Walking through the Catacombs of San Gaudioso is a study in intergenerational cooperation. As you enter, you're greeted by a fifth century fresco of the Apostle Peter, his hands clearly beckoning you in, his entire head effaced by time. Minutes later, you're face-to-face with the skull of an 18th century nobleman, stuck in the wall over a portrait of its previous owner.

Above you, through the stone ceilings, cars rumble through the streets of modern-day Rione Sanità, a neighborhood smack in the middle of Naples that is caught in the claws of a global recession. And in front of you, explaining all of this, is an enthusiastic Neapolitan teen—the only reason you get to go down here in the first place.

These teen tour guides are members of La Paranza Cooperative—a group of young locals united by their desire to help their city and their love of the catacombs, which they reopened to the public. "The silence, the smell, and the history, it gives you this feeling," says Vincenzo Porzio, the organization's communications operator. "It's like traveling back in time."

Porzio and four of his friends started La Paranza Cooperative ten years ago, for two reasons. First, their community was hurting. The recession hit southern Italy hard: about a fifth of citizens are unemployed, and for young people, the statistic rises to 75 percent. Without employment prospects, many of Porzio's peers have trouble envisioning a future for themselves. Some flee to Berlin and London. Others end up joining the mafia, which has used this disillusionment to swell its ranks.

Thanks to centuries of biased urban planning, Rione Sanità is even worse off than your average district. Back in the 17th century, Porzio explains, Neapolitan nobles would travel down into the Rione Sanità valley on their way from the center of Naples to the Royal Palace in Capodimonte, on the city's northern edge.

This route was popular, but indirect, and the diplomats eventually funded a bridge that linked the center and the palace directly. This cut down on travel time for the royal family, but completely isolated Rione Sanità. At that point, the district "started to become like a ghetto," and never stopped, says Porzio.

This gave Porzio and his friends another impetus: "We needed to see our cultural heritage valorized," he says. Rione Sanità is literally full of history, as the city sits on top of nine different catacombs and ossuaries, carved into the earth over centuries. The ancient Romans webbed the sides of the valley with tunnels, which they used to store water. In 452 AD, when the bishop St. Gaudiosus died in Naples, he was buried in the tunnels. Fifth-century tourists flocked to his gravesite, and the ancient infrastructure became an underground cemetery—the Catacombs of San Gaudioso.

The entrance to the catacombs lies under the altar of the Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanita, itself a marvel of baroque architecture, full of sun-drenched marble and topped with a green and yellow ceramic dome. Here was a portal to another time, sitting unused inside the city's most beautiful building. If people had been literally driving over Rione Sanità, maybe this could make them slow down.

After what another founding member called "some pretty serious negotiations" with the Vatican, which is in charge of Catholic relics, the five teenagers linked up with a local priest, raised seed money from local donors, and began leading tours of the catacombs. "We didn't wait for the public administration," says Porzio. "We worked by ourselves."

Fast forward ten years, and La Paranza Cooperative is a thriving, economically sustainable business. The five volunteers are now 20 paid employees, and they lead 70,000 visitors on catacomb tours every year—visitors who then patronize other local hotels, shops, and restaurants. 

"We have met really nice people," says Porzio. Some of these people turned out to be local archeologists, who are helping them open more and more catacombs, and keep the art and bones inside safe for future generations. Others were electricians and engineers—the tunnels are now lit with LEDs, and several of them are handicapped-accessible. "Between frescos, mosaics, and places you can walk in now, we have restored 10,522 square meters of cultural heritage," says Porzio.

La Paranza does a lot of work aboveground too. They have part ownership in two bed and breakfasts—one a transformed convent, the other a rehabilitated monastery, naturally. They spurred the creation of a youth orchestra, a theater company, and two "homework houses." On weekends, they lead longer tours through the whole city, dipping in and out of historic churches, down into the catacombs, and then back up into the streets where all of their work got started. It's a lot of logistics for a Sunday, but Porzio doesn't mind. "It's a job which we don't actually call a job," says Porzio. "We're working for the image of our city."

Sitting in the middle of Taihape, a small town of 1,640 in New Zealand, rests a gigantic iron boot. This multicolored, climbable gumboot may seem randomly placed at first, but it is actually there as a result of a fictional character that is Taihape’s singular claim to fame.

John Clarke, a satirist from New Zealand, often played a fictional character named “Fred Dagg” in his TV sketches. Dagg represented a stereotypical farmer from New Zealand, or, in Clarke's words, a "Kiwi bloke." As was the case with many of the farmers in the region, Dagg wore gumboots on his feet.

Clarke had to choose a hometown for Dagg, and he decided on Taihape. The small town took its 15 minutes of fame to its full advantage. Taihape was soon dubbed the “Gumboot Capital of the World," and, beginning ten years after Dagg's first appearance, the town began to celebrate “Gumboot Day” on the Tuesday following Easter every year.

Beginning in 1985 and growing in popularity ever since, Gumboot Day revolves around the Gumboot Toss, where hundreds of contestants chuck men’s size eight gumboots as far as they can in hopes of setting the Gumboot Toss world record. Other competitions on Gumboot Day include the best-dressed gumboot and the "shoot the loop" competition.

Taihape's bizarre gumboot attraction has completely shaped the city. The local quilt shop is now named “The Quilted Gumboot,” the tearooms are located in "Gumboot Manor," and a giant iron gumboot rests in the center of town.

Wong Tai Sin Temple is known for answering prayers and wishes with the practice of Kau Cim, a form of fortune telling that originated in China.

The beautifully ornamented temple is dedicated to the Taoist deity, Wong Tai Sin, a shepherd boy born in Zhejiang Province on the eastern coast of mainland China in the 4th century. According to legend he began practising Taoism at the age of 15 after meeting an immortal on Heng Shan (Red Pine Hill) in his hometown. The saintly person taught him the art of refining cinnabar into a medicine believed to cure all illnesses. After spending 40 years in seclusion learning this art, he achieved enlightenment and became immortal.

Legend holds that Wong Tai Sin could punish the evil, heal the wounded, rescue the dying, see the future, and make wishes come true.

Originally a private shrine for Taoists, in 1934 the Wong Tai Sin temple was opened to the public for the Lunar New Year. The temple survived the wide destruction of Hong Kong during the Japanese Occupation in WWII, which was attributed to Wong Tai Sin’s powers. In 1956, with government approval, the shrine was opened to the public year-round.

