s body would not rest in peace, as it was reburied and relocated each time the cathedral was rebuilt over the centuries. The bones were moved so many times that church authorities lost track of them.

In 1545, Pizarro’s bones and swords were exhumed and placed in a wooden box under the altar. In 1551, Pizarro’s daughter gave the church 5,000 pieces of gold to construct a chapel in her father’s honor. According to church records, Pizarro’s bones were deposited in a wooden box covered in black velvet in this area of the cathedral.

Pizarro’s bones were moved to a new church in July 4, 1606, when the Cathedral of Lima underwent reconstruction. His bones were moved again sometime between 1623 and 1629.

In 1661, during the verification process for the remains of St. Toribio, the first saint from Peru, church records documented the presence of a lead casket inside a wooden box covered in brown velvet. The lead casket had the following inscription: “Here is the skull of the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered and won Peru and placed it under the crown of Castile.”

In 1891 — the 350th anniversary of Pizarro’s death — a team of scientists was formed to positively identify the mummified body that church officials believed belonged to Francisco Pizarro. The body in question was missing its hands and genitals, and had been mummified by the dry air of Lima. They believed that the mutilations to the body could be attributed to Pizarro’s brutal death.

This research team relied on the testimony of church officials and phrenological landmarks to make their identification. After the mummified body was mistakenly identified as Francisco Pizarro, it was placed in a lavish sarcophagus for public display.

Francisco Pizarro, British LibraryIllustration from "The Land of the Incas and the City of the Sun; or the story of Francisco Pizarro and the conquest of Peru" (1885) (via British Library)

Die by the Sword

In 1977, workmen who were cleaning the crypt under the altar in the Cathedral of Lima discovered two wooden boxes filled with bones. One of the wooden boxes held a lead casket with an inscription:

“Here is the skull of the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered and won Peru and placed it under the crown of Castile.”

Since the Cathedral of Lima had been displaying a mummy they believed to be Francisco Pizarro since 1891, the church called in Dr. Hugo Ludeña, a Peruvian historian, to settle the matter. After examining the remains and church documents, Ludeña and his team of researchers found that the skull did indeed belong to Pizarro. But other Peruvian scholars disputed these findings.

So in 1984, forensic anthropologist William Maples and his colleague, Dr. Robert Benfer, were asked to travel to Peru to examine the skeletal remains in the two wooden boxes. In his book, Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist, Dr. Maples describes this process.

The larger wooden box, which he called box A, contained the comingled remains of the following:

- The bones of at least 2 children
- The remains of an elderly female
- The skull and post-cranial bones of an elderly male
- Only the post-cranial bones of a second elderly male (the skull was missing).
- The smaller wooden box, called box B, held some human bones and the lead casket with the inscription and a skull.

When articulated, the occipital condyles of the skull in the lead casket fit perfectly with the vertebrae of the skull-less post-cranial bones of the second elderly male in Box A.

The physical examination of the skull from the lead casket and the skull-less post-cranial bones of the elderly male from Box A revealed they belonged to a Caucasian male who was at least 60 years old, and stood between 65 and 69 inches (1.65 and 17.5 meters) tall. Healed fractures and arthritis revealed a man who lived an active and violent life. The biological profile of these skeletal remains corresponded to what we know about Pizarro, who was thought to be about 63 or 65 years old when he died.

The physical examination also revealed numerous perimortem injuries to the right side of the body, which would be consistent with a right-handed swordsman. Maples noted injuries that caused tool marks on the bones. These include:

- At least four stab wounds to the cervical vertebrae
- Stab wound to the abdomen
- Defensive wounds in the arms and hands
- Injuries to the skull

These injuries fit nicely with the historical accounts of Pizarro’s assassination. Because a few of Pizarro’s attackers survived to be interrogated, we know what happened that night in the governor’s palace in 1541.

As Don Francisco Pizarro sat down to Sunday dinner with his 20 guests, Almagro and his supporters charged the walls of the governor’s palace to seek revenge. Reports vary about the number of attackers, some say seven men and others report as many as 25. Most of Pizarro’s guests ran off, but three or four stayed behind to help defend the governor, including Alcántara.

Killing of Francisco Pizarro, illustrated by William Prescott in 1851Killing of Francisco Pizarro, illustrated by William Prescott in 1851 (via Wikimedia)

As Pizarro tried to fight off his assassins, he received a rapier wound to his throat that incapacitated him. He was stabbed a few more times in the neck before he went down. As Pizarro fell to the floor, his assassins surrounded him and repeatedly stabbed his body.

Because the biological profile and the wounds were consistent with historical accounts, Maples and Benfer believed these bones could indeed belong to Francisco Pizarro. To be sure, they examined the mummy that had been identified as Pizarro in 1891. They found that the mummy belonged to a male who was about 65 inches tall who had a gracile, or small, skeleton. Despite the mummies missing hands and genitals, the bones showed no signs of an active or violent life, and lacked evidence of wounds or injury. They believed that these remains belonged to someone who was a scholar or a man of the church.

Skull of Pizarrovia iml.jou.ufl.edu

Maples and Benfer identified the skull in the lead casket and the skull-less post-cranial bones of an elderly man in Box A as Don Francisco Pizarro, reinforcing Dr. Hugo Ludeña’s findings in 1977. In 1985, Pizarro’s bones were placed in the ornate sarcophagus now on display at the Cathedral of Lima, and funeral rites were performed that Pizarro himself had asked for in his will.

The other bodies in Box A could not be positively identified. The bones of the 2 children may belong to two of Pizarro’s children. The female skeleton may belong to Alcántara’s wife, and the skeleton of the other elderly male may be Alcántara himself.

Dr. Hugo Ludeña has some great photographs from his investigation in 1977 and the Maples and Benfer investigation in 1984 on his website.

For more fascinating stories of forensic anthropology visit Dolly Stolze's Strange Remains, where a version of this article also appeared


Morbid Mondays highlight macabre stories from around the world and through time, indulging in our morbid curiosity for stories from history's darkest corners. Read more Morbid Mondays>








Hiking the Disturbing Remains of a California Hideout for Hitler

0
0

Obscura Society LA loves to take advantage of the natural area that surrounds us in Southern California, especially to explore areas off the beaten path, with curious and mysterious histories whose mythologies develop over time.

A group of United States-based Nazi sympathizers in the 1930s certainly found the right place to live in seclusion undetected for years: at the bottom of Rustic Canyon in Los Angeles' Santa Monica Mountains. We set out to uncover their former hideout, where they waited for Hitler to conquer the US and retreat here, hidden away, but close enough to hang out with the Hollywood elite.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los Angeles In front of the Paul R. Williams-designed gated entry to Murphy Ranch, as we embark down into Rustic Canyon

But why would a group of Hitler-supporting white supremacists hire the first certified African American architect, Paul Revere Williams, to build such a grandiose gated entry for the famed, isolated, and supposedly hidden Murphy Ranch?

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesConcrete stairs leading to one of the tanks

There are many unexplained mysteries surrounding the tale of Murphy Ranch — named after a mining heiress "Jesse Murphy" who probably never actually existed — including where they actually lived down there (at one point, 40-50 Hitler supporters strong, many of the "Silver Shirts" Nazi group). 

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesCistern full of graffiti, thanks to a rusted ladder leading down into it

But there are signs as to how they survived, including giant tanks and cisterns that held enough diesel fuel and water to help them sustain life in isolation for up to three years without supplies from the outside world.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesGarden at the ranch

The residents of Murphy Ranch survived for nearly a decade by growing their own food in a concrete-walled garden, now exposed to the elements but probably once covered by a greenhouse roof.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesFenced-off machine shed area

The parcel of land that houses Murphy Ranch is technically owned by the City of Los Angeles, whose parks department has begun some rehabilitation and graffiti abatement work.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesPower House

That includes fencing off the iconic Murphy Ranch power house, left empty when its diesel engines (used for generating power for the compound) were removed years ago. A fresh coat of municipal gray paint has covered up the façade of the power house, but the graffiti on the exterior side walls, roof, and interior still remain... for now.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesIn Rustic Canyon, nothing is safe from graffiti: not even this Boy Scout camp farmhouse

But the history of Rustic Canyon does not belong solely to the inhabitants of Murphy Ranch, which was raided the day after Pearl Harbor in 1941, and eventually abandoned fully by 1948. On our way through the property, we also stopped by an old abandoned farmhouse, reportedly once part of the neighboring Boy Scout Camp Josepho.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesVW bus, underside

Signs of the artist colony that took up residence down here in the late 1960s and early 1970s are also evident, including an abandoned VW bus.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesDocumenting the rubble

The area may technically be abandoned, but it's visited frequently by hikers and vandals, who always make sure there's a fresh coat of paint on anything that remains down there.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesHeading up the infamous stairs

In addition to the road that leads down from the wrought iron gate entrance, there are several concrete stairways that provide access points from the fire road above down in to the canyon. 

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesThe 300 mark up the stairs, more than halfway there.

We climbed over 500 of these narrow stairs (with no railings!) to make our exit, marking our progress thanks to some graffitied markers.

Rustic Canyon's Nazi Murphy Ranch in Los AngelesHappy hikers emerging from the canyon floor

We were happy to have made our trek on a sunny spring day before the weather gets too hot, and certainly before the city government "improves" the area by removing any trace of its disturbing and baffling history.

All photographs by the author.


article-image

The Obscura Society is the real-world exploration arm of Atlas Obscura We seek out secret histories, unusual access, and opportunities for our community to explore strange and overlooked places hidden all around us. Join us on our next adventure!

