Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie were in their early twenties and had just begun working in New York City when they were killed by an intruder in their Upper East Side apartment in August 1963. Both girls had been stabbed, and Wylie sexually assaulted. Hoffert and Wylie were members of a new generation of “career girls,” young white working women in New York, and their case captured public attention partly because of a preexisting moral anxiety—was it safe for young women to live and work in the city on their own, or was this a case of liberation gone too far?

When New York police arrested George Whitmore, a black teenager who confessed to the murders, many people felt that their assumptions about “career girls”—that seeking a career was reckless, that the city was no place for a young woman, that living in New York would expose innocent white girls to a seedy non-white urban underbelly—had been confirmed.

For people skeptical about the burgeoning movement for women’s independence in financial matters, housing, and employment, the murders of Hoffert and Wylie represented a worst-case scenario. The women were unmarried, working their way up the career ladder, living away from their families, and subject to all manner of urban dangers. Both were college graduates with “respectable” white-collar jobs—Wylie was at Newsweek and Hoffert was about to start a job as a teacher, positions that indicated the girls’ good social standing. And yet they were brought low by their own ambitions, and by exposure to what white America thought of as unsavory elements.

Unlike poor, often non-white women who had been working outside the home for decades, Hoffert and Wylie and other women deemed “career girls” were from well-to-do families and were choosing to leave home for the glitz and glamor of New York. In many cases, career girls were looking for work between college and marriage—a foray into socially acceptable independence that would, in theory, then come to an end. The New York Times reported that the girls were daughters of professionals (Hoffert’s father was a surgeon and Wylie’s a writer); in other words, they weren’t forced into employment by bad economic circumstances. Instead, it seemed, they were victims of independence.

In the wake of the murders, the parents of other "career girls" took measures to curtail their own daughters' independence. In a piece for the Times after the murders, Gay Talese quoted “a father” from New Rochelle, New York, who had decided not to let his 22-year-old daughter move to the city. “‘Yeah, you’ll get an apartment—over my dead body,’” the man told Talese, echoing the worried sentiments of other parents rethinking the idea of allowing their daughters out of their sight.

The idea that keeping young white women close to home would somehow save them from harm was reproduced on a larger scale in the aftermath of the murders. In her article “The Career Girls Murders: Gender, Race and Crime in 1960s New York” in the journal Women’s Studies Quarterly, Marilynn C. Johnson writes that the Wylie-Hoffert case ultimately served to limit the freedoms of young women and the black suspects that were so often accused in crimes against them. “For young women, the discourse of crime prevention sent an unmistakably repressive message: secure your home, limit your mobility, and seek out male protectors—or better yet, avoid the urban career world altogether,” she writes. In crime studies of this period, Johnson notes, societal consensus dictated that women were largely responsible for their own fate at the hands of men—no matter the circumstance—and career girls’ newfound urban independence could come at a cost.

The new freedom Johnson discussed was thoroughly interrogated by the media and other public figures, including Janice Wylie’s father Max. In 1964, Max Wylie, a novelist, published Career Girl, Watch Your Step!, a book filled with instructions and advice for, presumably, girls like his daughter who were making their way in the big city without the protection of men. In the aftermath of the murders, the Times kept a close eye on the case and its effects on Wylie and Hoffert’s neighbors. Some “1,000” tips were called into the police, but no arrests were made for months, further stoking fears that the killer was still at large. The NYPD also released a pamphlet on self-defense and safety for young women called “A Message to Women,” and set up extra phone hotlines for women to report threats and sexual assaults.

This increased interest in women’s safety helped to highlight the everyday aggression that women faced in the city, but the effort had a few blind spots. It put the onus of prevention on the women themselves, instead of on men or law enforcement. And campaigns to end the violence and harassment of women were largely limited to those young white women whose circumstances were similar to Hoffert and Wylie’s. In contrast to the career girls murders, New York media didn’t pay the same level of attention to violent crimes against poor women of color.

This was especially evident when comparing the coverage of Hoffert and Wylie with the two other crimes that Whitmore confessed to: the attempted rape of Elba Borrero and the murder of Minnie Edmonds, both women of color from Brooklyn. When the New Yorker reported on the ongoing case in 1969, the distinction between the career girls and Borrero and Edmonds was made very clear: “This killing was also a brutal one,” the article stated of Edmonds’ death, “but the social position of the victim (Mrs. Edmonds was a Negro dayworker) and the site of the crime (Brownsville, a dismal slum) insured that it would receive very little public attention.” In contrast, newspapers fixated on career girls for years, focusing on violent crimes against young white women in classy neighborhoods as crime rates rose in New York. This approach, says Johnson, further fanned the flames of racial tension in the city, as many white conservatives conflated a rise in crime with a rise in crimes perpetrated by people of color against white people and called for harsher punishments as a result.

As it turned out, Whitmore wasn’t the killer. He eventually recanted his confession, and the case became an important part of legal history when detectives’ unjustified arrest and coercion was used as an example in the Supreme Court case that led to mandated Miranda warnings. Police detectives ignored the holes in Whitmore’s story, including his whereabouts on the day of the murders and his knowledge of the attack. Despite the issues surrounding the investigation, Whitmore spent months in prison for the crimes until another man, Richard Robles, confessed in 1965, telling police that he killed the women during a robbery gone wrong. Robles was ultimately convicted, but not before Whitmore had served time for a crime he didn’t commit.

As Hoffert and Wylie’s deaths have come to represent a cultural flashpoint for the treatment of working women by media and law enforcement, the investigation of George Whitmore has also served as a cautionary tale for what can happen to disadvantaged suspects caught in the eye of the storm. For Whitmore, a teenager with reported intellectual disabilities, being a suspect led to forced confessions and jail time, even after Robles came forward. Even as Whitmore’s story contributed to the Miranda rights law, the officers who beat, coerced, and withheld evidence from him were not convicted of any wrongdoing. Further, the late 1960s brought Richard Nixon’s harsh law-and-order approach to policing, which disproportionately affected poor people of color when it came to conviction and incarceration.  