The huge shrine includes many halls and altars, and though it is primarily a Taoist temple, the shrine also has Buddhist and Confucian worshipping halls. A portrait of Wong Tai Sin stands in the middle of the Main Altar backdropped by wooden sculptures that depict the story of how Wong Tai Sin became a deity. Taoist as well as Buddhist and Confucian scriptures and images are engraved on the walls.

The large open space in front of the Main Altar is the main worshipping place. Here worshippers hold bundles of burning incense and bow to Wong Tai Sin three times and then shake fortune sticks until one falls out. The stick is exchanged for a piece of paper with the corresponding number for interpretation by the fortune tellers. The secondary platform contains bronze statues of the 12 Zodiac Animals.

Another interesting feature are the five buildings and structures, arranged in a row, representing the five elements in fung shui: the Bronze Pavilion (metal); the Archives Hall (wood); the Yuk Yik Fountain (water); the Yue Hung Shrine (fire), where the Buddha of the Lighting Lamp is worshipped; and the Earth Wall (earth). Located at the rear of the complex is Good Wish Garden, Chinese-style garden which features a miniature replica of the Summer Palace in Beijing, the replica of the Nine Dragon mural in Pei Hai Park in the Forbidden City in Beijing, and a white jade statue of sheep, depicting the miracle of Wong Tai Sin transforming piles of white boulders into sheep. 

Since the very first star charts carved into mammoth tusks 32,500 years ago and the first recorded constellations in 17,300-year-old French caves, humans have come up with a variety of interpretations of the night sky. In the 17th century, star cartographer got a step closer when he produced the first star atlas that mapped the entire observable night sky.

In 1603 Johann Bayer, a German lawyer and celestial cartographer, and artist Alexander Mair published the first edition of Uranometria—an atlas comprised of 51 copperplates engraved with celestial constellations. Uranometria, the full title translating to “Uranometria, containing charts of all the constellations, drawn by a new method, engraved on copperplates,” was applauded both for its accuracy and beauty.

Mair’s intricate constellation engravings challenged the aesthetics of astronomical charts, while Bayer’s cataloging and classifications were widely accepted by the scientific community. The atlas is said to be the first to capture the entire celestial sphere, adding 12 new constellations and filling in the missing southern celestial pole which had only been previously documented in a few expensive globes.

Before Uranometria, star catalogues used verbal descriptions to describe the locations of stars within famous Greek astronomer and writer Claudius Ptolemy’s 48 classical constellations. However, this system led to constant errors and misinterpretations of celestial body positions.

Bayer’s depiction of the sky included more stars than previous charts. He used a foundation of 1,005 stars observed by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who was commended for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical documentations, and added an additional 1,000 stars he had charted on his own. His classification system, known as the Bayer designation, categorized each star by its brightness—alpha being the brightest star in a constellation, beta being the second, and so forth.  

Each of 48 Greek constellations are shown on separate plates, or star maps. They are carefully engraved on a grid with margins calibrated for each degree, allowing star positions to be read a fraction of a degree from the margins using a straight edge, writes Nick Kansas in Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography.  

The 12 new constellations in the south celestial polar cap are illustrated together on a single planispheric map, Chart 49 (seen above). The constellations were first observed and recorded by Dutch navigator Peter Dirkszoon Keyser, and were depicted on globes. However, since globes were expensive, Bayer’s Chart 49 was more easily accessible to the wider public. Among the 140 stars plotted in this chart, the new constellations show a wide variety of creatures, including the Phoenix, Hydra, and the strange-looking Chamaeleon.

Bayer also records rough fractions of the Milky Way, shown as a speckled wavy column—a unique characteristic of an early star atlas. Scholars so far have found 31 plates that show parts of the Milky Way, and continue to study Bayer’s work to understand where he obtained this data.

While the atlas is centuries old, entities within the carvings remain relevant today. Art critics and historians have deemed the book a splendor;Philip Hofer, author of Baroque Book Illustration,  called it an “example of fine astronomical illustration.” Bayer’s star classification system is still practiced, and Uranometria’s depiction of the twinkling celestial bodies the first to be considered scientifically useable.

View more wondrous constellation engravings in the 1655 edition of Uranometria below.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

St. Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus Christ, is claimed to have brought Christianity to India in 52 AD, where he was killed as a martyr. His relics traveled to quite a few places after his death, until most of them found their final resting place in the Basilica di San Tommaso in Ortona, Italy.

Some of the relics of St. Thomas still remain in Chennai, India, close to where he died and was buried. Others ended up on the Greek Island Chios at the beginning of the 13^th century, where, supposedly, the skull of St. Thomas remains. Yet others made their way to Italy in 1258 when Ortona's General Leone Acciaiuoli visited the Greek island with three galleys and had a spiritual experience.

After successfully looting the place, the general went into the local church to pray. According to a legend, a light hand waved twice at him, beckoning him to come closer, and he felt a sweetness and peace as never before. Acciaiuoli than reached into the tomb and took a bone. A halo surrounding the bones was proof to him that, indeed, he had found the relics of the Apostle St. Thomas. The next night he came back and stole the rest of the relics and the tomb.

In 1358 the relics were brought to the local church in Ortona, which was elevated to a minor basilica by Pope Pius IX in 1859. There the relics of the Apostle St. Thomas, along with the looted tombstone, were displayed in a crypt, and remain to this day.

The relics survived centuries of turbulent events—an earthquake, an attack by the Turks, a fire, an attack by the French—but remained untouched. Sometime later they were put under the altar of the church. The church was damaged again during WWII under German occupation. A heavy silver bust of St. Thomas was hidden from the Germans in a dark corner of the church under some timber and the relics, which saw daylight for the first time in 150 years, were hidden in the home of the priest.

With the reopening of the church after renovation and rebuilding in 1949, the tomb and the relics of the Apostle St. Thomas, stored in a gilded copper shrine, were placed in a crypt in the Basilica and remain there up to today. The bust of St. Thomas, which contains some fragments of his scull bone, is also on display in the church again. Today many people come to visit the Basilica di San Tommaso on their 195-mile “Cammino di San Tommaso” pilgrimage, the route of St. Thomas, from Rome to Ortona.