All Upcoming Obscura Society Events








Bats and Vampiric Lore in Père Lachaise Cemetery

0
0

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in ParisBat in Père-Lachaise Cemtery (photograph by the author)

The symbolism of cemeteries can be rather ominous, with skulls and flying souls and the refrain of memento mori— remember that you will die. By the 19th century, however, most cemeteries in Western Europe and the United States had moved to a gentler Victorian iconography, focusing on eternal life with inverted flames still burning in the dark, and weeping angels with their beautiful carved faces demurely turned to the ground. Yet in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, opened in 1804, a curious dark symbol repeats itself: the bat. 

Most visitors to this most touristy of cemeteries don't notice the flying creatures carved in stone or formed in tomb doors, but keep an eye out and you're likely to see at least one on your visit. As Shannon Moore Shepherd wrote for Atlas Obscura in her account of visiting the cemetery with Jacques Sirgent of the Paris vampire museum, 14 bats are hidden in the cemetery, which, when followed, supposedly "put you directly in front of the grave [Sirgent] believes the original Dracula was transported to a long time ago."

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in ParisThe Lautru & Margot tomb (photograph by the author)

There is an undercurrent of vampire mythology in the cemetery. In the 1913 German story Das Grabmal auf dem Père Lachaise by Karl Hans Strobl, a man takes the bargain of a fortune in exchange for spending a year in the tomb of a countess, and finds that he is unable to depart the claustrophobic grave. He suspects that a vampire may be the cause, although the tale is as much about the loss of a sense of self. There's also the jesting 19th century Les Étrennes d'un vampire, said to have been copied from a manuscript found in the cemetery. 

Then there is the very real and gruesome history of François Bertrand. In 1848, graves in Père-Lachaise were found brutally dug open, the corpses grotesquely ripped to fleshy shreds. It turned out that Bertrand — a French military sergeant proclaimed the "Vampire of Montparnasse" in the frenzied press — was to blame, and he admitted to an uncontrollable impulse to mutilate bodies in their graves. 

Some cemetery visitors have noted the eerie Valachie mausoleum on the "Allée du Dragon." Vlad Dracul, father of the man who became Vlad the Impaler and inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula, means "Vlad the Dragon," and on top of the tomb is a sculpture of an eagle grasping in its talons a cross and what looks like a stake. 

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in ParisA bat with a rather human face (photograph by the author)

Despite all the fiction and coincidences, the source of the bat may simply be in its representation of the night, and thus death. It is a rare graveyard symbol, but not unseen in other cemeteries around the world, although not nearly in such a concentrated number. An old demonic protection superstition also involved nailing a dead bat to your door for protection, which the bats with their wings spread wide do resemble. Then there is the grave of phantasmagoria pioneer Robertson, which has bat wings flanking skulls as a reminder of the magician's spectral feats in evoking the supernatural through his smoke and mirror tricks. 

There is no clear reason why these different people chose bats to adorn their final resting places, although they are a reminder of some of the darker histories of this city of the dead. Perhaps it's best to wait until night, and if you're lucky you may glimpse some of the real bats that call the cemetery home departing their daily resting place, evoking in the night life in the darkness and the descent of each day into sleep. As the flying hourglass cemetery symbol reminds us: time flies. 

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris
The Gaumont tomb (photograph by Till Krech)

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in ParisBat on the Gaumont door (photograph by mirandiki/Flickr user)

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris
Bat above a cross on a tomb door (photograph by John Althouse Cohen)

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris
The tomb of Robertson (photograph by istolethetv/Flickr user)

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris
Skulls and bat wings on the Robertson tomb (photograph by the author)

Bat tomb symbol in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris
Tomb of Marc Schoelcher, with bats wings on a flying hourglass (photograph by Medelie Vendetta)








Society Adventures: Cocktails in the Crypt

0
0

Lucky Chops Brass Band performing at the New York Obscura Society's Cocktails in the CryptLucky Chops Brass Band performing at the New York Obscura Society's Cocktails in the Crypt (all photographs by Steven Acres, visit http://stevenacr.es to view more of his work)

Last weekend, the New York Obscura Society invited 100 guests to join us for an underground night of jazz music and Prohibition era-cocktails in a historic Harlem crypt. Guests braved the rain to journey to the Church of the Intercession, a towering gothic chapel bordering the uptown Trinity Cemetery, where they were guided down a series of stone steps into the beautiful, vaulted chambers of the crypt.

The beautiful Church of the Intercession of Harlem at nightThe beautiful Church of the Intercession of Harlem at night

Looking up the stairway from the crypt at Harlem's Church of the Intercession
Looking up the stairway from the crypt

Harlem's Church of the Intercession was completed in 1915, at a time when the graveyards of Manhattan's churches were literally overflowing and the city's need for burial space was at a high. The crypt was included in the construction of the chapel as a holding place for the deceased prior to burial, and by 1920 the walls had been carved out to permanently house cremated remains, making the Church of the Intercession the first in the country with its own interior columbarium.

The side of the chapel as seen from Old Trinity CemeteryThe side of the chapel as seen from Trinity Cemetery

The candlelit columbarium in the church of the intercession in harlem
The candlelit columbarium

As a part of the New York Obscura Society's ongoing mission to share some of our city's hidden gems, we sought to highlight this incredible and unique space while also paying tribute to Harlem's impressive history. A hotbed for creativity and talent during the "Roaring Twenties," Harlem fostered a slew of incredible artists and musicians who completely changed the course of music. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie all had their beginnings in the speakeasies and nightclubs of Jazz Age Harlem. To speak on this incredible period of musical growth, we invited Loren Schoenberg, the artistic director for the National Museum of Jazz in Harlem (and a top-notch jazz musician himself), to join us for the night and offer a welcoming speech to kick off the festivities.

Loren SchoenbergOur esteemed guest Loren Schoenberg discussing Harlem's Prohibition Era Jazz Scene

The extremely talented Jesse Gelber shows us how it's done on the baby grand piano in the harlem church of the intercession
The extremely talented Jesse Gelber shows us how it's done on the baby grand piano

We had a fantastic collection of local talent lined up, starting off with the incredible stride pianist Jesse Gelber on the baby grand, tickling the ivories and setting the mood for the night to come. Following his set, the Lucky Chops Brass Band took the floor and had the crowd up and dancing before the end of their first number.    

The Lucky Chops Brass Band takes the stage
The Lucky Chops Brass Band takes the stage

The Lucky Chops Brass Band
Lucky Chops captivating the crowd

The rest of the evening was a high energy, big band dance party with the Lucky Chops stealing the show. By the end of their second set they had us all utterly enthralled, literally leading the crowd out of the crypt Pied Piper-style when it came time for our grand affair to come to a close. We left our beautiful, subterranean jazz haunt in the early morning hours, having channeled the energy and elation of Harlem and the Roaring Twenties well into the night.

The Lucky Chops Brass Band in the church of the intercession crypt Cocktails in the Crypt in full swing

Here are a few more photographs from Steve Acres of the night's festivities:

Atlas Obscura in Harlem's Church of the Intercession crypt

Atlas Obscura in Harlem's Church of the Intercession crypt

Atlas Obscura in Harlem's Church of the Intercession crypt

Atlas Obscura in Harlem's Church of the Intercession crypt

Atlas Obscura in Harlem's Church of the Intercession crypt

Atlas Obscura in Harlem's Church of the Intercession crypt

Obscura Society NYC's Cocktails in the Crypt took place May 24, 2014 in the crypt of the Church of the Intercession in Harlem. 


article-image

The Obscura Society is the real-world exploration arm of Atlas Obscura We seek out secret histories, unusual access, and opportunities for our community to explore strange and overlooked places hidden all around us. Join us on our next adventure!

All Upcoming Obscura Society Events








The Planes, Soviet Trains, and Rare Automobiles of North Korea

0
0

The entire country of North Korea has fewer paved roads than the city of Detroit — about one car for every thousand people — and a chronic shortage of petroleum fuel. That's the transportation situation for the nearly 25 million people. So how do they get around? 

article-image
Children in North Korea: a good socialist never takes more wheels than she needs (photograph by stephan/Flickr user)

International Travel

As the world’s most isolated country, there are very few links between North Korea and the outside world. Most foreigners travel in and out of the country by air, through the Pyongyang Sunan International Airport. National carrier Air Koryo operates regular flights from Beijing and several other Asian cities. Air Koryo has the distinction of being the world’s only “1-star” airline out of the 681 reviewed by rating service Skytrax

article-imageAir Koryo (photograph by Laika ac/Flickr user)

article-imageIn-flight meal service on North Korea's national airline (photo by Kristoferb)

article-image
Arriving in Pyongyang Sunan Airport (photograph by calflier001/Flickr user)

Almost no automobile traffic crosses the North Korean border. The Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge provides a one-lane vehicular route from DPRK into Dandong, China, but the majority of the traffic over the bridge is by rail. Pedestrian traffic is entirely forbidden, and the entrance is heavily guarded on the North Korean side. Most defectors who escape the country cross the border in this area on foot, often swimming across the Yalu or Tumen rivers under the cover of darkness. 

 article-image
View from the Chinese side of the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge (photograph by Prince Roy)

article-image
View of the bridge from the water (photograph by Marie/Flickr user)

Automobiles

Cars and trucks are a scarce commodity in North Korea. In a 2007 interview, Andrei Lankov, a Seoul-based North Korea expert, estimated that there were only between 20,000 and 25,000 passenger cars in the entire country. Owning a private car is “pretty much what a private jet is to the ordinary American," according to Lankov.  

article-image
A Romanian-built Dacia 1310 in North Korea. The black license plates indicate state ownership (photo by Roman Harak)

article-image
Driving in Pyongyang, with the May Day Stadium in the background (photograph by stephan/Flickr user)

On large highways, the speed limit varies by lane — and which lane you can travel in depends on your status. The far left lane is reserved for senior government and military officials, who can zip along at 43 mph, while regular folks on the far right are restricted to 24 mph. 