Hoffert and Wylie came to represent the dangers that women could face if they tried to have careers in the big, bad city—the combination of danger and glamor was irresistible for the media, particularly given the girls’ class positions and the gruesome nature of their deaths. In Talese’s article on August 31, an astute New Yorker told him that the attention paid to the crimes was purely a result of the victims’ social status and the pedigree of the neighborhood: “Look, we’re all horrified, but these things happen. If they happened in Brooklyn or Harlem—where they happen every day—we wouldn’t hear a thing about it. So it happened in a ‘good’ neighborhood. Well, I’m sorry, but believe me, in a few days in New York it’ll only be the poor girls’ parents and friends who will care.”

The woman’s matter-of-fact approach to the story speaks to the realities of crime for so many people, but she was wrong about the career girls’ legacy—more than 50 years on, they haven’t been forgotten.

A uniquely weird, perfectly Florida creature serves as the perfect, if enigmatic, emblem for Tampa's Seminole Heights neighborhood.

When the suburb was first developed in 1911, its founder used a two-headed alligator, both mouths open, as the neighborhood's emblem in advertising materials. The bizarre image came from old Florida folklore.

In a story collected by historians R. Lopez and A. L. Perez for the WPA's Federal Writers' Project in 1929, a rabbit teases an alligator in the Hillsborough River. An old turtle warns, "Stay away from that gator, rabbit. By bite or smite, it'll get you.” The rabbit ignores the turtle, taunts the alligator by dangling his feet in front of its mouth, and is surprised to find that the gator has not one head, but two, complete with its own set of sharp teeth.

The second head gobbles up the rabbit, to which the turtle remarks, “I told that rabbit, by bite or smite, it'll get him and, by the looks of it, smite got to do the eating today."

For years, the two-headed gator symbol continued to pop up all over Seminole Heights, bolstered by later stories. In 2014 Tampa resident Justin Arnold was walking among mangroves in a local park when he allegedly came upon an alligator with dual heads laying on the shore. His photo of the creature ran in the next day's Tampa Bay Times. The authenticity of the photo was immediately brought into question, but a Seminole Heights restaurant, Ella's Americana Folkart Cafe, now displays a taxidermied gator with two heads. The establishment claims it was this very specimen that appeared in the paper.

Two years later the symbol reared its twin heads again, just down the road from the Folkart Cafe at Southern Brewing and Winemaking. Arnold, with the help of community program Urban Arts Attack, installed a six-foot-tall two-headed gator sculpture standing upright in front of the brewery. Its arms are akimbo and both its mouths are tiled into crooked smiles, beckoning visitors to come try the Southern Brewing's "Bite or Smite" beers.

In Myitkyina, Myanmar, not far from the border with China, there’s an amber market that sells nuggets extracted from mines nearby. Lida Xing, of the China University of Geosciences, was browsing there when he found a piece of amber with an alluring specimen inside. The seller, the Los Angeles Times reports, thought might be a plant. But the paleontologist had another idea.

His hunch was right: trapped inside the amber was a thin piece of dinosaur tail. And it was covered in feathers.

The fossilized tail is 99 million years old and belonged to young coelurosaur. Preserved in the amber are its bones, soft tissue, and the feathers that covered its tail. The paleontologists who analyzed the tail knew the bones belonged to a dinosaur and not a bird because the vertebrae were articulated; birds and their most direct ancestors have fused vertebrae in their tails. They believe the top feathers would have been a “chestnut brown,” with white on the other side. They’re small enough that if all the feathers on the tail were of this size, the dinosaur would not have flown.

No fossil quite like this one has ever been found before. It is “an astonishing fossil, highlighting the unique preservation potential of amber,” the paleontologists write in their paper announcing the find, published in Current Biology.

John Glenn died today, at the age of 95. And while his many, many accomplishments—first American to orbit the Earth, U.S. senator for 24 years, and, at 77, the oldest man ever to fly in space—will be celebrated in the coming days, it's worth pointing out that what largely propelled those achievements was Glenn's never-ending sense of curiosity.

"Every bit of human progress, that's ever been made, occurred because somebody was curious about doing things in a new or different or combination-with-something-else way," Glenn explains in this video, shot in 2008 in Columbus, Ohio, about an hour away from where Glenn grew up, in New Concord, Ohio. 

He went to space twice—once to orbit the Earth, and once as a 77-year-old—and was one of only 10 individuals to have been honored more than once in their lifetimes with a ticker-tape parade in New York City. 

John Glenn was an American hero. Long live John Glenn. 

High in the Caucasus Mountains of northern Georgia is the small town of Mestia. It is dotted with medieval stone towers comprising part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But one tower stands out from the rest: Mestia’s Queen Tamar Airport. Even though it was built in 2010 and consists mostly of glass, its square shape and skyward facing wings echo the ancient buildings around it.

The airport’s purpose has not been as successful as its design. Originally intended to help promote Mestia as a ski resort, Queen Tamar airport never received a code from the International Air Transport Association on account of low passenger numbers. Currently just one local charter airline, Servisair, flies a 15-seat plane into Mestia four times a week.

Yet Queen Tamar is just one of the many unique and beautifully designed airports featured in the new book The Art of the Airport: The World’s Most Beautiful Terminals, by Alexander Gutzmer, Laura Frommberg and Stefan Eiselin. The book highlights those airports where travel has been elevated from the mundane to magnificent—even where it’s still hypothetical, like in New Mexico’s Spaceport America, where the passenger numbers remain at zero.

In Florida, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission received a call about a very unusual creature—an electric blue tortoise.

This guy wasn’t some superhero mutant, though. He was the victim of an illegal act.

Someone had spray-painted the gopher tortoise this dramatic shade of blue. Gopher tortoises are a threatened species, and it’s illegal to harm them. Spray-painting a tortoise is very dangerous to the tortoise. The paint blocks its ability to absorb vital UV rays from the sun and exposes it to chemicals. (Think about whether you would like to be painted electric blue. You would not. The tortoise is basically in the same situation.)

Luckily for this tortoise, he was found before any serious harm was done. He had to go to a wildlife rehabilitation center for a serious scrubbing, which was probably unpleasant in its own right. But he was returned to the world with what the FWC describes as only “a slight blue hue.”