The businessman Jingchun Li, who made a fortune on selling mosquito repellent in China, had high ambitions when he bought a hotel by the E4 highway outside the city of Gävle, Sweden in 2004. He envisioned a grand Chinese castle that served as a business meeting point and cultural gateway between China and Sweden. He named the complex "Dragon Gate." 

The plans for Dragon Gate included a restaurant, hotel, conference facilities, museum, rice field, a Shaolin Temple with a Kung Fu school andthe world’s largest Buddha statue. There were even plans to import a live panda bear.

Today, after more than a decade, the site is far from what Mr. Li envisioned. There have been a number of scandals, ranging from fire safety regulations not being met to unsafe working conditions for the underpaid Chinese construction workers. Of the original plans, only the museum—with is 200 replica terracotta soldiers—and the restaurant and gift shop opened to the publicat the grand opening in August 2014. 

So far, the Dragon Gate project is estimated to have cost more than 250 million krona. However, the 56 individually designed bedrooms in this luxurious hotel are still waiting for their first guests to arrive when, or if, the hotel finally opens its doors.

VIDEO: Mysterious Celtic cross discovered in Donegal forest: https://t.co/qyoWkLJ7SMpic.twitter.com/PtUQrSWSOO

— UTV Live News (@UTVNews) October 24, 2016

Flying over Ireland is always a magical experience. But over the past few weeks, travelers speeding over County Donegal have been treated to a particularly mystical sight: a 100-foot-long Celtic cross, made of thousands of trees.

Passengers have been curious about the massive emblem, posting pictures and questions to social media. As UTV Northern Ireland revealed in a short video posted today, the man apparently responsible was Liam Emmery, a forester from the region. Emmery died in 2010, at age 51, after an accident left him unwell for two years. "Even his family knew little about his creation," which Emmery accomplished by planting different types of trees years ago, says UTV.

The effect has been visible for a few years now, but this year's dry autumn has made it particularly eye-catching, the yellow cross vivid against a background of spruce green. "We're going to be appreciating this for the next sixty or seventy years," horticulturist Gareth Austin told UTV. Not a bad way to go out.

Martin Sloane realizes he has slipped back in time when he sees his younger self carving his name on a gazebo in the park with an old carousel. Martin has accidentally returned to his childhood town after a 25-year absence, and is astounded to discover nothing has changed.

So begins the plot of “Walking Distance,” the fifth episode of the Twilight Zone, which aired in 1959. The setting of the story is based on a real carousel that has been in continuous operation since 1925 in Recreation Park in Binghamton, New York, where the visionary creator of the famous television series grew up.

Many Twilight Zone locations are based on real places. “Mirror Image” takes place at the Greyhound station with a rider waiting for his bus to Cortland. The streets in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” eerily resemble Binghamton’s West Side.  The carousel at Recreation Park is one of six built by George F. Johnson as a gift to the workers of the Endicott-Johnson company. All six are still running, and if you ride them all in one summer you will earn a pin to commemorate the effort. The Rec Park carousel has 60 mounts and runs all day in the warmer months.

Rod Serling is Binghamton’s favorite local-boy-done-good, and his name and face adorn parks, stages, and festivals across Broome County. The moment where Martin Sloane realizes he has returned home has been commemorated as well. A large gazebo with titanic pillars was erected on the hill overlooking the carousel. A plaque in the center reads, “Rod Serling, Creator of The Twilight Zone, “Walking Distance."

Imagine the Manhattan Bridge twinkling from underneath with hundreds of small pods filled with decaying biomass – the final resting place of many former New Yorkers, shining like stars in an otherwise dark sky.

There, you might lay flowers near a pod containing the remains of a loved one, until decomposition finishes its course and all that remains is a container to keep as a remembrance.

This is the vision that is Constellation Park, a shiny new cemetery proposed by DeathLab, a trans-disciplinary research and design space at Columbia University. For the past five years, DeathLab has been focused—during an era of global warming, overcrowding and leave-no-trace environmentalism—on solving the problem of last rites in New York, where an average of 144 bodies stack up per day.

That, in turn, totals around half a million plots per decade, consuming nearly all of the ground left in the dozens of cemeteries and polluting the air with cremation smog in the New York metropolitan area.

It’s a lot of death, in other words, in a very small space, and how we’ll deal with it in the future is an open question (also explored by Hyperallergic in May). One thing’s for sure, though: it’s probably going to look a lot different than how we’ve dealt with it in the past.

Which is where DeathLab comes in.

“Remaining titled earthen burial plots are extremely limited and relatively expensive in New York City and in dense urban environments across the globe,” said Karla Rothstein, the director of DeathLab and an architecture professor at Columbia. “Engaging the corpse on its biological basis, DeathLab’s projects incorporate mortuary processes which are far less energy intensive, elegant, and scalable.”

In Bristol, England a similar project at the historic Victorian Arnos Vale cemetery won a prestigious design competition there earlier this year, allowing DeathLab researchers to work to build a design for a prototype. Here, the Manhattan Bridge project hasn’t even gotten that far along, but if stodgy old Britain can at least try, couldn’t New York?

For now, the answer is no, as the idea has yet to even come before the city council, while also facing fierce opposition from the funeral industry. But like a lot of things in New York it might, eventually, come down to a numbers game: if built, Constellation Park, could accommodate around 10 percent of deaths in the city each year—a number that seems small until you start to think about the alternatives, which can be environmentally disastrous.

Constellation Park isn’t the only alternative proposed, of course. Consider, also, promession, in which mortuary workers freeze dry a body in liquid nitrogen and then shatter it to dust with a slight vibration. Another is “alkaline hydrolysis, or “flameless cremation,” through which bodies are exposed to a lye solution and then broken down with the assistance of a low-energy pressurized chamber heated to 350 degrees. This process results in a “greenish-brown liquid containing amino acids, peptides, sugars, and salts.”

But, like Constellation Park, the latter ideas have been met with obstacles: No commercial prometorium, or freeze-dryer, has yet been built. And although seven U.S. states approve of flameless creation, religious institutions, including the Catholic Church, have declared the disposal of liquefied bodies “undignified,” contributing to the demise of a 2008 bill that would have legalized alkaline hydrolysis to New York.

Proponents of alternative means of dealing with corpses have said, however, that some religious institutions—and society itself—might have to rethink their burial dogma.