According to exile news site New Focus International, North Korean traffic police are the most ready source of gasoline and diesel for those without a connection to military supplies. Police use their enforcement authority to solicit bribes from drivers, and then demand on-the-spot payment in the form of siphoned fuel — a hot commodity in the underground barter market. 

article-imageA traffic director in Kaesong, North Korea, a common sight in cities as they're cheaper to hire than power traffic lights (photograph by yeowatzup/Flickr user)

Trains

Experts believe the majority of passengers and cargo get around by means of the country’s extensive railway network. Rail infrastructure may be one of the only measures of economic development where North Korea outranks the South, In 2009, the CIA reported about 5,200 km of railroad track across North Korea’s 46,000 square miles, compared to 3,300 kilometers in the South. 

Kim Il-Sung, who founded the country in 1948 and ruled until his death in 1994, was a big fan of train travel. His son, Kim Jong Il, was famously afraid of flying. He was reported to have six personal trains, which he deployed in convoys of three to travel among his 19 private rail stations around the country. According to state media, he died while on one of these train trips in 2011. Kim Jong-Un has broken with tradition, choosing to travel in a Russian made IL-62 — a passenger jet comparable to a 747.  

For those not traveling with the Presidential entourage, rail accommodations range from Soviet chic to homemade death trap. 

article-image
A Soviet M62 diesel locomotive in use in North Korea (photograph by Clay Gilliland)

article-image
Pyongyang Railway Station, with a Soviet-era diesel procured from the GDR (photograph by Clay Gilliland)

At the death trap end of the spectrum are improvised train cars people use to move themselves and goods around the countryside. Essentially they are homemade carts and platforms, sometimes powered by old tractor or motorcycle engines, and rigged to run on existing rail lines.

Trams, Trolleys, Buses, and Subways 

Because both cars and fuel are so rare, North Korean cities are heavily reliant on electrically powered public transportation. In the capital and a few other large cities there are tram and trolleybus systems powered by overhead electrical lines, mostly running ancient buses and equipment from the Soviet Union. 

article-image
A North Korean-made Cholima 9.25 tram crossing Kim Il-Sung Square (photo by Laika ac/Flickr user) 

article-image
Bus in North Korea (photograph by Roman Harak)

The pride of the Pyongyang transit system is its subway. The Pyongyang Metro connects 16 stations over 24km of track. Apparently there used to be 17 stations, but one was converted into a mausoleum to house the remains of the Eternal Leader Kim Il Sung. So the trains don’t stop there anymore.  Up to 700,000 riders a day use the system to get around Pyongyang, with tickets priced at a relatively affordable $0.03 U.S. cents.

article-image
Yonggwang Station on the Pyongyang Metro; the cars were originally used in Berlin (photograph by John Pavelka)

article-image
Puhung Station in Pyongyang (photograph by John Pavelka)

article-image
Mosaic mural of "The Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung Among Workers" in Puhung Station (photograph by John Pavelka)

It is among the deepest metro systems in the world, with sections over 350 feet below ground, likely because the network is intended for military use in addition to public transit. The stations were designed to be convertible into bomb shelters, with heavy steel blast doors and inspiring socialist murals. It is widely believed that there other, secret lines on the system reserved for government and military use. North Korea is known to have a number of underground military installations, and the metro is likely used to link these installations. 

article-imageStatue in the Pyongyang Metro (photograph by Clay Gilliland)

article-imageStation controller in the Pyongyang Metro (photograph by Laika ac/Flickr user)

article-image
Descending deep into the Puhung station of the Pyongyang Metro (photograph by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen)

Bicycles

Bicycles are probably the most common mode of transportation for average North Koreans. Until fairly recently bikes were considered a status symbol and a bit of a luxury item. But with the rise of grey market trading in the last 10-15 years, bicycles have become an economic necessity. Household bike ownership rates shot from 40 percent to over 70 percent by 2008. At that time, prices ranged from about $11-$22 dollars U.S. for a used bicycle, with the best Japanese models going into the $70 and $80 range.  

article-image
Man cycling by the Taedong River; Grand People's Study House in background (photograph by Kok Leng Yeo)

So it was a big deal in 1996 when women were banned from riding bikes in North Korea — allegedly after a senior official’s daughter was killed in a cycling accident. Current leader Kim Jong Un briefly lifted the ban after coming to power, but it was reinstated a few months later. State media have suggested the image of a woman on a bike is “contrary to socialist morals,” but reports from tourists and others suggest enforcement is spotty in the countryside.  

article-image
Mural of Kim Il-sung & Kim Jong-il in Gaeseong (photograph by Nicor/Wikimedia)

article-imageStreet in Kaesong (photograph by Nicor/Wikimedia)








How to Pick a Lock (With Infographics!)

0
0

article-imageSchuyler Towne preparing for the workshop (all photographs by Erin Johnson)

"Who is to say they would even have locks!" exclaimed Schuyler Towne after he was asked if an alien-locked brief case from outer space floated down to Earth, would he be able to open it. 

More than a world-renown lockpicker, expert teacher, and historian, Schuyler Towne is a "security anthropologist." He prides himself on not just knowing the ins and outs of locks, but the impact locks and security in general have had on our society.

Towne's love for all things locked was apparent when on May 22, 2014, the Obscura Society LA had the honor and joy to participate in a lock picking workshop taught by him. Earlier this year, he was the star of a lock picking party with the New York Obscura Society in the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen. The Los Angeles workshop took place in the beautiful and historic 1914 Carnegie Library, now occupied by the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock. 

article-image

With instruction and plenty of hands-on experience, we learned a varied assortment of skills, including how to pick North America's most common lock — a pin tumbler. Additionally, we learned how a master key works, and the difference between wafer and disc detainer locks. We attempted to (and somewhat successfully) pick more mid-level and high security locks, heard about the great lock controversy of 1851, and discussed the social implications of locks in our society. It was a magical evening that "unlocked" mysteries behind the door of knowledge for us all.

article-image

article-image

We would like to thank Schuyler Towne for his wealth of information, charisma, but most of all, his passion. It was truly contagious. We would also like to thank the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock for hosting and partnering with us on this event. Their enthusiasm and encouragement for this workshop was awesome.

If you weren't able to attend we also have these handy infographics by Michelle Enemark, created for the NYC event in collaboration with Towne, that walk you through the basics of lockpicking:

article-imageclick here to view larger

article-imageclick here to view larger


 

article-image

The Obscura Society is the real-world exploration arm of Atlas Obscura We seek out secret histories, unusual access, and opportunities for our community to explore strange and overlooked places hidden all around us. Join us on our next adventure!

All Upcoming Obscura Society Events








Feel like a Monster at These 10 Tiny Towns

0
0

Humans are united by a strange fascination: in recreating their worlds in miniature. From England to Istanbul, dedicated individuals have obsessively built tiny versions of their towns — architecture so small it is absolutely useless except as a whimsical attraction. What is it about miniatures that is so pleasing? Is it the feeling of being a monolithic god, or perhaps a rampaging giant monster, above these little places? Or is it just amusing to see the formidable buildings of the world reduced to toy size?

Here are 10 of the world's most amazing tiny towns, where you can stride through like a conquering giant. 

WIMBORNE MINSTER MODEL TOWN
Wimborne Minister, England 

article-imagephotograph by Jim Champion

For quaint charm, you can't beat the Wimborne Minister Model Town. As one of the biggest and most elaborate model towns in England (which is host to quite a few miniature municipalities), it almost perfectly recreates Wimborne Minister itself as it appeared in the 1950s. The buildings at 1/10th scale were built from photographs of the town center, including the looming church and even tiny people with small cars among the 120 buildings. Unfortunately, the Wimborne Minister model fell into disrepair after interest in it waned. Now, however, it has been revitalized and is tended to by dedicated volunteers. 

article-image
photograph by Lex McKee

article-image
photograph by Lex McKee

article-imagephotograph by Lex McKee

LE JARDIN DE NOUS DEUX
Civrieux-d'Azergues, France

article-imagephotograph by Petitge/Wikimedia

Le Jardin de Nous Deux means "The Garden of the Two of Us," and the little landscape of peaked towers and exotic designs in France was built by Charles Billy based on the travels he took with his wife. Billy began the garden in 1975, recreating some of their favorite sites, and he worked on it until he passed away in 1991. While still a private space, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Venetian palaces still remain as he left them in the romantic space.