On October 21, 1600, a short but savage conflict changed the course of Japanese history forever. Near the quiet farming village of Sekigahara, more than a century of civil war culminated in a six-hour battle that left over 30,000 dead. The victor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, went on to unite the country under the Tokugawa Shogunate that ruled for 250 years from the new capital city of Edo (later renamed Tokyo). This momentous event is recreated in frequently absurd and occasionally inaccurate details at Sekigahara War Land.

A somewhat bizarre "theme park" filled with over 200 highly evocative life-sized statues of varying quality, Sekigahara War Land introduces visitors to the weapons, armor, and atmosphere of the Battle of Sekigahara via various sculptural vignettes. One can walk through the "battlefield" and imagine actually being there. (If one also imagines that the battle took place entirely within a small field, and was filled with soldiers who didn't actually know how to use their weapons.)

Amidst the sword fights, archery volleys, and imminent death blows waiting to be struck, visitors can also see scenes and figures particular to the Battle of Sekigahara. These include Tokugawa Ieyasu claming final victory, the seppuku suicide of defeated general Ōtani Yoshitsugu, and soldiers carrying the severed heads of several samurai on a pole. War Land also features, for some reason, statues of historical figures who died over a decade before the Battle of Sekigahara.

The site also includes a small indoor museum featuring displays of historical weapons and armor from the Battle of Sekigahara. Obviously, though, the real attraction is the charming and unlikely sculpture garden outside.

Love is a powerful thing—especially when expressed in the form of a small chunk of metal hung on a public bridge.

For years, swooning couples wrote their initials on padlocks and fastened them to certain footbridges in Paris, covering the guardrails. Last June, the city had to chainsaw off the "love locks," fearing the walkways would collapse under all that affection. 

But you can't keep a love lock down. According to the Local, the city is putting this romantic trash up for auction early next year—and all proceeds will benefit refugees.

The locks, which have been hanging out in a warehouse for about 18 months, will be sold off in chunks "at an affordable price," announced Bruno Julliard, the chief of environment at Paris City Hall. "All of the proceeds will be given to those who work in support and in solidarity of the refugees in Paris." Julliard expects to raise about €100,000 ($105,000). 

Over the past few months, thousands of African and Afghan migrants have ended up in the city, often camping in the streets until they are either bused to reception centers elsewhere in the country, or scattered by police. 

Lisa Anselmo, one of the first people to call for the locks to be removed, is pleased. "It's a much better way to show love—the universal kind of love," she told the Local.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Numerous versions of an ancient legend surround this 50-foot manmade hill on the outskirts of Kraków. All, however, center around the mound's namesake. In some version a princess, in others a queen, Wanda is a mythic embodiment of the courage, resilience, and devotion of the Polish people.

As legend has it, Wanda became the ruler of her region and people upon the death of her father, King Krak, after whom the city of Kraków was named. Perceiving this political development as an opportunity for expansion, a German ruler named Rytygier invaded to take advantage of the inexperienced queen. From here, the various versions of the legend differ.

In some versions, Rytygier proposed marriage to avoid conflict, and when Wanda—whose beauty stunned his troops into laying down their weapons—refused, he committed suicide. Another versions states that the two armies fought and when the Polish forces emerged victorious, Rytygier (again) committed suicide. In these iterations, Wanda subsequently grew old and wise while lands and people prospered under her guidance.

More romanticized versions of the story end with the deaths of both leaders. In one, Wanda and her loyal forces went to battle against her would-be suitor and upon victory, Wanda killed herself as a sacrifice to thank her gods for aiding her people in battle. Yet another adaptation has her killing herself prior to the battle to earn the support of the gods, rather than thank them for it after the fact. However, two things always stay the same: The Slavic forces win; and Rytygier dies in the battle.

Regardless of which version is told, Princess Wanda has always remained near and dear to the hearts of Krakovians. The mound, which was built in the 7th or 8th century, is celebrated as her burial site (though there is no evidence confirming this) and is located just 6 miles away from the Krakus Mound, her father’s supposed eternal resting place.

Modern scholars believe that the two mounds have astronomical significance related to Celtic pagan beliefs. It seems that they, along with two nearby natural hills called Sikornik and Wawel, may constitute a gigantic calendar.

Standing atop Sikornik (the westernmost of the hills), an observer can watch the sun rise directly over Wawel on both the spring and fall equinoxes. From the same vantage point, the sun rises directly over Krakus Mound on November 1, which was the Celtic New Year. From atop Krakus Mound, the sun rises directly over Wanda Mound on May 1, which was the eve of the Celtic sun celebration, the second most important holiday of the year.

Today, the grassy area around Wanda Mound is a popular destination for picnickers and families out for a stroll. At the summit of the mound, there is a monument featuring a white Polish eagle atop a red granite base inscribed with the legendary heroine's name. The monument was designed by prominent Kraków artist Jan Matejko and installed in 1890.

An uninhabited Futuro House in poor condition deteriorates in the woods of North Carolina.

Futuro Houses were a 1960s architectural fad, prefabricated vacation homes that were appropriate for beaches, mountainsides, and forests. They were the invention of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, and sold like hotcakes when they debuted in 1968. They represented a leisurely, modern vision of the future.

The trend didn't last though, and today more Futuro Houses lie abandoned than inhabited.

This one in the woods outside Chapel Hill is in very bad shape. The roof caved in and severely rotted decking prevents any real access. But you can still see the strange white bubble shape from Jack Bennet Road and peek your head in through the hatch to imagine the life of Futurians.

The war between Krampus and teens has flared up once again in the small Austrian city of St. Johann im Pongau, as a group of teens have brutalized one of the performers in the annual Christmas demon parade.

As reported on the Local, during this year’s annual Krampuslauf, one of the demons got attacked by a gang of teens. The parade is an Austrian tradition which sees dozens of locals dress up like the demonic Christmas monster, Krampus, and parade through the streets judging people naughty or nice and threatening to punish them with switches or chains. There is often fire, elaborate costumes, and as with many raucous holiday traditions, a fair amount of heavy drinking.