“The ways in which a cultural group has disposed of the deceased – since almost the beginning of human history – has often been a matter of environmental necessity,” said Christina Staudt, a DeathLab affiliate and the Chair of the Columbia Seminar on Death. “In the high altitudes of the Himalayas, where permafrost makes the ground impenetrable, earthen burial and burning of the body are not viable options, and a tradition of feeding the corpses to vultures developed.

“The values and practices of the current, mobile urban population,” Staudt adds, “where traditional groups rub against each other, share space and are forced to adapt and adjust to each other, have been described as fluid and kaleidoscopic.”

Which brings us back to Constellation Park, which would in part be made possible through the work of Rothstein’s colleague Kartik Chandran, who has been working on an anaerobic microbial digestion for corpses in which microorganisms consume bodies without the need for oxygen, reducing them to light.  

Through that digestion, Constellation Park shines—and families wouldn’t have to, as Rothstein has put it, visit loved ones who lived in Queens for 85 years in New Jersey cemeteries 85 miles away.

It also means that the future of death in New York might be bright—at least for the living.

“Socio-cultural needs and desires are not static,” Rothstein said. “Honoring our dead is a basic human endeavor, and there are many valid practices, including new models, that can support this need.”

It’s Halloween time again, and as it has been for the past 50 years, a Star Trek costume is a safe bet for anyone looking to dress up. But do you want to be a Starfleet captain in 2268? A ship's doctor in 2368? For the uninitiated, deciphering the language of colors and symbols that place you in the show's universe is a crapshoot.

Luckily, Atlas Obscura is here to help, with a bit of cosplay codebreaking.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, and from the first episode in 1966, the Starfleet uniforms worn by the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise (and eventually elsewhere) have remained one of the most enduring and iconic aspects of the franchise. Aside from being deliberately utilitarian and futuristic, from the beginning, the uniforms have also been used to communicate a character’s rank and station, although depending on what period in the future you are trying to emulate, the language changes.

Gene Roddenberry imagined the space-faring fleet as something akin to the modern Navy, carrying over much of the same rank and job structure. Each ship has a captain, and subordinate ranks such as commander, lieutenant commander, and ensign. These ranks are spread out among various ship positions like command, security, engineering, science and medical. Within each series, and the movies, most of this can be gleaned just by looking at the character’s uniform.

In the original Star Trek series, which ran from 1966-1969 (or roughly from 2254 to 2269, in universe), there were three standard uniform colors among the Starfleet officers on the Enterprise: gold, blue, and red. During this time period you have gold uniforms being worn by people in command positions (Captain James T. Kirk, helmsman Lieutenant Sulu); blue uniforms were reserved for members of the science divisions, which included the medical staff (O.G. science officer, Lieutenant Commander Spock, and Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy). Then you have the hard-working folks in the red uniforms, who make up the operations divisions on the ship, including security and engineering (Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, and countless, faceless extras that served as doomed security officers, also known as “redshirts”). Interestingly, as explained by a piece over on Mental Floss, the command gold was originally intended to be green, but came out yellowish-gold under the studio lights, and was simply embraced from then on.

Within the various career divisions on the ship, everyone held a different rank as well, which was denoted by a series of rings on the ends of their sleeves. The number of stripes denoting rank shifted a bit throughout the series, but for the most part, a safe reading of the uniforms is that two-three sleeve stripes indicated a captain, a single or double sleeve stripe indicated all other enlisted officers, and a braided stripe (or no stripe) indicated non-commissioned personnel.

This same system of tri-colored uniforms and ranked sleeve cuffs was also adopted in the more recent “Kelvin Universe” Star Trek films of the 2000s to current, with little variation to the meaning. What little difference does exist is in the ranked sleeves, which have been standardized to a trio of rings on a captain’s shirt; two bold rings for a commander; one thin ring, one bold ring for a lieutenant commander; one ring for a lieutenant; and no rings for an ensign.     

Within these main Starfleet guidelines, there were variations in style (hello, v-necks and mini-skirts), and even color from time to time, be it for fashion or some mission-specific look, but if we’re looking at classic Trek, you can’t go wrong with those basics.

The Star Trek movies that followed the cancellation of the original series, threw most of the original coloring schemes out the window for a cleaner look, which is surprisingly harder to read. In 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which takes place in the mid-2270s), the bright colors were done away with and replaced with white, grey, and beige uniforms.

Here, a person’s position could be determined by the color of the ring behind the Starfleet insignia on their breast. A white ring was used for command, orange and green were used for the science divisions, and red, gold, and grey were used for operations. Rank was now worn on either the sleeve and/or on a shoulder tab. Thankfully, these creamy jumpsuits didn’t last long.

By 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Starfleet (and the film’s production department) had adopted an even more standardized and militaristic look. Taking place around the late-2270s, the second film introduced a standard maroon color that was worn by all officers in jumpsuit and jacket styles. While some of the straps and collars were different colors, most of the rank and division information was denoted by complicated badges and insignias generally worn on the left cuff and on a strap on the right shoulder. Variations of these uniforms were worn by Starfleet officers throughout the rest of the original series films.

With the intricate mix of rank indicators and service badges, not to mention the constantly shifting positions of the crew throughout these films, reading the uniforms is a chore, even for die-hard Trek fans. In fact, this uniform style has come to be known as the “Monster Maroon” among fan costumers. Anyone looking for exact accuracy in a costume from this period should reference the always reliable, Memory Alpha wiki on the subject.

Fast forward to the 23rd century and the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, and once again we have a whole new language of uniform. This new series saw the return of the multi-colored officer uniforms, although they often meant different things from when Kirk first donned his velour captain’s shirt.

Now, the command crew of the Enterprise wore dark maroon (Captain Jean Luc Picard, Commander William T. Riker), and members of the operations staff wore gold-colored jumpsuits (Lieutenant Commander Data, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge), reversing the scheme from the original series. The science and medical divisions stayed in the same wheelhouse though, and were denoted by uniforms in a range from blue to green (Chief Medical Officer Beverley Crusher, Ship’s Counselor Deanna Troi).

The rank designations also went back to a simpler system than that of the earlier movies. Beginning in The Next Generation, rank was now shown by a series of circular pips generally worn on the right side of the neckline. This pip system essentially broke down to the more pips someone has, the higher their rank. Captains wore four pips; commanders wore three; lieutenant commanders wore two full pips and one hollow one; lieutenants wore two pips; junior lieutenants wore one full pip, and one hollow pip; and lowly ensigns wore only a single pip.