LE PETIT-PARIS
Vaissac, France

article-imageGérard Brion at Petit-Paris (via Petit-Paris)

Also in France is another one-man wonder: Le Petit-Paris. Gérard Brion spent over two decades building the miniature of the City of Lights in his backyard. Although the diminutive Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, and Haussmannian boulevards appear as elegant as the real thing, they are all built from trash, including old soup cards, baby food jars, and cardboard. 

article-image
photograph by Gérard Brion

article-imagePetit-Paris by night (via Petit-Paris)

MINI-EUROPE
Brussels, Belgium

article-imagephotograph by Andrew Childs

If you want even more petite Paris, head to Brussels for Mini-Europe, where the Arc de Triomphe appears at a 1:25 scale along with other European Union icons. Mini-Europe was opened in 1989, and includes over 350 pieces, with a Mount Vesuvius that actually erupts and a chiming Big Ben. As a curious contrast, it is nestled at the base of the Atomium monument, which represents an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. 

article-image
The fall of the Berlin Wall at Mini-Europe (photograph by Maria Firsova)

article-imagephotograph by Jerry Pank

BEKONSCOT MODEL VILLAGE
Beaconsfield, England

article-imageBekonscot Model Village in 1988 (photograph by Robert Linsdell)

Back to England, Bekonscot is the oldest of the world's model villages. It shows life in rural England in the 1930s, and was started by an idle accountant named Roland Callingham. Originally it filled his backyard and used his swimming pool as the sea, but now Bekonscot is much expanded with water features, boats, trains, and plenty of wandering figures in the outdoor space. 

article-image
photograph by Cristian Bortes

article-image
photograph by Timo Newton-Sym

article-imagephotograph by Mark Fosh

SHANGRI-LA STONE VILLAGE
Prospect Hill, North Carolina

article-imagephotograph by C.E. Delohery

Retired tobacco farmer Henry L. Warren constructed Shangri-La Stone Village in North Carolina from concrete, stone, and thousands of arrowheads. He started back in 1968, blasting his own rock, and until he died in 1977 he could often be seen with a cigaratte and soda in hand toiling away on the red-accented buildings. Thanks to its sturdy design, the 27 buildings, including a theater, hotel, gym, and water tower, still stand. Who knows, with their low stature and stone architecture, they might outlast the bigger cities around them, leaving a strange puzzle for future archaeologists. 

article-image
photograph by C.E. Delohery

article-image
photograph by C.E. Delohery

article-imagephotograph by C.E. Delohery

MINIATURE WALCHEREN
Middelburg, The Netherlands

article-imagevia Wikimedia

Miniature Walcheren was only meant to stand for three months, but proved so popular it remains. It was commissioned by the Queen and constructed in the 1950s, replicating the city of Walcheren's best buildings at a 1:20 scale out of wood. 600 volunteers were necessary to make the little town with its windmills and charming little homes, and it also includes over 30 boats. 

article-image
via Wikimedia

article-image
photograph by Norbert Schnitzler

article-imagephotograph by Norbert Schnitzler

MINIATURK
Istanbul, Turkey

article-imagephotograph by Dzhingarova/Flickr user

Opened in 2003, Miniaturk in Istanbul is a newcomer on the tiny town scene, but it's already one of the biggest. With 160,000 square feet, it presents over 100 models. The beautiful buildings show 45 of Istanbul's landmarks, as well as other icons from Anatolia and the Ottoman Territories. 

article-image
photograph by Boris Dzhingarov

article-image
photograph by Boris Dzhingarov

article-imagephotograph by Boris Dzhingarov

MINI SIAM
Pattaya, Thailand

article-imagephotograph by Sergey/Flickr user

Mini Siam was built in 1986 in a remote area of Thailand in an attempt to bring in tourism. It worked, and the attraction continues to show some of the world's wonders at 1:25 scale, including Buckingham Palace, Angkor Wat, and the Sydney Opera House alongside historic sites from Thailand like the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the bridge over the River Kwai. 

article-imagephotograph by Sergey/Flickr user

HARTMAN'S ROCK GARDEN
Springfield, Ohio

article-imagephotograph by Cindy Funk

H.G. Hartman was toiling on a stone fish pond at his Ohio home in 1932, unemployed and looking for a purpose in the Great Depression. That's when he was inspired to create Hartman's Rock Garden, a rock village that in some 20,000 stones now replicates the White House, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Mount Vernon, and even the animals on Noah's Ark. While much is now covered in moss and mostly patrolled by small insects, it remains quietly behind its stone picket fence, representing this international impulse to reduce our world down to a smaller size. 

article-image
photograph by Cindy Funk

article-imagephotograph by Cindy Funk


Discover more small worlds & model towns on Atlas Obscura >









Shrines of Obsession: The Real-World Locations of 11 Cult Films

0
0

Some unsuccessful films are quirky enough to capture an underground fanbase, or they are screened often enough in late-night venues that they build a hardcore following. For whatever reason, the fans really love them, enough to sometimes go on pilgrimages to filming sites. Here are eleven cult films and the locations of their various filming shrines.

THE WICKER MAN (1973)
Scotland, United Kingdom 

article-imageScene from "The Wicker Man" (via pds209/Flickr user)

Once called the “Citizen Kane of horror films,” The Wicker Man (1973) concerns straitlaced Scottish police sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), who receives an anonymous letter requesting his help investigating the disappearance of a young girl, Rowan, from the remote island Summerisle. When he arrives in Summerisle, Howie is puzzled that no one seems to have even heard of Rowan. 

The film was shot in a series of small towns scattered across southeastern Scotland. In Creetown, filmmakers used the bar of the Ellangowan hotel for interior scenes in the Green Man Pub, where Howie lodges during his stay. However, he turns down offers of “company” from the pubkeeper’s daughter Willow (Britt Ekland). The staff at the Ellangowan are proud of their association with the film, displaying cast photos on the walls and offering guests directions to other nearby shooting sites. 

article-imageCulzean Castle (photograph by David Warrington)

In nearby Ayrshire, the exterior of Culzean Castle stands in for the home of the enigmatic Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). Lord Summerisle also dodges Howie’s questions about the missing girl, but explains the stranger customs Howie’s noticed by claiming the island practices pre-Christian pagan traditions. 

Shots inside Lord Summerisle’s castle were filmed elsewhere, in the Lochinch Castle at Castle Kennedy Gardens in Dumfrinich and Galloway. Lochinch Castle is not open to the public, but the grounds themselves are, and are host themselves to scenes from the film, including the community’s May Day procession, which Howie joins in secret to find Rowan. He suspects that the “pagan customs” Lord Summerisle spoke of include human sacrifice — and that Rowan is to be the next victim. 

article-imageSt. Ninian's Cave (photograph by Jonathan Hollander)

During the May Day festivities, Howie rescues Rowan, bringing her to a cave on the beach for safekeeping, only to have Rowan join the town in turning the tables on him. The beach and cave are at the St. Ninian’s Cave site, believed to be a former retreat for the Scottish Saint Ninian. The cave boasts a series of crosses scratched into the stone towards the rear, and Christian visitors often leave small crosses of their own. 

At Burrowhead, on the southwest coast, Howie finally meets the Wicker Man of the title, as well as his own fate. Today, the location of the final scenes are on the grounds of the Burrowhead Holiday Village campground, a 100-acre site overlooking the beach with views of the Isle of Man. The legs from of one of the Wicker Men once remained on the grounds as well — two wooden stumps, several feet tall, in a concrete base. However, recent visitors report that vandals have stolen the legs, sawing off all but a few inches near the base. 

article-imageThe (real) Summer Isles (via Wikimedia)

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984)
Los Angeles, California, United States

Okay, this film is bizarre. Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and rock musician, supported by a team he calls the Hong Kong Cavaliers. His experiments in inter-dimensional travel accidentally release three "Red Lectroids," an alien race imprisoned in the 8th Dimension. Once out, the group of Lectroids — lead by mad scientist Dr. John Whorfin (John Lithgow) — race to spring the rest of their people out of prison, and Buckaroo is forced to stop them, and thus save the world.

 Clear so far?

article-imageEl Mirage Dry Lake (photograph by Mitch Barrie)

The scenes where Buckaroo first tests his inter-dimensional car — and his “oscillation overthruster,” the engine which breaks down the walls between dimensions — take place in El Mirage Dry Lake and in Rabbit Springs Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert. Both are popular destinations for off-road vehicle recreational drivers, and for more conventional auto testing.

In an effort to get Buckaroo’s oscillation overthruster, the Lectroids kidnap Buckaroo’s sweetheart, Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), and hold her hostage in their headquarters, a building disguised as the tech research firm “Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems.” Most of the Yoyodyne scenes were filmed at an old tire factory in Los Angeles, which bizarrely resembles an Assyrian temple.

article-imageCitadel Outlet Mall (photograph by Mark Ou)

article-imageCitadel Outlet Mall (photograph by Eye Tunes/Flickr user)

Today, the building is home to the Citadel Outlet Mall, a shopping hotspot for bargain hunters. While the inside of the building is much cleaner than the Lectroids kept it, the façade has stayed the same.

Penny and Buckaroo first meet early in the film, during a Hong Kong Cavaliers night club gig. The club was actually a recording studio, itself built inside a warehouse for an old lumber yard. Today, the warehouse —  known as 440 Seaton — is an events space, occasionally hosting art shows and flea markets alongside weddings and parties.

article-imageSepulveda Dam (photograph by Mokwell/Wikimedia)

Fans even love the film’s closing credits, in which Buckaroo rappels down a wall and joins the rest of the cast in a victory lap around what looks like an outdoor amphitheater. The scene is at the Sepulveda Dam, one of a series of dams built along the Los Angeles River in the 1940s following a major flood in 1938. The dam’s striking look has made it a frequent location in other films as well, such as Iron Man 2 and The Fast And The Furious, as well as television shows, music videos, and commercials. It’s also a popular site for urban explorers and skaters, even though the dam itself is not open to the public. A safer bet is the surrounding Sepulveda Basin recreation area, sporting bike paths, a cricket pitch, and a Japanese garden. 

OFFICE SPACE (1999)
Austin, Texas, United States

Producers initially asked Mike Judge to set his black comedy classic somewhere like Wall Street, but he refused, placing it in the same sort of unglamorous Texas office parks he’d once worked in himself. 