However, this year, a group of teenagers decided that they liked Santa better and physically assaulted some of the performers in the parade. It doesn’t seem like anyone was seriously injured, although at least one of the teens was placed under arrest.

Surprisingly, this is not the first volley in the war between Krampus’ and their audience. In 2015, a group of teens in Salzburg, Austria was viciously attacked by some of the Krampus performers during their local parade, sending one of the kids to the hospital. Hopefully next year, Krampus and naughty teens can just get along.

It’s 1996. At the behest of Robert De Niro, a small group of coders and game designers toil away in a seedy San Francisco warehouse to finish a surreal, puzzle game about a run down hotel that may house the creative muses. Also, Christopher Reeve, members of Aerosmith, and Jim Belushi will also be voicing character with names like The Toxic Twins and Uncle Salty.

While that all might sound like some kind of bizarre pop culture Mad Lib, it’s actually the story of the long forgotten and hopelessly strange computer game, 9: The Last Resort.

The director of 9: The Last Resort, Buzz Hays, met De Niro while has working as the Director of Engineering at Lucasfilm THX. De Niro enlisted Hays to help design a portion of his new Tribeca Grill, and the actor eventually convinced Hays to get into the movie business himself.

“One day, Robert got tired of us talking about making movies, and he said, ‘Why don’t you just quit your job, and make a movie?’” says Hays who is now the owner of True Image Co., which specializes in stereoscopic 3D film development. 

The classic computer puzzle game Myst had been released in 1993, setting a new standard for what thoughtful, atmospheric games could be, thanks to its use of haunting locations and lonely atmosphere. This more cinematic approach to gaming inspired a number of creators who would previously never have thought to make a video game, to try their hand at the growing medium, even as more action oriented games began to take over the scene.

A few years after Myst’s release, De Niro’s production company launched Tribeca Interactive, a division that would focus on new types of media. Hays was put in charge of their very first computer game.

“We knew that we were going to be released in a time when most games were first-person shooters and driving games," says Hays. "Myst had already had its day in the sun. It was still, in many peoples’ eyes the finest video game ever to be created. So we decided to try and do a more irreverent version of that.”  

Hays put together small team and moved the operation into a San Francisco warehouse space where they developed 9: The Last Resort. 

To create their game world, Hays teamed up with pop art icon Mark Ryden to help design the look of the game. Ryden’s signature aesthetic, heavy on eerie, childlike figures and mysterious symbols, was a natural fit for the world of an enigmatic puzzle game.

“He ended up doing on the order of 1,200 paintings for the game,” says Hays. “Mark would come up a couple of times a week and paint furiously, and our [internal art director] would stand next to him with a hair dryer, drying the paint, so that we could scan it and get it into the computer.”

The resulting game ended up looking not unlike a gorgeous living, explorable version of one of Ryden’s paintings.

Working off of characters Ryden had created, the resulting story in the game came to revolve around a rundown resort hotel and its odd inhabitants. The player starts the game having inherited The Last Resort from their late uncle Thurston Last (Christopher Reeve). As the player explores the hotel and uncovers its secret puzzles they learn that The Last Resort was once a place where creators thrived thanks to the nine muses who lived there. But now a pair of evil residents named The Toxic Twins (Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry) has taken up residence in the hotel, and have ruined its powers of inspiration. The player then has to move through the hotel and find a way to remove the Twins for good, by solving surreal puzzle challenges. They are helped along the way by a little stogie-chomping man in an airplane, Uncle Salty (Jim Belushi). It’s a very weird game.  

Unlike with other puzzle games of the day—okay, Myst—Hays created the puzzles in the game to have multiple solutions, so that they couldn’t be instantly burnt through with a strategy guide. “What I wanted to do was to foster this notion that when you finished the game, you had a different way of getting through it than the other people who finished," says Hays. "So you had something to talk about."

With De Niro’s star power and connections, the game was able to pull in an incredible number of celebrities to voice characters in the game. In addition to Reeve, Aerosmith, and Belushi, Cher was brought in to voice a fortune telling machine named Isadora, and Ellen DeGeneres makes an appearance as a cryptic octopus.

According to Hays, the celebrity voice actors really got into the parts. “When we went to record Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, they were recording an album down in Florida. Joe came up with this idea that he maybe should use the voice box he uses when he plays guitar. So his whole character talks through the voice box.”

Working with Reeve proved to be a bit of a challenge do to the debilitating injuries he suffered in a 1995 horseriding accident that left him reliant on a mechanical breathing apparatus. According to Hays, because of the noise of the respiratory machine, they could only record Reeve’s lines in short six-second bursts, although his somewhat rasping delivery ended up being perfect for the mysterious character.

Despite all of the heavy-hitting Hollywood names and gorgeous style of the game, when it was finally released in 1996, 9: The Last Resort turned out to be a dud. While many critics gave the game positive reviews, the changing trends of the 1990s computer game industry proved too much for this weird game to overcome.

“The game came to market, and it barely got noticed,” says Hays. “In those days everyone and their grandmother was releasing CD-rom games. I wouldn’t call it a failure. it was just kind of a quiet landing.”

Surprisingly, before the game even hit store shelves, Hays and his team had already packed up shop and moved on to other projects. “At the end of the game, we ultimately realized that maybe this wasn’t the best business for a film production company to be in," he says. "So we all agreed that it was more important to fold up the tent and walk away gracefully.”

In the years since its release, 9: The Last Resort has been largely forgotten by most gamers. Even with names like De Niro, Tyler, and Cher involved it is only rarely referenced. The game has never been re-released to run on modern machines, making it incredibly difficult, if not nearly impossible, to play now. But Hays still fondly remembers the game, and the experience of making it.

“For us it was just this funny nostalgic time when we got to do this crazy thing in this tiny warehouse in San Francisco," he says. “We had such a good time making this thing that at the end of the day it kind of didn’t matter whether people loved it or not.”

Independence Temple is awe-inspiring even to the undevout; it’s unlike any other place of worship built before or since. Construction of the spire—designed in the shape of a nautilus shell reaching up to the heavens—required four years and over 300 panels of custom-built stainless steel, and all this in the days of early 1990s software imaging. The final effect is truly otherworldly. 