Higher ranks such as admiral were often shown wearing variations of this system, such as four pips on a black field, or pips beneath a run of stars.

While the cut and style of standard Starfleet uniforms shifted and evolved as the years went on, this system of colors and pips holds true with little variation through the run of The Next Generation, its associated films, and subsequent series Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Commander (later Captain) Benjamin Sisko and Captain Kathryn Janeway sport a command maroon just like Picard did, and characters like Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien wore operations gold in both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. As far in the future as canon Star Trek looked (barring certain incidents of time travel), this was the visual language.

The most recent Star Trek television series, 2001’s Enterprise, was actually a prequel, taking place in the mid-2100s, and strangely, their uniforms take cues from every era of the Star Trek franchise. Taking place prior to the formation of the Federation Starfleet seen in later incarnations, the uniforms of the very first space-faring Enterprise, were once again standardized into a purple workman’s jumpsuit (echoing the red-washed uniforms of the later Original Series films). Position on the ship could be determined by the color of a seam that ran along the shoulder of the jumpsuit, with the colors corresponding to the original command gold, science blue-green, and operations red.

And then rank was indicated by the number of silver bars over the right breast, just like the pips used in The Next Generation. While not everyone’s favorite, this suit kind of had it all.  

The beauty of Star Trek’s uniform standards is that they allow fans to dream up their own costumes and characters that could conceivably find a place on any Starfleet ship. If you don’t want to dress up like Captain Picard, you can just as easily envision a costume for Lt. Comm. Your-Name-Here. And with the limitless variation of designs within the ranking system, you can always tailor it to your personal style, so long as you are using the established fashion language.   

Of course, there is a near unlimited amount of Trek novels, mirror universe tales, cartoons, video games, comic books and more where variations on this uniform symbology may differ. However, if you are looking to become a member of Starfleet this Halloween, you probably can’t go wrong sticking to the lessons seen on screen. Don’t get laughed out of another Star Trek convention.  

Built by winds and sea currents, the Curonian Spit is a ribbon of sand separating the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. The barrier bar has been designated a national park by both Lithuania and Russia. As a protected area within a protected area, the Dead Dunes are one of the most dramatic and botanically significant features of this unique geological formation.

Ranging up to 60 meters in height, the Dead Dunes still obscure four villages and two cemeteries that were swallowed by the shifting sands between 1675 and 1854, when the dunes were travelling 0.5 to 15 meters per year.

Human activity on the Curonian Spit—also known as Neringa—dates back to at least the 9th century CE, and was subsequently occupied by the Teutonic Knights, whose presence led to increased grazing and logging. The resulting deforestation created a more transient landscape of sand dunes that warped and migrated with the prevailing westerly winds. Reforestation efforts began in the 19th century, and were largely successful. The Dead Dunes provide a glimpse of an unreconstructed stretch of Neringa.

Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the "Dead Dunes" moniker is a striking misnomer; the area comprises the Nagliai Nature Reserve, an ecologically sensitive region home to multiple rare and fragile plants. The unique flora overall provide a muted, earth-toned appearance, making the alternate name of the "Grey Dunes" make a bit more sense.

Visitors to the Nagliai Nature Reserve are obliged to stay on the marked trail, in order to avoid disrupting the peculiar and delicate ecosystem.

In 1861, a railway engineer by the name of John White passed away, was buried in a cast iron coffin, and began a slow transformation from White to blue.

The explanation for this spooky color change, which has occurred on numerous occasions all over the world, lies in the composition of the human body. Among the molecules contained within us is phosphate, a central phosphorus atom bound on four sides to atoms of oxygen. Phosphate is present in the hard bits of bones and teeth (as part of the mineral hydroxylapatite), helps hold together strands of DNA and RNA, and is used by cells to store and move energy around as well as to organize their many protein-driven activities.

If a dead person ends up buried somewhere waterlogged, lacking in oxygen, and loaded with iron, the phosphate leaking from their decaying remains can slowly combine with the iron and water to form a mineral called vivianite. It starts out clear and colorless, but will rapidly turn progressively darker shades of blue upon exposure to air as the iron within it reacts with oxygen. The formation of vivianite (also known as blue ironstone) is helped along by bacteria which act to dissolve iron out of soil and phosphate out of bodies while also directing the growth of the blue crystals. 

In the case of Mr. White, in keeping with the styles of the time, his coffin had a glass window installed in the front so his face could be seen by mourners when the lid was shut. At some point after burial, the glass had broken, allowing groundwater to seep inside and react with the cast iron coffin and phosphate-rich body. The end result was a corpse surround by blue vivianite crystals, revealed when the coffin was exhumed as part of an archeological rescue excavation over a century after being buried.

Vivianite can form in, on, and around human remains. It appears as crusty patches on bones, needle-like crystals within the pulpy centers of teeth, and discolored blotches on skin. It’s also been found on adipocere, the waxy gunk occasionally produced as fat-filled flesh breaks down under cold and wet conditions.

Partially blue human remains have been recovered from graveyards, past warzones, and alpine lakes and glaciers. As iron is an essential ingredient in vivianite, it tends to show up in naturally iron-rich locales or in cases where a corpse ends up near a source of the metal: cannonballs strewn about a battlefield, the site of a plane crash, or iron coffins in an older cemetery. The skin of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,000-year-old mummy discovered in the Ötztaler Alps between Austria and Italy after the glacier it was encased in partly melted away, is dotted with blue spots marking where it had been in close contact with iron-bearing rocks. 

In addition to giving the dead a splash of color, the presence of vivianite can both help and hinder their investigation by archeologists and forensic researchers.

Firstly, vivianite can tell us about what happened to a person’s body after their death. In 1963, an American B-26B aircraft went down over a mountainous part of South Vietnam. Its crew was subsequently listed as missing in action. Decades after the war, their blue-tinged skeletal remains were identified and returned to the US. American investigators were initially confused by the blue material, suspecting it to be paint intentionally added by someone who handled the remains while they were in Vietnam. With further study the material was revealed to be vivianite, leading the investigators to speculate that the crew had been buried in waterlogged soil dosed with iron from their corroding aircraft—ideal conditions for the blue mineral to arise.

Vivianite can also disrupt efforts to study human remains. It’s a thorn in the side of archeologists who use DNA from well-decayed dead people to learn more about their ancestry and other gene-encoded characteristics.    