Office Space is the story of Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), a computer programmer for “Initech,” where he and his friends Samir Nagheenanajar (Ajay Naidu) and Michael Bolton (David Herman) cope with dull tasks, office politics, and a malevolent printer. The Initech building is at 4120 Freidrich Lane, and is an active office park in Austin, Texas, currently home to a handful of legal offices and a collection agency.

article-image
Initech Building (photograph by Thomas Crenshaw)

Nearby is the former Alligator Grill, a Cajun restaurant which was renamed Chotchkie's for the film. Peter takes a shine to Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), one of the Chotchkie’s waitresses, who also hates her job. The site recently reopened as Baker Street Pub and Grill, a Sherlock Holmes-themed restaurant bearing little resemblance to Joanna’s old workplace. 

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)
Chicago, Illinois, United States

It’s obvious that a good deal of this film was shot in Chicago. What’s not obvious is that it was one of the first films to do so. So in addition to becoming a cult classic, The Blues Brothers put Chicago on the filmmaking map.

article-imageJoliet Prison Gate (photograph by (Jacobsteinafm/Wikimedia)

The film kicks off when Elwood Blues (Dan Akroyd) comes to collect his brother Jake (John Belushi) after a stint in prison. Jake has been in Joliet Correctional Center, a prison long referenced in blues songs, novels, and other pop culture from the 1920s and 1930s. Joliet closed in 2002, and a local history museum has been working to launch guided tours of the facility. 

The pair learn that the orphanage where they grew up is in danger of foreclosure, and brainstorm how to help. The church where Jake and Elwood finally receive their “Mission from God” to re-form their band and raise money for the orphanage is the Pilgrim Baptist Church of South Chicago. Confusingly, there are two Pilgrim Baptist Churches within a few blocks of each other. The “wrong” one, at South Indiana Avenue, is worth a visit anyway, for its architectural and historic significance. That Pilgrim Baptist was designed by noted architect Louis Sullivan, but recently suffered a fire and is still undergoing renovation. The "right" Pilgrim Baptist is at 91st Street and is a much more modest structure, formerly home to a Lutheran church.

After reuniting, the band shops for instruments at “Ray’s Music Shop,” overseen by Ray Charles. Today Ray’s is now “Shelly’s Loan Company,” at a storefront on East 47th Street. The outside wall still sports a mural commemorating Chicago music greats.

article-imageSouth Shore Center (via Oak Park Cycle Club)

The band scores a major gig at the “Palace Hotel Ballroom, 106 miles from Chicago up north on Lake Wazupumani." The building is actually right in Chicago. It’s the South Shore Cultural Center, a former country club now hosting art classes, youth programs, and cultural exhibitions. However, interior scenes at the Palace Hotel Ballroom were filmed on a Los Angeles soundstage. Film fans may recognize the inside of the South Shore center anyway — it was used in a completely different film, A League Of Their Own, for scenes set at a “charm school.”

article-imageDaley Plaza (photograph by Jaysin Trevino)

The film ends with a dramatic car chase as Jake and Elwood flee city police, National Guardsmen, an angry country and western band, and Illinois Nazis as they rush their gig’s proceeds to city hall. They park their “Bluesmobile” in Daley Plaza, a courtyard sporting a giant horsehead sculpture designed by Pablo Picasso.

article-imageChicago City Hall (photograph by Lucas/Flickr user)

They flee into the City Hall building south of the plaza, and successfully pay the deed on their orphanage — handing the funds off to Stephen Spielberg, in a cameo as the office clerk — before they are handcuffed and brought back to Joliet. 

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)
Doune Castle, Dirling, Scotland, United Kingdom 

There were supposed to be several shoot locations for this Monty Python classic. After all, King Arthur (Graham Chapman) leads his band of knights to several castles on their quest for the Holy Grail  — Camelot first, then the castle where a French knight (John Cleese) taunts them from a high tower, the Castle Anthrax where Sir Galahad (Michael Palin) encounters a harem, the Swamp Castle where Sir Lancelot (John Cleese, again) blunders into a wedding. The National Heritage Trust had initially approved several different places, but shortly before filming started, the Trust had second thoughts. 

article-imageDoune Castle (photograph by Jeff Woodgate) 

Fortunately, the Pythons had also approached two other privately owned castles, and they were still on board. So they shot nearly all of the different castle scenes at one castle in particular — Doune Castle, in Dirling — carefully selecting different rooms and different angles to disguise the fact that it was all the same building. The “Camelot” dance scene is in the main hall, and the Castle Anthrax scenes were shot in the kitchen. The wedding scenes at the “Swamp Castle” were in Doune’s courtyard.

article-imageDoune Castle (photograph by Wendy/Flickr user)

The “French Knight” scene, where Arthur and his men face taunting from a very rude Frenchman, was filmed at Doune’s battlements, while the East Wall is where Arthur argues with a pair of guards about the airspeed velocity of unladen swallows.  Doune now hosts a “Monty Python Day” every year to cater to fans, and Python alumnus Terry Jones has recorded a special audio tour of the castle which leads visitors to the specific filming locations. 

article-imageCastle Stalker (photograph by Norrie Adamson)

The only other castle used was Castle Stalker, near Argyll, which appears briefly as “the Castle Aaaaarrrrrggggghhh” where Arthur believes his quest may finally end. 

article-imagePass of Glen Coe Falls (photograph by Martin Grossniklaus)

Elsewhere in Scotland, at Glen Coe in the Highlands, is where the Pythons filmed scenes featuring the “Bridge of Death” over the “Gorge of Eternal Peril,” with a waterfall in the Pass of Glen Coe standing in for the Gorge.

THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT (1994)
New South Wales & Northern Territory, Australia 

This 1994 film chronicles what is possibly the most glamorous road trip ever, after Sydney-based drag performer Tick (Hugo Weaving) ropes his costars Adam (Guy Pearce) and Bernadette (Terrence Stamp) into doing a gig at a remote Australian resort. 

One of the trio’s first stopovers is in mining town Broken Hill, where they check into “Mario’s Palace,” a hotel festooned with an eye-popping variety of “tack-o-rama” murals before an afternoon of shopping capped off by cocktails back at the hotel bar

The hotel still exists — now under the simple name “The Palace” — as do the murals, all done by local artist Gordon Waye. Film producer Al Clark loved the Palace so much he named it “Drag queen heaven.” Writer and director Stephan Elliot also became such a fan he donated “Priscilla,” the bus used as the trio’s transport in the film, to Broken Hill, encouraging the town to display the bus near the hotel. As of late 2013, Broken Hill was still trying to find a suitable place for Priscilla. 

article-imageWhite Cliffs Underground Motel (photograph by Richard Gifford)

The welcome is less warm in Coober Pedy, another mining town where Adam is attacked by a homophobic mob and the trio’s bus is vandalized. This time the group is staying in the White Cliffs Underground Motel. Most residential buildings and hotels in Coober Pedy are below ground for comfort in the brutally hot desert climate (the name “Coober Pedy” is actually taken from an Aboriginal term meaning “White Man’s Burrow”). White Cliffs has been host to frequent gatherings of the film’s fans. 

article-imageLasseters Casino (photograph by Andy Mitchel)

The final stop is in Alice Springs, where Tick reveals the connection he has with the resort’s manager Marion (Sarah Chadwick) and her son Benjamin (Mark Holmes). The resort is the Lasseters Hotel Casino, a splashy hotel with the only licensed casino in Alice Springs. 

article-imageKings Canyon Rim Walk (photograph by Lawrence Murray)

Before the team does their act, they indulge Adam in fulfilling a lifelong fantasy — climbing to the top of Uluru in full drag. Out of respect to the Aṉangu people — who have requested that visitors not climb Uluru at all, much less in formalwear — the actors instead hiked through Kings Canyon, part of the Watarrka National Park southwest of Alice Springs. The Rim Walk hiking trail leads visitors to most of the spots from the movie; one site on the trail has even been dubbed “Priscilla’s Crack”.  

THE “MAD MAX” TRILOGY  (1979/1981/1985)
Sydney, Melbourne, Clunes, and New South Wales, Australia 

Even though the Mad Max trilogy shares some locations with Priscilla Queen of the Desert, it tells a very different story — that of Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), a former cop thrust into a profoundly different way of life after a nuclear apocalypse.  

article-imageSpotswood Pumping Station (photograph by Rexness/Flickr user)

In the first film, Max is still a cop of sorts. He is part of the Main Force Patrol, a self-appointed police force trying to maintain order. Scenes at the “Halls of Justice,” the Main Force Patrol’s base of operations, were shot at two gas pumping stations in Melbourne — Spotswood and Port Melbourne Gasworks.

Spotswood is still operational, and offers guided tours of the plant. However, the tours cater more towards the facility’s current operations rather than the film. Port Melbourne Gasworks was already closed at the time of filming, and has since been extensively remodeled into the Gasworks Arts Park, an art studio and performance space complex boasting 16 artists-in-residence and offering hundreds of annual exhibitions, performances, classes, and workshops.

article-imageClunes Streetscape (photograph by Mattinbgn/Wikimedia)

Max’s main headache in the first film is a team of outlaw bikers making their home in a ghost town they call "Wee Jerusalem." It’s actually Clunes, a small town 91 miles away from Melbourne. A former gold mining town, Clunes’ council has revived it as an international “booktown,” opening dozens of used bookstores and hosting an annual book festival drawing visitors from across Australia. However, Clunes didn’t do much to change the town’s appearance, and it looks much the same as it did in the film.

article-imageEmu Creek Bridge (photograph by Mattinbgn/Wikimedia)

The biker gang pursues Max even after he quits the force and retires to the countryside with his family. They kill his wife and child and attempt to do him in as well. But Max fights back, dispatching them all one by one before setting out to wander in the Outback. The first film’s final scene, where Max handcuffs the gang’s leader to a burning car and leaves him to die, is at the Emu Creek Bridge just outside the Melbourne suburb of Sunbury.

article-imageSilverton Hotel (photograph by Amanda Slater)

Most of the second film takes place on open roads, so it’s hard to pinpoint exact locations. Generally, though, they were all in the land surrounding Broken Hills and near Silverton, a struggling town with only 50 residents. Silverton has turned its hotel into a museum of sorts, commemorating the many film crews who have passed through over the years. A replica of one of the cars from The Road Warrior is parked just outside. Many Silverton residents can also give driving directions to some of the approximate film sites. 

article-imageBrick Pit Walk (photograph by Gord Webster)

In the final film, Max comes upon the rough city “Bartertown,” where the town’s leader Auntie Entity (Tina Turner) enlists him for a mission.  A former brick quarry stood in for Bartertown, and was nearly bulldozed in the 1990s to make way for Sydney’s Olympic Park, but developers discovered a colony of rare green and golden bell frogs living there. That section of the quarry — and, thus, a section of the Bartertown film set — was preserved as a nature walk in Sydney’s Olympic Park.