The location of the temple is not far from Adam-ondi-Ahman, the place the Latter-Day Saints believe was the Garden of Eden and where Christ will reappear.

As the Book of Mormon tells it, in 1831 Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, visited Missouri. When he reached Jackson County, he prophesied that Independence, Missouri was the center of the Earth and that it would be a place of wisdom for years to come:

"Hearken, O ye elders of my church, saith the Lord your God, who have assembled yourselves together, according to my commandments, in this land, which is the land of Missouri, which is the land which I have appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the saints. Wherefore, this is the land of promise, and the place for the city of Zion. And thus saith the Lord your God, if you will receive wisdom here is wisdom. Behold, the place which is now called Independence is the center place; and a spot for the temple is lying westward..."

Smith purchased the land for the LDS, but it wasn't until more than a century later that the church was actually built. The church made up for lost time in grandiosity, in the form of the magnificent Independence Temple. The structure serves as the headquarters of the Community of Christ Church. 

Plans for the temple were initially unveiled in 1988 by Community of Christ President Wallace B. Smith. The temple is rife with biblical symbolism, with award-winning fountains and murals along "Worshiper's Path." It's also huge: The Temple Sanctuary seats 1,600 while the auditorium seats 5,800. There is also a Meditation Chapel and a colorful Children's Peace Pavilion. The Temple also houses two giant organs, one of which is the largest in the country with 6,334 pipes.

While most Mormon temples are closed to the public, the Community of Christ welcomes visitors of alternate faiths. This is fortunate because Independence Temple is a sight to be seen, inside and out. 

The 1960s were swept up by the boisterous, raging rock-and-roll wave. And at the heart of the sound: the electric guitar. This 1965 video archived by British Pathé follows the creation process of gleaming, wooden electric guitars at a factory in Essex, England. With each step, a curmudgeon of a narrator adds amusing, snippy comments about rebellious teens and youths.

Dozens of craftsmen handle an electric guitar before it’s placed in a shop window, explains the narrator. “All this to make a bedlam of adolescent noise,” he then adds.

After grinding just enough space out of a solid piece of wood to fit in the electromagnetic pickups, the instrument is fitted with two miles of string. At the 49-second mark, you can see how the rosewood fingerboard and nickel frets are fastened to the neck by hand. The lustrous materials can rack up the price, the narrator commenting how, “the guitar boys have to pay so much for their guitars that they have no money left for a haircut.”

Bright neon polyester spray paint is coated over the wooden bodies before adding on the string and glossing the finished product. Each guitar is specially tuned so musicians can play that distinct rock-and-roll sound—or noise, according to the narrator.

“Surprising,” he says. “When you consider the noise they make, that each and every guitar is scientifically tuned just as if they were real musical instruments.” 

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.

Gather 'round, holiday shoppers, for a gift guide that takes inspiration from some of the most memorable items featured on Atlas Obscura this year. Got someone in your life who's difficult to surprise? Need a present that will inspire wonder and curiosity? From autograph albums to antique globes, we've selected the finest objects of intrigue for your loved ones.

An Instrument You Play By Waving Your Hands Over a Doll

Theremins and Russian nesting dolls: together at last! Give the gift of unnerving wails packaged in a plump and happy wooden matryoshka with the matryomin. Oh yes: it's a theremin inside a matryoshka. And it can make beautiful music, especially when the instruments play Beethoven en masse.

320 Euros ($339.68) from etheremin.com

 

Banana Slug Mask

Seattle's Archie McPhee is the the world's finest purveyor of utterly bizarre and perfectly useless oddities. If you are looking for a strange gift for that heroic weirdo on your list, you could probably just go on their site, close your eyes, and start clicking. You wouldn't be disappointed with what ended up in your cart. But for our money, we recommend their unsettlingly realistic banana slug mask. Just put it on and wait in the dark for your family to arrive. Christmas achieved.

$24.95 from Archie McPhee

Never Built New York

New York City today is an elegantly congested urban mess, a largely ad hoc group of skyscrapers, highways, avenues, and pedestrian walkways. But if some of the architects in Never Built New York had their way, New York might be a wholly different place, with buildings built over the city's rivers and urban planning that matched the city's ambition to be the greatest on Earth. Check out this intoxicating look at the designs for New York that, either through bureaucracy, budget or bad luck, never came to pass.

$41.56 from Amazon

Trebuchet

Everyone needs a trebuchet because everyone needs to fling things. Pick your size—from desktop accessory to an in-the-field pumpkin-pitcher, as used at the annual Punkin Chunkin event in Delaware.

Various price points and sizes available from Amazon

As Above, So Below: The Art of Fraternal Societies, 1850-1930

Fraternal societies—many secret—used to be a staple of American life, and, in some places, still are. But they peaked in the late 19th century, when some 5.5 million American men were involved in one society or another. As Above, So Below: Art of the American Fraternal Society 1850-1930 explores the amazing art that many of these societies produced, from banners to magic lanterns to ritual objects. It's 288 pages, in other words, of old fraternal love.

$41.87 from Amazon

Martian Globe

In the 19th century, astronomer Percival Lowell spotted a strange series of lines covering the surface of Mars. Lowell mapped over 700 of these Martian canals, raising controversy that there was intelligent life on the Red Planet. At the Planetenkugel-Manufaktur globe manufactory in Germany, traditional globe maker Michael Plichta recreates historical planetary maps into globes, such as Lowell’s Martian canal maps. These handcrafted 12-inch globes offer a new view of debunked astronomy charts.

Price on application, from Planetenkugel-Manufaktur

Inkblot Autograph Albums

What does your signature say about you? In the 1900s, people would collect “ghost signatures” of friends and celebrities in special autograph books called "The Ghost of My Friends". A fresh, well-inked signature would be folded and pressed on special paper to form elegant and devilish inkblots. Modern replicas of the autograph inkblot albums are produced by Reflections of My Friends, so you can continue this odd tradition today.

£25 ($31.43) from Refections of My Friends

Diatom Art

In the Victorian era, a common decorative item seen in the homes of scientists and naturalists were kaleidoscopic art pieces made out of tiny single-celled algae known as diatoms. English artist, Klaus Kemp, continues the Victorian art of diatom arrangement, and sells microscope slides of his beautiful biology masterpieces.