After discovering a mass grave of soldiers who perished during a clash between the Austrian and Prussian armies in the spring of 1757 near what is now the city of Liberec in the Czech Republic (as part of the Seven Years' War), researchers had trouble analyzing DNA extracted from the skeletons. They traced the source of their problems to the blue crust coating the bones they were getting the DNA from.

Iron-containing minerals such as vivianite can mess with the molecular tool used to access small amounts of DNA present in biological remains. This tool, polymerase chain reaction (usually shortened to PCR), is essentially a DNA photocopier, making vivianite a paper jam of sorts. The inhibition of PCR by vivianite led the researchers to develop a new method for analyzing bones containing the disruptive mineral.

Finally, vivianite can protect human remains and provide information about burial sites. The North Brisbane Burial Grounds is a collection of cemeteries used until 1875 to bury deceased residents of Brisbane Town, now the capital of city of Queensland, Australia. A century later, it was partially excavated during a construction project, leading to the discovery of 25 graves containing vivianite. Researchers discovered the blue coating on the bones and teeth had helped to slow their decay, improving their archeological value. The presence of vivianite also served as evidence of occasional flooding of the burial grounds, confirming what had been reported in an early Brisbane newspaper.

Mr. White may have changed color thanks to vivianite, but a couple of other minerals can have a similar effect on the dead. Blue-green copper minerals are known to show up on human remains if there are objects such as bullet jackets, jewelry, or clothing buttons made of the metal nearby. No one said decomposition couldn’t be a little showy.

Action films are often described as “rides”, and that description could not be more accurately applied to The Fast and the Furious. From the chrome-plated opening credits to the final vehicular barrel roll, humans take a backseat in this car fetish franchise, which is upfront about what’s on offer. The titles are enough to tell the audience they’re signing on for gleeful mayhem that doesn’t take itself too seriously. After 2001’s inaugural offering followed six more that read like word soup assembled from the first: 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), The Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift (2006), Fast & Furious (2009) and so on, right up to 2015’s Furious 7. (A new installment, Fast 8, arrives in 2017.)

The marquee players of The Fast and the Furious are the cars—and for anyone who doubts that, the creators of the film have said as much. As director Rob Cohen told a reporter,“The vehicles are really the co-stars of this movie.” Eddie Paul, who built the vehicles featured in the film, wrote in his book The Cars of the Fast and the Furious of the first and second films, “The cars are the main characters in both of these movies.”

But it's not just any kind of cars. It's Southern California car culture that fills the screen.

The human co-stars of the film are Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto, the street-racing grocery-store owner with a tragic past and Paul Walker as Brian O’Conner the LAPD cop assigned with investigating Toretto’s group (nay, family) of adrenaline junkies in connection with a series of truck hijackings.

The film begins in a car, as O’Conner puts his slime green Mitsubishi Eclipse through its paces in the Dodger Stadium parking lot. Numerous scenes are spent in the cabs of flashy, neon-colored racers, tricked out with computer screens, nitrous oxide tanks, extraneous LED lights and ostentatious artwork. But even when viewers aren’t sitting in the cab or careening along the road with the drivers, it rarely feels like we’ve exited the car. The camera sweeps past rows of car parts to enter the cubby where O’Connor sleeps, surrounded—of course—by car posters. When a rival gang of street racers torment a mechanic, his tools become the weapons as a bad guy jams a pump into his mouth and fills his craw with oil. 

In an interview with Cinema.com, costume designer Sanja Milkovic Hays said of the men’s outfits that she wanted them to “look like they just got out of bed and threw some clothes on,” and this is true to a certain extent—Toretto wears a button up with the sleeves ripped off, O’Conner’s typical look is a t-shirt—but there is also something highly calibrated about the men in the film. They are decorated with complicated tattoos, wear chunky necklaces, mesh tank tops and wrist cuffs. The male physique is carefully honed; to see characters with their shirts off is to know time and money has been lavished on their exterior.

They are the sportscars of the human world.

The Fast and the Furious is a snapshot of a certain kind of early ‘00s fashion, particularly when it comes to the outfits Sanja assembled for the women in the film, most of whom are as much set decoration as the cars that crowd the race scenes. (Some of these women are credited simply as “Hot Chick” on the film’s IMDB page.)

“A lot of the girls at these street races are trying to compete with their boyfriends’ cars,” Hays said. “And we have so much male energy in the movie that we needed to balance it. So we had a lot of fun dressing the women outrageously, from jeans to fishnet to leather.” 

This is a world where midriffs are never covered, women dress as if they have chosen their daily outfits from a Halloween store, and are provocative in the way fashions that came of age in the 1990s are: There are chunky flip flops, filmy spaghetti strap tank tops and shiny materials galore. The extras were dressed to “match the ‘coolness’ of the car” according to Hays. (The idea of people-as-cars and cars-as-people would be brought to its logical conclusion by Pixar five years later.)

The two women who occasionally wear pants (Michelle Rodriguez as Letty and Jordana Brewster as Mia Toretto) are also the ones who get to drive.

As much as The Fast and the Furious is a love letter to car culture, it is also an ode to Los Angeles, the car-iest place on Earth. But this is not the glitzy Los Angeles of other big-budget films. (Although there, are, of course, sweeping shots of the glittering cityscape from on high—it’s basically illegal to shoot a film in LA without one.) The Fast and the Furious was shot in neighborhoods like Echo Park and Angelino Heights, where the scenery veers toward single-family homes and telephone wires, not high-rises and neon. Toretto runs a modest grocery store (which is actually Bob’s Market in Echo Park). He lives in an unassuming home, the interior of which looks like teenagers inherited their grandmother’s house.

(It is unremarkable save one odd detail—the “family” loves candles. Whether watching television, partying or hanging out in the bedroom, there are enough lit candles strewn about to hold an impromptu black mass.)

 

The low-key surroundings are great at showing off over-the-top cars, but also mark the racers as down-to-Earth dudes. The only people who populate a stereotypically Hollywood setting? The no-fun cops who have set up shop inside an expansive mid-century home commandeered from the previous occupant. 

Watching The Fast and the Furious 15 years after it debuted in theaters, it is striking how reserved the action seems in comparison to what followed. The film is filled with stylish car races and chases, and the action culminates in a centerpiece that required the invention of a special stunt truck dubbed a Mic Rig that allowed a massive flatbed to keep pace with street racers.