After running afoul of Auntie Entity, Max is kicked out of Bartertown and sent wandering again. He comes to an oasis where he meets a tribe of children descended from the survivors of a long-ago plane crash. These scenes were all shot in Mermaids’ Cave, a sandstone cave in Megalong valley in the Blue Mountains north of Sydney.

The children believe Max is the reincarnation of their former pilot, come to lead them home. When he refuses, a team of disillusioned children strikes off on their own, stumbling upon Bartertown. Max springs them and they escape through the desert with Auntie Entity in pursuit — until Max meets Jedediah, a cave-dwelling bush pilot who can fly them to safety.  

article-imageCrocodile Harry at home (photograph by Ben Cooper)

Jedediah’s cave was the actual home of “Crocodile Harry,” a Coober Pedy eccentric whose exploits allegedly inspired the film Crocodile Dundee.  Harry relished his home’s fame, and happily gave tours to visitors, sharing his own stories about his boyhood in Latvia and years as a crocodile hunter and opal miner. Harry died in 2006, but his home has been preserved as “Crocodile Harry’s Underground Nest,” and is still open to visitors. (Look for the collection of bras on one of the ceilings — one of them is allegedly from Tina Turner!) 

WITHNAIL AND I (1987)
London and Cumbria, United Kingdom 

Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and Marwood (Paul McGann) are a pair of struggling actors, sharing a dismal flat in London’s Camden Town neighborhood in the late 1960s. The film begins when Withnail, fed up with their circumstances, suggests they borrow his uncle Monty’s (Richard Griffiths) country cottage for a vacation.

article-imageWest House (photograph by Peter Damian)

Sadly, the pair’s own flat has been demolished, but Uncle Monty’s London flat is still standing. It’s West House, a landmark example of the Queen Anne revival building style, in Chelsea. The house is not open to visitors, but the building’s exterior is obvious to passersby.

article-imageSleddale Hall, 2007 (photograph by Marwood/Wikimedia)

Uncle Monty’s cottage “Crow Crag” is actually Sleddale Hall, a historic farmhouse near the town of Shap in the north of England. Like West House, the interior of Sleddale Hall is inaccessible to the public. Filmmakers used the exterior of the house, the grounds, and the hall’s kitchen, where in one scene, the pair try to cook a chicken very much from scratch.  

article-imageThe Crown (photograph by Roland Turner)

The pair venture into the nearby town once or twice to investigate the “nightlife.” Fans of the film have searched in vain for these locations near Sledalle Hall, but the scenes were actually filmed further south in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, closer to London.

In one scene the pair blunder into a tea room where Withnail demands “the finest wines known to humanity." Today, the building is a pharmacy, Cox and Robinson. Across the square — also used in the film — is a pub named the Crown, renamed “The King Henry” for the film. The Crown prominently showcases its involvement with the film on its website today.

At the film’s end, back in London, Marwood finally gets a big acting break and has to leave Withnail behind. They take one last walk through Regents Park in London, finally saying their goodbyes just outside London’s Zoo to the north of the park; a heartsick Withnail lingers to perform a speech from Hamlet for three of the zoo’s uncomprehending wolves. 

HAROLD AND MAUDE (1972)
San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States

This film features an unlikely May-December romance between 20-year-old Harold (Bud Cort), a rich kid obsessed with death, and Maude (Ruth Gordon), an almost-80-year-old with unconventional habits.

article-imageHoly Cross Cemetery (photograph by Tom Hilton)

Harold first sees Maude at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, where both are crashing the same funeral. They meet again at a different funeral, in the St. Thomas Aquinas church in Palo Alto. Maude breaks the ice by offering Harold licorice, and the two become fast friends.  Holy Cross and St. Thomas Aquinas are both open to the public. The Holy Cross Cemetery is of particular historic interest, as a number of notable San Francisco residents have been interred there.

article-imageSutro Heights (photograph by Eugene Kim)

Harold’s controlling mother (Vivian Pickles), hoping to sort her son out, enlists Harold’s World War II veteran uncle Victor (Charles Tyner) to persuade Harold to follow him into the military. Victor takes Harold on a stroll through San Francisco’s Sutro Heights Park, where Victor regales Harold with a series of war stories. The park is the former estate of Adolph Sutro, a former mayor of San Fransico, and includes the ruins of the Sutro Baths, a public indoor swimming pool complex Sutro created for San Franciscan’s public use.

article-imageSutro Baths (photograph by Julnyes/Flickr user)

The bath complex boasted seven pools — six saltwater, one freshwater — and an ice skating rink in winter, along with a 3,700-seat amphitheater, private party rooms, and a natural history museum to boot. Despite these wonders, the facility continuously lost money, and finally closed in 1964. A 1966 fire erased everything but the concrete foundations.

Near the baths’ ruins, Harold and Victor come upon Maude “by accident,” where Harold — in a scene he and Maude have prearranged — pretends to kill her in front of a shocked Victor.

article-imageSanta Cruz Boardwalk (photograph by Matt314/Wikimedia)

Harold finally tells Maude he loves her after an outing at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, giving her a token he’s made at one of the boardwalk’s “Metal  Typer” souvenir penny machines. Maude is touched, yet throws the token into the Pacific just off the boardwalk  — “so I’ll always know where it is,” she tells Harold.  

THE WARRIORS (1979)
New York, New York, United States

Some locations in this film are easy to find — like the Ferris wheel in the very first shot. Deno’s “Wonder Wheel” has loomed over Coney Island’s boardwalk since 1920, and is no doubt one of the last things which the film’s stars — a street gang called the Warriors — see before leaving their turf to join a summit of all the city’s gangs up in the Bronx.

article-imageWonder Wheel (photograph by Colin D. Young)

article-image
Roger Hill in The Warriors

At the summit, enigmatic gangleader Cyrus (Roger Hill) preaches a citywide gang truce. Since they collectively outnumber the police, he argues, by working together they can take over the city entirely. But Luther (David Patrick Kelly), a member of the rabblerousing Rogues, shoots him and then frames the Warriors for the killing, turning every gang in the city against them and forcing Warrior Swan (Michael Beck) to lead the gang back to Brooklyn safely. Ostensibly, the summit is far to the north, in the Bronx’s Van Cortland Park, but the scene was actually shot in a playground in Riverside Park, near the 96th Street entrance.

The film relies on Riverside Park for a few more scenes. Near the 100th Street entrance is the Fireman’s Memorial, a 1913 landmark the Warriors pass on an escape from the bizarrely-clad Baseball Furies gang.  Further into the park, the gang loses Ajax (James Remar) when he stops to hit on a woman on a park bench (Mercedes Ruehl), only to learn she’s an undercover cop.

article-imageHoyt-Schermerhorn Station (photograph by Eli Duke)

The gang is chased in and out of a number of subways. Here, too, one stop stands in for a couple different ones. Two platforms at Brooklyn’s Hoyt-Schemerhorn station have gone unused since 1981, making them an easy location choice for film and television shoots. Hoyt has played host to everyone from Eddie Murphy (in Coming to America II)¸ Michael Jackson (in the video for “Bad,” and in the film The Wiz), Michael J. Fox (in The Hard Way), and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In The Warriors, the station stands in for the 96th Street Station, where a group of transit cops give chase and split the gang up, and for the Union Square station, where they find each other again.

Sadly, the location for one of the film’s most iconic final scenes is no longer accessible. When the Warriors finally return to Coney Island, they find that Luther waiting for them.They huddle under the boardwalk to plan strategy and arm themselves as Luther waits outside taunting them. The scene was shot under the boardwalk entrance at Stillwell Avenue and West 12th. However, the city has since redesigned the entrance, filling in under the boardwalk and adding ramps. 

While in New York, you can also visit the soundstages the film used, sort of. The Warriors used the historic Kaufman-Astoria studios, a film studio from the 1920s which had been temporarily taken over by the military for the production of training films. The Warriors was one of the first productions to use Kaufman-Astoria after it rejoined the private sector. It's still a busy studio today — it's hosted all the Men in Black films and several of the Bourne Identity films, as well as televisions shows like The Cosby Show and Sesame Street. The Museum of the Moving Image on the grounds gives a fascinating look into the history of the space and into the craft of moviemaking in general. 

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)
Oakley Court Hotel, Windsor 

This is arguably the Platonian ideal of all cult films. Most of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was shot in Bray Studios in Maidenhead, on the soundstages owned by longtime film production company Hammer Films. Bray Studios' building is currently facing conversion into a luxury housing development, but a vocal group of cineastes has been working to preserve the site. 

article-imageOakley Court (photograph by George Grinsted)

The only remote locations were at the Oakley Court, a Gothic mansion next door to the studios which turned up in a number of Hammer Films as a result. Its gloomy exterior doesn’t dissuade sweethearts Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon) from asking for help after their car breaks down, but the castle’s owner, the enigmatic Dr. Frank-n-Furter (Tim Curry) has very different plans in store for them.