Starting at £6 ($7.55) from Klaus Kemp

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders

Okay, so clearly this is a biased recommendation. But if you like what we do at Atlas Obscura, you will certainly dig the hidden wonders and awe-inspiring sights contained in our hefty 480-page hardcover book. Flip through the pages to see glowworm caves, hair museums, flaming holes, and 650 other fascinating places and phenomena around the world. 

$17.50 (retail price $35) from Amazon

Historically Accurate Leech Jar

As any respectable 18th-century doctor knew, it’s important to have a place to store the leeches you use for bleeding your patients. Historical product purveyor Jas. Townsend & Sons puts great care and research into ensuring the accuracy of their offerings, so you can be assured that your leech jar will be the real deal. Their suggestion? Fill it with gummy worms if you are “short on leeches.”

$82, from Jas. Townsend & Sons

Status Symbol Fish

Bangkok’s Chatuchak Weekend Market has a little-known section where incredibly rare and expensive fish are sold. What better way to show your love for friends and family than with a brightly colored dragon fish, a freshwater stingray as large as a pizza, or a two-foot long “platinum” gar?

$20,000 for the dragon fish, from Chatuchak Weekend Market

Weather Stick of Questionable Functionality

Sick of checking your smartphone’s weather app? So are we. That’s why we are gushing over this natural, battery-free alternative. Made from organic balsam fir, the 16-inch weather stick curves upwards for clear skies or downwards for rain and snow. Whether it predicts or simply confirms local meteorology is irrelevant—either way, your holiday would not be complete without one.

$9.95 from Amazon

Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero

If you want to understand the tortured psyche of young Peter Parker through the language of progressive rock, there is no finer album than Rock Reflections of a Superhero. Between the lonely longing of "Peter Stays and Spider-Man Goes," and the the sinister chants of "Dr. Octopus," this one-of-a-kind album, released in 1975, is the perfect piece of pop culture ephemera for the comic book or music fan on your list.

$9.88 (CD) or $0.99 per track from Amazon

Pet Oxygen Mask

If by some terrible twist of fate, a beloved pet is trapped in a burning house, they’ll have a better chance of recovery if the local firefighters have oxygen masks designed especially for pets on hand. A mask kit comes with three different sizes, suitable for pets from guinea pigs to ponies.

$90 from Wag’n O2 Fur Life

People Knitting, a Book Filled With People Knitting

One of the great charms of knitting is that you can knit almost anywhere—at the beauty salon, on the streets of Seattle, on a horse drawn cart in England, or at a classical music concert (although apparently that’s frowned upon). This book of surprisingly compelling photos from the 1860s to the 1960s shows just how universal and ubiquitous knitting can be.

$10.59 from Amazon

Dark Trip to Iceland

Take a four-day trip into the deepest darkness with an Atlas Obscura adventure to Iceland on March 9—a time when the sun is a rare sight. You’ll see the Northern Lights at their most spectacular, hike to a plane wreck on a black sand beach, and try not to giggle too much at the world’s only penis museum, located in Reykjavik.

$2,699 from Atlas Obscura 

British Skittles

Did you know that the purple Skittle tastes different outside the United States? In some countries, including the UK and Australia, its flavor is blackcurrant rather than grape.

Blackcurrant is a rare taste in the States due to an early 20th-century ban on farming the berry. (It was given a bad rap after being associated with wood blight.) With the ban lifted in many states, blackcurrant is making a slow American comeback in the form of syrups, sauces, and juices. But it you want to taste it in the form of a purple Skittle, you'll need to source the candy from an international supplier.

£3.95 ($4.97) for a 250-gram bag from Amazon

American Houses Poster

From 17th-century colonial homes to the beige interiors of early 21st-century McMansions, American abodes have gone through many incarnations. Chart the changes with this poster, which provides an architectural timeline of the United States.

$29 from Pop Chart Lab

Truly Surreal Dali Cookbook

For the last 43 years, owning a copy of Les Diners de Gala, Salvador Dali’s rare and eccentric cookbook, cost upwards of $400. As of last month, you can buy it for much less, thanks to a Taschen reprint. With recipes ranging from fast-acting cocktails to lambs brain with avocado to a royal peacock surrounded by its court, it is the perfectly unique gift for the chef who’s always looking to impress.

$35.99 from Amazon

Art Nouveau Telescope

In 1923, Vermont artist, Arctic explorer, and amateur astronomer Russell W. Porter created the beautiful bronze Porter Garden Telescope, a floral objet d'art which functioned as both stargazer and garden ornament. A replica version is now available for those who don’t mind spending an astronomical sum on their astronomical appliances.

$125,000 from Telescopes of Vermont

Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees

Full of millennia-old trees, soaring and stout against backgrounds of moonless nights filled with endless stars, these photos offer some humbling perspective on the vast stretch of time and the universe. Sometimes it’s nice to remember that we are all tiny blips in a much larger world.

$37.46, from Abbeville Press

Tristan da Cunha Love Socks

Nothing says "I adore you, admire your patience,  and want you to be warm" like a pair of hand-knitted socks from the world's most remote island. Due to shipping schedules it's little too late to order them for the 2016 holiday season, but you'll have them in time for next year. And the IOU makes for a great story.

Starting at £13.50 ($17.04) from tristandc.com

Miles away from civilization and accessible only by a gravel road is Villa Baviera, a quaint tourist town in Chile that appears to be typical of other European-themed villages throughout the world... that is, until you look closer.

Past the Bavarian facades and German sausages lies a deeper backstory that reveals a sinister past of censorship, torture, and white nationalism.

In 1959, former Nazi sergeant Paul Schäfer was charged by the West German government with two counts of sexually abusing young children and was forced to flee European land as a fugitive. By 1961, Schäfer and a few hundred of his closest followers had successfully escaped to form Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony) an isolated, rural town in the Andean foothills of eastern Chile.