But with each installment, the ante was upped. The subsequent films would be marked by global locations, even more outrageous outfits, and of course, more cars. Furious 7 featured—among other breathtakingly improbable escapades—a car smashing through the window of a Abu Dhabi highrise and landing safely in an adjacent skyscraper. The Fast and the Furious has come a long way since Echo Park.

Some hot springs are in picturesque mountain valleys, or in mystical high desert plateaus. The springs the feed the thermal baths in Hokkaido's most popular spa town, however, flow from a blasted primordial caldera so infernal and reeking of sulfur, it was traditionally known as a gateway to hell.

Jigokudani, or "Hell Valley" in English, is a 24-acre smoking crater of geothermal activity, created by a volcanic eruption 20,000 years ago (not to be confused with the more well-known Jigokudani in Honshu, home to the famous hot-tubbing snow monkeys). Steam vents, geysers, and boiling lakes abound in this park that can usually be smelled before it is seen.

Rusty mountain vistas surround fiery black sulfur mud ponds and hot rivers that flow down to feed the baths in the nearby well-frequented resort town of Noboribetsu. The formal spas of Noboribetsu date back to the 19th century, and were used as hospitals were wounded soldiers recovered after the Russo-Japanese War. Today the town is known as a sort of hot spring supermarket, boasting dozens of baths with many different kinds of mineral thermal waters.

The springs, geysers, hissing valleys, and baths are watched over by numerous yukijin statues, demons who bid visitors welcome and intercede in the underworld to secure good fortune for humans. Noboribetsu boasts a Shinto shrine dedicated to Enma, the King of Hell, and features a Festival of Hell in August that includes regular Demon's Firework shows. Jigokudani itself can be explored via an 8-kilometer network of boardwalks that run through the park that give visitors access to foot baths in warm volcanic rivers, as well as views of ancient forests and snow-capped peaks within a surprisingly cozy diabolical landscape.

Police say "tree guy" is 30 year old Asher Woodworth? He told police he wanted to see how his act affected "people's natural choreography." pic.twitter.com/ZHauVGI4mL

— TVTEDDY (@TVTEDDY) October 24, 2016

It is an indisputable fact that trees don't belong in the street. Luckily, we have law enforcement to deal with such situations. Yesterday in Portland, Maine, police successfully arrested a stubborn human tree, who was blocking traffic at a busy intersection.

The piney perp "went to Congress Square wearing what appeared to be branches from an evergreen tree," the Portland Press-Herald reports. Police approached him, lifted the needly branches from his face, and told him to stay out of traffic. When he walked into the road, they arrested him for obstructing a public way. Video shows the tree slowly shuffling down the crosswalk, flanked by officers.

The offending tree man, Asher A. Woodworth, is a local artist. His previous work includes various professional dance performances, as well as stealing the pepper from a local Chili's sign. He describes himself as an "impulsive" person who "believes in physical labor and the unity of opposites." Photo and video evidence suggest he made a really convincing tree.

Police have arrested a man dressed as tree for blocking traffic on Congress Street...as God is my witness. pic.twitter.com/VUFQY6Vyv0

— TVTEDDY (@TVTEDDY) October 24, 2016

Although Woodworth refused to give a press statement, police say he wasn't protesting or handing out fliers. Instead, they say, he told them he was trying to observe how the presence of a tree-man in a busy intersection might impact "people's natural choreography." After he was booked and took this sad mug shot, he made his $60 bail and went home.

The Portland police were unruffled. "It happens from time to time," one officer said.

On June 1, 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porète was burned at the stake in Paris after she had refused to retract her book, The Mirror Of The Simple Souls. She was a particular kind of woman, devout to the point of fanaticism, and her book about Christian mysticism regarded as heretical by the Church.

“Marguerite Porète is a very interesting case," says Walter Simons of Dartmouth College. “She made the mistake of wanting to make a point of her heresy. And that suited a lot of people quite well.”

Both the Church, who at the beginning of the 14th century was becoming increasingly worried about heretical movements, and the French crown saw in Porète an easy target, an unmarried, wandering mystic. It didn’t help that she was a member of a mysterious, distrusted, poorly-understood religious movement—the beguines. 

Beguines were a religious movement of women who weren’t wives but also weren’t fully ordained in a religious order. There is a long history of Christian mystics, and they occupied a twilight zone in which they could move between the secular and religious worlds. They didn’t need to bear the burden of married life, but also weren’t forced to seclude themselves as nuns did, leading active and economically useful lives as single women. 

The movement founds its origin in 12th century when mulieres religiosae, holy women, began grouping together in cities of present day Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Northern France. Here they lived in voluntary poverty and preached sexual abstinence, while living lives in the service of the poor and marginalized. One such holy woman, the 23-year old widow Juetta of Huy, left her family in the city of Liege around 1181 to serve lepers. She then spent the last 36-years of her life immured as an anchorite.

Around 1230 these holy women had started to be called “beguines”, a term that was most likely initially used pejoratively, but whose original meaning is lost to history. Some of these communities formed separate, walled communities called beguinages, located just outside the city walls. The biggest beguinages housed thousands of single women, a remarkable feat in medieval Europe. (Beguinages, now empty of beguines, still exist in most Belgian and Dutch cities, where their medieval houses, tight alleyways and bleached walls make them prime tourist destinations.)

Originally these separate living quarters were at least partly imposed on the beguines because male clerics feared the exposure of these single women to harmful city influences. In the 1245 charter for the creation of a beguinage in Tongeren a local priest warned:

“On high feasts they [the beguines] find themselves submerged by crowds of the populace in the main church of Tongeren, where they might eagerly observe these people while being dangerously exposed to them.”

The beguines abhorred what they considered usury. Early beguine Mary of Oignies was so shocked by the vice and greed she saw in the streets of Nivelles she mutilated her own feet because they brought her there. Beguines did, however, admire manual labor. Many entered the textile industry, for which the medieval low countries were a major center.

Beguines didn’t take vows as nuns do, but they did place strong emphasis on sexual abstinence. Many beguines were, however, not virgins, and had been married before and chose to live in beguinages only later in life. Mothers and daughters even joined the movement together. 

Often beguines were upper-class, Juetta of Huy, Mary of Oignies and Marguerite Porète probably all hailed from families of nobles or urban merchants. In the case of Porète this adds an extra layer of mystery to her eventual burning at the stake. “I don’t understand why her family, that was most likely quite wealthy, didn’t intervene in her case,” says Simons.