Today the Oakley Court is a luxury hotel, but has retained its Gothic exterior and the entry hall where Frank makes his grand entrance. The hotel also hosts the annual “Time Warp Picnics” thrown by the film’s official fan club.


Visit more film locations on Atlas Obscura >








Ruins of a Human Zoo at the Forgotten Edge of Paris

0
0

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in ParisRuins of the Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale (all photographs by the author)

Colonial exhibitions, showing the exotic plants, animals, and other products of the European empires, were not uncommon in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sometimes these went so far as to exhibit actual people from territories in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The remains of one of these "human zoos" has been quietly left to ruins at the eastern edge of the Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris.

From May to October of 1907, an estimated two million people attended this exhibition of humanity, purchasing food and refreshments while viewing the temporary communities. People from French colonies including Tunisia, Morocco, Congo, Madagascar, and the Sudan were set up in replica villages like a living curiosity cabinet. 

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in ParisLa Réunion Pavilion

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
The Tunisia Pavilion

The Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale dates to before the colonial exhibition. It was started in 1899 as a laboratory to test how to better cultivate plants both tropical and non-native for growth in the French empire, such as cacao, coffee, vanilla, and bananas. (Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale basically means "Garden of Tropical Agriculture.") Some of these old greenhouses still remain among the small sprawl of what is now a park, open to the public since 2006, but still with its abandoned pavilions and monuments haunting the lush terrain.

All reports I'd read before journeying on the RER to Nogent sure Marne and walking through the quiet residential streets to the Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale had been of the unsettling isolation of the park, where it seemed no one dared to tread. However, on the morning of my visit there were families with strollers, and several groups of visitors discussing the strange park, as well as some individuals studiously studying the informational placards now installed for each abandoned pavilion. The stately Indochina Pavilion — a colonial exhibition hub for displaying artifacts and products from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam — has been restored into a center for the City of Paris to host exhibitions and other programs. The 4.5 hectares of the public park, still sprouting tropical plants and bamboo, are at least no longer a complete secret in the city's history.  

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in ParisAbandoned greenhouses

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in ParisColonial exhibition bridge

That's not to say it isn't a spooky space, even in the spring sunshine. It's one thing to read about human zoos, to research figures like the Khoikhoi Sarah Baartman who died in Paris, her body's curves a spectacle to the end of her days, and pygmy Ota Benga with his filed teeth living in the Bronx Zoo. It's quite another to actually walk up to a facsimile of Tunisian architecture and know this is part of the strange environment given as a habitat to people brought far from their homes, often under false promises. (It's hard to forget the Inuits lured by Robert Peary to New York being promised "nice warm houses in the sunshine land," and being left in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History.) 

Alongside the old pavilions are war monuments to soldiers from the colonies tucked among the foliage, a reminder of the battles fought not just by the French in these distant lands, but the people they enlisted there to join this foreign cause. There are also relics of countries that were only temporarily carved from Africa in the French Empire, such as a pavilion for Dahomey, a former French colony in West Africa that existed from 1904 to 1958.

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in ParisIndochina Pavilion

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in ParisThe Dahomey Pavilion

The Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale wasn't totally forgotten after the 1907 colonial exhibition. The Guyana Pavilion was later used as an agriculture genetics laboratory by Joseph-Alfred Massibot until he perished in an airplane crash on January 8, 1948, in Algeria. The Tunisia Pavilion became a chemistry laboratory in the 1920s, and then was later used for plant research. There was another colonial exhibition — the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale, also in the Bois de Vincennes — that drew a crowd of 33 million over six months. Some of its statues showing scenes like an African gazing up at a European are now tossed aside in a corner of the Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale. 

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in ParisStatues from the 1931 colonial exhibition

However, for decades it was totally abandoned, closed behind fences and seen only by trespassers. Its 10-foot-tall red torii gate may now be open to anyone, but this is a place still searching for a purpose. That's not to say there isn't an effort. Last year circus artist Johann Le Guillerm was an artist-in-residence, and the presence of locals shows that it's at least a draw as a community park. Yet the future of the ruins themselves seems less certain. Perhaps they'll just be left to linger in shadows of the trees and tropical foliage, an echo of a not-so-distant past of colonialism that remains here and in those communities severed by an empire's expansion. 

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
Entrance to the Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
The Tunisia Pavilion 

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
The Guyana Pavilion

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
Monument "aux soldats noirs morts pour la France" — "to black soldiers who died for France"

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
Morocco Pavilion

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
Morocco Pavilion

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
Morocco Pavilion

Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale human zoo ruins in Paris
La Réunion Pavilion seen through the bamboo


JARDIN D'AGRONOMIE TROPICALE, Paris, France 








Airplane Food: Five Aircraft Turned into Restaurants

0
0

article-image
What about piña coladas inside this plane in Costa Rica? (photograph by Jesús Rodríguez Martínez)

Forget the peanuts. Forget the cheap yet expensive snacks you can get on any old jetliner at 30,000 feet. If you want to experience a true gourmet dining or drinking experience on aircraft, you have to go to the planes on the ground.

How about some killer Ghanaian duck groundnut soup with fufu on an earthbound DC-10? Would you like some Costa Rican fried calamari on a Fairchild C-123? What about a Big Mac on a DC-3, or some salmon neptune on a KC-97 transport plane that will never fly again?

For some reason, the world over, restaurateurs have looked at old and dead aircraft and thought: "Now this would be a fine restaurant." Aircraft of all types — but predominantly airliners — have started their new lives as restaurants and bars at points all over the globe. Some restaurants play up the aircraft as a home for a good meal or drink. Other aircraft restaurant owners seem to treat the formerly flight-worthy shells of their aircraft as nothing but unromantic, durable containers for their culinary dreams, parked around the world like downed birds stripped of wings.

La Tante DC 10 Restaurant
McDonnell Douglas DC-10
Accra, Ghana

article-image
The La Tante DC 10 Restaurant may seem out of place next to this building, but it's not far from the Accra, Ghana, airport (photograph by Jeffery A. Adjei)

Climb aboard this garishly painted former DC-10 which was used by Ghana Airways before the company went bankrupt in 2005. Colorful patterns top the airliner seats, and the restaurant serves West African and Ghanaian food, such as the fish palava sauce with eba and tilapia with banku. Yes, there might be a flashing neon strip down the side of the center aisle in the jet, but that's only to help direct the restaurant's full cargo of 118 guests.

Over a period of several years, a private-partner venture restored the DC-10 and converted it into a restaurant, sporting the colors of its sponsor, Club Premium Lager. The drink is an American-style lager made in Ghana. The jet has certainly gotten plenty of press, and it's certainly hard to miss. The novelty is something Ghanaians still seem to enjoy — it's known locally as the Green Plane. A Chinese news crew even made a trip to tell the jet's story.

article-image
Club Premium Lager, made in Ghana, is trumpeted by the La Tante DC 10 Restaurant's outside paint and is prominently on tap inside. (photography by Jeffery A. Adjei)

The Airplane Restaurant
Boeing KC-97
Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

article-image
This KC-97 Stratotanker was formerly a air-to-air refueler for the Texas Air National Guard (photograph by Xnatedawgx)

This Boeing KC-97 is still dressed in the U.S. Air Force paint in which it spent its life after it rolled off the assembly line in 1953. In 2002, it started its second life as a restaurant in Colorado Springs, Colorado — the home of the U.S. Air Force Academy — right next to a Radisson Hotel. The KC-97 is one of the largest piston-engine aircrafts ever built by Boeing, and now, as The Airplane Restaurant, seats up to 275 diners and hold numerous photos and artifacts.

The aircraft restaurant's entryway and main dining area sit outside the plane, and include an arched ceiling vaulting over the plane's left wing. Inside, two-person seating strings along both sides of a central aisle. And yes, the Airplane Restaurant caters, serving crab and shrimp stuffed mushrooms, Italian penne, chicken marsala, and "BurgerTrays," which are exactly what you'd imagine.

El Avión Restaurant
Fairchild C-123
Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica

article-image
It seems likely that when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency sent this plane to Central America to covertly transport arms, it never expected it would end up as a bar (photograph by David Berkowitz)

It's safe to say the Reagan Administration's convoluted attempt to supply arms to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s was an unmitigated disaster — one that ended when a U.S. plane crashed, revealing the scheme. The plane, a Fairchild C-123, is the sister aircraft of this plane now tucked away in Costa Rica as El Avión Restaurant. After the scandal, the plane was abandoned in the San Jose, Costa Rica, airport, before it was purchased in 2000 for $3,000 and split into sections, shipped via ocean ferry and transported on old railroad bridges to its current resting spot atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

The restaurant's chairs are sheltered by the aircraft's wings and a roof extends behind the plane, underneath lazily turning fans and wooden chandeliers. Want food? Think seafood, steaks, nachos, salads, and French onion soup. Inside the Fairchild's cargo hold, a small bar will keep you properly lubricated with piña coladas and batidos — essentially fruit smoothies you can get with alcohol in them. Take the time to examine all the stickers covering the fuselage, left by visitors over the years.

article-image
Food and drinks just taste better under the wing of an abandoned ex-military aircraft in Costa Rica. (photograph by Jesús Rodríguez Martínez

McDonald's
McDonnell Douglas DC-3
Taupo, New Zealand 

article-imageOne one side and inside — a McDonald's restaurant. On the other side, a prime parking spot to protect your vehicle from the elements (via russavia)

Yeah, yeah, you know all about the McDonald's chain fast food restaurant and its food. But have you eaten it in an airplane, overlooking a parking lot? We bet the answer is no. Go to Taupo, New Zealand, where an old DC-3 is perched above traffic as an eye-catching sign and a small seating area.