While the Nazi immigrants painted their Chilean colony as a communal agricultural utopia to the rest of the world, their propaganda couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Colonia Dignidad claimed to be a Christian charity providing free healthcare to Chileans affected by a recent earthquake, but in reality it was an authoritarian Nazi police state with guardhouses, lookout towers, and a complete restriction of emigration.

Under Schäfer’s rule, connection to the outside world was strictly limited, with a ban on calendars, computers, and TVs. The Nazi leader employed a cult of personality; eventually, all of his followers thought of him as God, referring to him as “Der Permanente Onkel,” or The Permanent Uncle.

Every aspect of human life was controlled at Colonia Dignidad. Sex wasn’t allowed unless approved by Schäfer, and families were separated from birth into gender-segregated groups of 6 to 15. Laborers worked without pay and those who broke the colony’s strict laws were tortured with electrocution and beatings. Schäfer even collaborated with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who used the colony as a detention camp to torture and execute his political prisoners.

But by the 1990s, things at Colonia Dignidad began to change. Democracy was brought to Chile and by 1997 Schäfer fled Chile under charges of torture, amassing weapons, and committing pedophilia against the children of the colony.

Nowadays, the colony is no longer under Schäfer's Nazi rule and has been renamed “Villa Baviera,” a controversial tourist town that has purportedly moved on from its Nazi-dominated past. Featuring a manmade pond, Hotel Baviera, and the Zippelhaus Restaurant, located in renovated versions of Schäfer's original architecture, Villa Baviera is the former Nazi colony’s best attempt to move forward from its rough past with a positive, German-themed tourist appeal minutes away from the Andes. The sheds and slave workshops of the old Colonia Dignidad remain standing to this day, forcing the waiters and innkeepers to explain to tourists that their ideologies have evolved from those of their parents.

Hidden far away from urban life and offering music, Oktoberfest celebrations, painted Bavarian cottages, and traditional European meals, Villa Baviera is the home to a few dozen tourists each week, all of which ponder on whether the controversial tourist town shows a positive outlook for the future or if it profits off of its brutal Nazi history.

This remote mountain desert park straddles two countries, earning it two different names: It is Ai-Ais in Namibia and Richtersveld in South Africa. The two regions are divided by the Orange River, well known for diamond mining along its shores, and the Fish River, which feeds into Fish River Canyon, the largest gorge in the world after the Grand Canyon.

Life in the park seems impossible: The inhospitable terrain of steep mountains and sandy plains receives very little rain; temperatures in summer can rise above 122◦F and drop to freezing during winter nights. But it exists. To the keen-eyed observer, animal life abounds in the desert park. Ranging from large antelopes like the gemsbok to smaller mammals like vervet monkeys and clawless otters in the rivers, they are well-adapted to life in this harsh environment.  

There are traces of ancient human activity, too. Stone tools and rock paintings dating back 4,000 years have been found in the park. These were the ancestors of the Bushmen (San) and later the Khoikhoi (ancestors to the contemporary Nama-speaking people in the area) that brought the first livestock with them. Today the descendants of these first human occupants are actively involved in the conservancy of the Ai-Ais–Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, which helps keep awareness of their culture alive. 

The geology of the park is complex, consisting of many successive geologic events starting with the outflow of lava two billion years ago that formed the oldest rocks in the park today. Upon first entering the park from the Sendelingsdrift Gate, the visitor is greeted by almost otherworldly appearing mountains of various colours and dark bands wedged in between—the result of successive new intrusions of magma between layers of older rock.

As the landscape changes from one panoramic scene to the next, a whitish layer of rock called Tillite can often be seen. On closer inspection fine rocks of different origins are present—evidence of long-disappeared glaciers at work in a region that is now a desert.

The Ai-Ais–Richtersveld Transfrontier Park falls within the Succulent Karoo Biome. Many odd, unique species of plants, especially succulents occur here and nowhere else on earth, adapted specifically to the arid climate. The well-known but extremely rare "Halfmens" (literally meaning "half-human") is an up to 5-metre tall endemic succulent that earned its name because it looks like a human being from a distance. Also typical to the greater region is the Quiver tree, a soft-barked tree of the aloe family that can grow for centuries. Its name originates from the fact that the San people used its hollowed-out trunk as an an arrow quiver.

The African fish eagle can often be seen and heard along the river, which itself plays habitat to large populations of fish and amphibians. Insects and arachnids also abound in the park, and although most are harmless and beneficial to the ecosystem, there are also several dangerously toxic species such as the Black Button spider and the thick-tailed scorpion species. Both the flora and fauna of the region thrive off the "malmokkies," the thick morning fog which rolls in off the Atlantic. 

In the morning of March 10, 1860, a crowd of several hundred New Yorkers looked up curiously at a long cloth chute dangling from the top of City Hall. The tube was supported by ropes along its sides, with one end fastened to the top of the building and the other held by people on the ground. “Through this bottomless bag the persons in danger are expected to slide,” reported Scientific American in its March 10 issue.

A group of adventurous boys and men slid daringly through the chute, the spectators both relieved and amused when they reached the ground in one piece.

Inventor W.W. Van Loan’s English-made cloth tube, experimentally demonstrated at City Hall, was just one of the many kinds of fire escape contraptions of the 1800s and early 1900s. New household technologies such as oil and gas lamps and kitchen ranges had become commonplace, and also a common cause of fires. Consequentially, inventors came up with creative mechanisms to help escape from a burning building.

While most patents were portable variations on ropes, chutes, and ladders-on-wheels, parachute helmets and winged apparatuses leaned more towards the bizarre and ridiculous.

"There are a lot of designs for fire escapes, but none of them really inspire confidence," says National Archives archivist Julie Halls, who authored a section about fire escape patents in her book Inventions That Didn’t Change the World. "There’s a flimsy looking contraption designed to catch you if you jump out of a window, and various baskets attached to ropes and pulleys that are meant to lower to the ground. Although none of them look very practical, they do reflect the fear of fire at that time."

By the 19th century, fire risks began to increase at an alarming rate within homes and factories. Faulty home appliances like kitchen ranges and small bathroom boilers (also called geysers) were prone to explode, wrote Halls in Inventions That Didn’t Change the World. Oil and gas lamps, stoves, hearths, and chimneys were all sources of inferno.