A section of the clergy had distrusted the beguines from the start. The Church, however, only began condemning the beguines wholesale in the wake of the burning of Marguerite Porète in 1310. As a result, beguinages were closed throughout Northern-France and Western-Germany. In present-day Belgium and the Netherlands, women faced limitations on their lifestyle: No longer were wandering, preaching beguines, such as Marguerite Porète, tolerated, and their freedom of movement was more and more limited to the beguinages.

“The prevalent image of the beguine in this later age was no longer controversial or defiant, but rather that of a naïve, somewhat foolish but inoffensive kwezel [excessively pious woman],” writes Simons in his book Cities Of Ladies. In an interview with Atlas, he adds that it’s difficult to place the deeply religious figures in a contemporary context. “I wouldn’t call the early beguines rebellious, because they didn’t rebel,” he says. “But at least they were independent and free-minded in the early period.”

This persecution coincides with the crisis of the 14th century, that in many ways, represents a breaking point for medieval society. Medieval elites, worried about growing unrest and economic crisis, clamped down on dissent. “This is a time of persecution for not only the beguines, but also for Jews, heretics and the poor,” says Simons, “Society became more intolerant.”

The reformation proved equally tortuous for the beguines. Many beguinages were destroyed or abandoned and the order was hampered severely in the Protestant north, the present-day Netherlands. In the Catholic south, present-day Belgium, the beguines rebuilt their convents. The movement would never again reach the prominence it had during the Middle Ages, although it did experience periodic flare-ups.

The last beguine Marcella Pattyn died in 2013, and with her the movement that lasted hundreds of years. What remains is the clear material imprint they left on Belgian and Dutch cities. The beguinages where they lived and prayed have become centers of tourism, and oases of peace in the heart of bustling cities.

Have you ever wanted to attend a grand banquet with kittens or have a drink with squirrels at a club? In this 1965 clip archived by British Pathé, dolled-up dead animals are brought back to life in these human scenes.

British Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter dreamed up these scenarios at his incredible and bizarre museum of animal fantasy. He stuffed deceased little creatures, dressed them in miniature human suits and dresses, and positioned them in elaborate dioramas. Highlights include a kitten wedding party, a school of 48 rabbits, and cricket match between guinea pigs.

Potter began as a traditional taxidermist, preserving cherished pets. Largely inspired by nursery rhymes, he completed a seven-year masterpiece “The Death and Burial of Cock Robin” at the age of 19, which gained so much popularity in 1861 that he opened Walter Potter’s Museum of Curiosities in Bramber, Sussex, England. At the 1:38-mark in the video above, you can view the countryside funeral scene, and spot 98 species of birds—the blue coffin of the deceased robin riding on the back of two other stuffed birds.  

Potter was most known for his work with squirrels, as, of all the animals he worked with, their proportions are closest to human anatomy, reports Vanity Fair. The men’s squirrel club (seen at 1:18) is one of Potter’s most celebrated dioramas. The stuffed animals have tiny cigars hanging from their lips and even sit around a table for a game of poker.

"As an artist he suffered simply because there was no one to compare him with," the narrator says in the video.

Unfortunately, Potter’s Museum of Curiosities has since shut its doors, and the collection of over 10,000 amphibians, birds, cats, rodents, and other specimens were auctioned off in 2003. This 1965 clip gives us a rare glimpse of Potter’s original fantastical world in all its glory.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

In 1645, near the last stage of the Thirty Years’ War, the city of Brno became famous across Europe when it managed to thwart a siege by the previously undefeated Swedish army, thanks in part to a little bit of timekeeping trickery.

The Swedes laid siege to the city for nearly three months, but the citizens of Brno would not surrender. Facing a stalemate, the Swedish general said he would withdraw if the city did not fall by noon. So the local people of Brno decided to turn the clock to read noon an hour early, at 11 o’clock. The general kept his word and the Swedes packed their weapons and turned home.

To commemorate this historic victory, the Brno Astronomical Clock monument was erected near náměstí Svobody (Freedom Square) in the city center. At 11 o’clock every day, the shiny black marble obelisk (meant to resemble a bullet, though the phallic shape bears a controversial resemblance to something else...) releases a stream of glass marbles—the color of the city’s coat of arms—that spectators gather around to catch and keep as a souvenir. The noon bell at the local cathedral still rings an hour early every day.

Though there had been efforts to advance the rights of women in early American history, the official start of the women’s rights movement is widely considered to have been the Seneca Falls Convention, which took place on July 19-20, 1848, at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls.

The simple red brick chapel was first built in 1843 by a Methodist congregation that supported the abolition of slavery and other liberal reforms. Having hosted political rallies, reform lectures, anti-slavery and free speech events, the chapel was considered the perfect place from which to issue the call for women’s rights.

The Seneca Falls Convention was planned at the nearby Waterloo, New York homes of Jane Hunt and Mary Ann M’Clintock, whose daughter, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, went on to become a famous activist and suffragist. A Declaration of Sentiments was prepared, with the Declaration of Independence as a blueprint ("all men and women are created equal" instead of just "all men.")

You could say the movement got off to a rocky start: On the first day of the convention, the chapel door was locked when the attendees arrived, and Stanton’s nephew had to be lifted through an open window so he could unlock the church from the inside and let everybody in. Once inside, the women finalized a list of grievances. The most famous and controversial resolution proposed was women's right to vote. Even Stanton’s own husband thought that such a resolution would be ridiculed and make every other resolution look silly by association. Frederick Douglass, the only African American out of the approximately 3,000 total attendees, spoke in favor of suffrage.

In the end, the declaration passed with its most important detail and was signed by 68 women and 32 men. The voting and signing on the second day of the convention were presided over by men chairing the sessions, as it was considered too radical to have a woman chair a meeting that included both men and women, even if that meeting was about advancing women's rights and place in society.

The Wesleyan Chapel was later sold by the congregation, and went through many commercial owners over the next 100 years, each of whom altered the building significantly. In 1980 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1985 it was purchased by the National Park Service. Today only three walls and a few wooden beams remain from the original structure, but the missing walls, doors, windows, and roofing have been replaced, so that what stands on the site is a representation of how it looked during the historic convention that started the long journey for women's rights.