The DC-3 was built in 1943, and after a stint as a troop transport during World War II, it was owned by the Australian National Airways and spent some time as a crop duster before it was retired and placed in storage in 1984. Tuapo mayor Rick Cooper bought the plane a year later for $20,000. It was installed as part of a McDonald's restaurant in Taupo in 1990. The restaurant, owned by Des and Eileen Byrne, has been named one of the top 10 McDonald's locations in the world.

Air Lekkerbek Bar & Restaurant
NAMC YS-11
Phillipsburg, St. Maarten, Dutch Antilles

article-image
In case you didn't notice, Heineken might just be the drink of choice aboard the Air Lekkerbek Bar & Restaurant (photograph by wanderinguk/Flickr user)

It started as a Japanese-made, 45-seat puddlejumper of an airliner for WinAir. But the NAMC YS-11-111 was stripped down at the nearby airport and toted across the bay to its present resting place. Now it's Air Lekkerbek, a bar and restaurant on the Dutch side of the island of St. Maarten (Saint-Martin on the French side), with additional flag-festooned seating on the outside, because 45 seats just aren't enough. The jet might be missing part of its tail, but guess what? That's just a good space to fit another Heineken sign.

Outside the entrance steps, you're greeted by a very Dutch-looking wooden sign of a bartender serving Heineken. It's surprisingly airy inside the jet, with white paint, stained wood chairs, and a colorful pattern across the overhead baggage area keeping things light. Thinking about food to accompany your glass of Heineken? Air Lekkerbek offers grilled meat of all kinds, seafood, poultry and lunch platters and sandwiches.

And sorry, it's closed on Sunday. No Heineken on Sundays.

article-image
As the Air Lekkerbeck Bar & Restaurant shows, just because you're dining in an old airplane doesn't mean it can't be a cheery meal. (photograph wanderinguk/Flickr user)


Find more of the world's most unusual restaurants on Atlas Obscura >








The Skeletal Remains of a Hellhound in the Folklore of Devil Dogs

0
0

article-image 
Aksel Waldemar Johannessen, "Dog and Raven" (1918), woodcut on paper (via Wikimedia)

Last year DigVentures, a London-based archaeology group, unearthed the bones of a gigantic dog from a shallow grave, about 20 inches deep, in the ruins of Leiston Abbey, Suffolk. Archaeologists estimate that the canine stood more than seven-feet-tall on its hind legs and weighed about 200 pounds. DigVentures researchers believe the canine bones likely date to when the abbey was active, so are likely medieval, but they are awaiting confirmation from testing.

English folklore is full of stories about a supernatural dog, known as Black Shuck, that prowled the countryside around Leiston Abbey about 500 years ago. Due to the size and date of the bones, many have speculated that these large canine remains could be connected to the legend of Black Shuck.

article-imageLeiston Abbey (photograph by Ian Patterson)

article-imageA Middle Ages wood cut of a rabid dog (via Wikimedia)

Hellhounds in Mythology

hellhound, or devil dog, is a supernatural animal found throughout mythology, folklore, and fiction. Hellhound legends date back to ancient times and sightings and attacks have been reported throughout history. Hellhounds tend to have black fur, glowing eyes, supernatural strength or speed, large teeth, long claws, and sometimes multiple heads.

Devil dogs guard the entrance to the Underworld and the grounds of graveyards, they also hunt lost souls and protect a supernatural treasure. In European folklore, seeing a hellhound or hearing it howl is seen as an omen of doom or the cause of death.

Hellhounds show up in many cultures and have many names including the three-headed Cerberus in Greek mythology, Anubis in Egyptian mythology, Garmr in Norse mythology, Perro Negro in Latin America, and Black Shuck in England. Most recently hellhounds were used in fiction in The Hound of the Baskervillesthe Grim in the Harry Potter series, and in movies like The Omen and Cujo.

article-imageBlack Dog of Bungay, Suffolk on a street light (photograph by Keith Evans)

The Folklore of Black Shuck

Black Shuck, Old Shuck, Old Shock, or Shuck is the name given to a medieval hellhound in England. This devil dog was said to have black fur, flaming eyes, sharp teeth and claws, and great strength. Locals described sightings of Black Shuck in graveyards, forests, and roadsides. Shuck’s most famous attack happened on August 4, 1577 at two churches in Blythburgh and Bungay in the English countryside.

During a storm on August 4, 1577, Black Shuck reportedly broke through the doors of Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh, about seven miles from Leiston Abbey, and charged through a large congregation. It was during this attack that he allegedly killed a man and a boy, before the church steeple collapsed through the roof. As the hellhound departed, he left claw marks on the north door of Holy Trinity Church that are supposedly still visible today.

article-imageHoly Trinity Church, Blythburgh, Suffolk (photograph by Robert Cutts)

article-imageSt Mary's Church, Bungay (photograph by William Metcalfe)

The same day, Black Shuck was rumored to have rampaged through St Mary’s Church in Bungay, about 12 miles away, which was described in A Straunge and Terrible Wunder, a pamphlet written by the Reverend Abraham Fleming in 1577:

“This black dog, or the divel in such a linenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a mome[n]t where they kneeled, they stra[n]gely dyed.”

article-imageTitle page of Rev. Abraham Fleming's account of "Black Shuck" — "A straunge, and terrible wunder — at the church of Bungay, Suffolk in 1577 (via Wikimedia)

Though musing about the earthly remains of a legendary creature or cryptid is always fun, this giant skeleton recently found at Leiston Abbey is likely the remains of an abbot’s faithful canine companion or hunting dog. At best, the sightings of this huge, domesticated dog by superstitious people may have sparked the rumors about Black Shuck.


For more fascinating stories of forensic anthropology visit Dolly Stolze's Strange Remains, where a version of this article also appeared








Book Towns: Where Reading Is the Reason to Live

0
0

article-imageThe "Honesty Bookshop" in Hay-on-Wye (photograph by Zach Beauvais)

Some small towns in the rural reaches that lost their former industries have reimagined themselves as "book towns." By filling empty storefronts with used and antiquarian bookshops, and hosting literary festivals, the goal is to attract new visitors in the form of bibliophiles. 

The book towns are officially united through the International Organisation of Book Towns. The movement started in 1961 with Richard Booth in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, and now includes towns across Europe and in Malaysia, Korea, and Australia. However, the drive for a sustainable tourism development program in these rural areas has hit some hurdles in recent years with the consolidation of the used book trade online and rise of the e-book. As Adrian Turpin, director of the literary festival in Wigtown, Scotland's book town, told the BBC in 2012:

"There was a time when second-hand book sellers in book towns were first of all selling books and secondly selling the experience of browsing. Now it is almost the other way around."

Despite these recent changes in the literary landscape, the book towns thrive on. Here are five of our favorites, and you can find even more on the International Organisation of Book Towns site

Hay-on-Wye, Wales

article-imagephotograph by ismas/Flickr user

Starting with the book town's birthplace, Hay-on-Wye, Wales, has about two dozen book shops, ranging from Murder and Mayhem focused on crime and horror to the Castle Book Store nestled in and around a 12th century chateau. The town of just under 2,000 also hosts an "honesty bookshop," where you make your selection against a backdrop of some old ruins and leave your money in a box. 

article-imagephotograph by Mark Chatterley

Fjærland, Norway

article-imagephotograph by Eduardo

The stunning little town of Fjærland, Norway, was only accessible by boat until 1985, but now with a road draws in a steady tourist trade. Many come for the books, which cluster in former cow sheds and pig pens as well as other structures in the area where settlement dates to the Viking Age. Fjærland started as a book town officially in 1996, and alongside the glaciers and fjords still entices a reading crowd. 

article-imagephotograph by Per Olav Bøyum

Redu, Belgium

article-imagephotograph by Dimitri Neyt

Calling itself the "Village du Livre," Redu, Belgium, joined as a book town in 1984. With about 400 residents lodged amidst the Ardennes forest, the town has over 20 bookshops with specialties ranging from nautical tomes to science and medicine, all with multiple languages for the Belgian crowd. Each August, Redu also hosts the Nuit du Livre, where all the bookstores stay open through the night. 

article-imagephotograph by Jean Housen

Sedbergh, England

article-imagephotograph by Andrew Bowden

 As Visit Sedbergh states: "The Sedbergh book town project was started after the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in order to encourage an increase in the number of visitors, whose enjoyment of the beautiful countryside around Sedbergh supports the functioning of vital town centre amenities." The English town's main street is now lined with book shops, making it the third book town in the UK after Hay-on Wye in Wales and Wigtown in Scotland. Sedbergh itself is surrounded by hills where the local economy once focused on farming and the production of wool clothing, but now its aim is to secure a future in books. 

article-imagephotograph by Steve F.

Urueña, Spain

article-imagephotograph by Frank Baulo

The medieval town of Ureña in Spain has just over 200 citizens, and has revitalized many of its old buildings through the book trade. One of the about a dozen shops is in a wine cellar (and specializes in wine-focused literature, naturally), while another concentrates on bull fighting. There's also the e-LEA Centre with workshops and exhibitions on reading and writing, as well as the Alcuino Caligrafía that celebrates calligraphy. It's all set in one of the most picturesque, nearly perfectly preserved medieval towns in the Castile-Leon region, where through reading visitors may continue to wander its stone streets, perhaps while lost in thought through literature. 

article-image
photograph by Luis Zamarreño Cosme

article-imagephotograph by txefar/Flickr user


Discover more literary wonders on Atlas Obscura >








Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images