Unfortunately, Victorian popular fashion did not mix well with these sources of heat. The brush of a six-foot wide crinoline dress against a hearth or stove would engulf the material (and the woman in it) in flames. Many tragic deaths were caused by scorched crinoline. Other women donning the same style could only watch in horror, knowing if they got too close to assist they too could end up caught in an inferno, Halls wrote.

The fireplace was a symbol of Victorian domestic life, and firemen became heroic figures in the public imagination. It was common for fires to attract large crowds of spectators, the head of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in 1865 even playing up the public performance aspect of fire fighting, Halls says. 

With the higher number of conflagrations and casualties, came a greater number of fire escape inventions, particularly those aimed at middle-class consumers, says Halls.

“Patents for fire escapes increased from just a handful before 1860 to dozens each year in the 1860s,” Sara Wermiel wrote in Technology and Culture. In New York, lawmakers did not specify the kinds of devices that would qualify as safe and approved fire escapes. The lack of specificity and the sheer demand “inspired inventors to turn out a range of mainly impractical things they dubbed ‘fire escapes,’” she wrote. 

Many didn’t see the need to construct additional exits and stairs within buildings since most were small, and required only a rescue ladder. From 1862 to the end of the decade, New York City’s building officials accepted portable devices, including such inventions meant to be worn by an escapee as he or she jumps from the window of a tall building.

B.B. Oppenheimer’s 1879 patent for a fire escape helmet would have included a wax cloth chute, about four to five feet in diameter, attached in “a suitable manner” to the head. “A person may safely jump out of the window of a burning building from any height and land without injury and without the least damage on the ground,” Oppenheimer wrote. To soften the impact, his invention also featured overshoes with thick elastic bottom pads.

In a similar vein, Pasquale Nigro proposed a fabric-covered set of wings that would allow a wearer to fly down to safety. He wrote: “In operation, the wearer engages the loops with his hands and is prepared to leap, the air imprisoned beneath the fabric material, serving to up-hold the wearer and break the force of his fall.”

Nigro asked for about $33,000 in 1909 to execute his invention, however, the idea never quite took off.

A common design trend seen among patents were ropes, pulleys, slings, and baskets, says Halls. "They often look quite complicated to use and set up, and would require a lot of quick thinking and dexterity under pressure," she says.

For example, R.H. Houghton’s 1877 fire escape proposal featured pegs tied along a rope to create a flimsy mock ladder that may have been difficult to keep steady if an escapee was trying to quickly descend from a burning building. A few systems operated like an elevator that would be propped and fastened to a window.   

Some officials tried mandating different tactics with ropes, but were met with skepticism. In 1882, retired quartermaster general of the United States Army, Montgomery Meigs, proposed that long bows with heavy metal arrows or hooks and balls of twine be hung inside doors of the government printing office building in Washington.

In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other states in the United States, local authorities adopted a rope fire-escape law for hotels, which had the second highest fatality rate after theater fires. The law required hotel owners to place ropes in guestrooms, explains Wermiel. “Such laws, which assumed that frightened hotel guests could climb down ropes from windows high above the street, struck contemporaries as silly,” she wrote.

Tall slides and cloth tubes that gave escapees a direct line of descent to the ground was a popular, and more logical solution. There were a variety of chute designs, from flame retardant canvas, netting, and metal. In the early 20th century, some schools and hospitals installed metal slide chutes to the sides of buildings. Companies still install and utilize similar kinds of escape chutes today.

Over time, the success and failure of different fire escape designs brought forth improved rules and regulations. In 1861, the massive London Tooley Street fire that caused the demise of many warehouses led to new legislation for governing fire services, the adoption of stricter commercial building regulations, and increased fire brigade services in the United Kingdom, Halls wrote.

In the United States, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire at the Asch Building in Greenwich Village in New York City that left 145 workers dead and dozens injured caused a shift towards stricter requirements for exits and fire escapes, Wermiel explains. Because of the horrible incident, architects incorporated fire towers, exterior stairs built with the similar strength of interior stairs, and other alternative exit routes. 

The Victorians’ fascination with fires and the fertile ground for enterprise bolstered the number of fire escape designs. The only problem: each of them, says Halls, “seem to carry as many risks as the fire the person was trying to escape from.”

Many stories have been told about Old Bet, one of the first elephants (if not THE first) to have set foot in the United States. One thing we do know for certain: She was murdered in Maine in the cold, cold summer of 1816.

There’s a striking memorial to Old Bet in Somers, New York, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, outside a lovely brick building called the Elephant Hotel. Now home to the town offices, it was once an inn and tavern built by Hachaliah (that’s “heck-a-LIE-uh”) Bailey, one of the fathers of the American Circus.

Bailey (a distant relative of the more famous James Bailey of Barnum & Bailey) was a local farmer who also traded in livestock. In 1805 he was at a cattle auction when he ran across an unusually large creature for the venue: an elephant, at the time rarely seen in the western hemisphere. It’s said he was “smitten” with the big girl, so he bought her, named her “Old Bet,” and took her home to work the farm in Somers.

How this particular elephant came to the U.S. is a story with a lot of shading over the years, but she may possibly be the very first pachyderm to have landed in America. So rare a creature piqued the neighbors’ curiosity, and Bailey quickly realized he could make a buck by giving folks a peek.

Bailey toured the northeast with Old Bet, charging 25 cents a head. Fearful that people might get a free look, Bailey made Bet walk from town to town under the cover of night. Making the rounds of New England this way was particularly punishing in July of 1816. It was unusually frigid summer that year, when temperatures across the northern hemisphere plummeted and crops routinely failed. It led to food shortages, widespread desperation and short fuses, including one man in the small town of Alfred, Maine.  

A sawmill operator named Daniel Davis may have been angry that his neighbors were wasting their money, he may have seen Bet as the real-life incarnation of the Biblical “behemoth,” or he may have simply been drunk and looking for a fight. Whatever his motive, Davis took to his musket and fired two shots into the defenseless animal. She died on the side of the road, where today the spot is marked with an honorary plaque.  

Davis spent just two days in jail for his crime, and Bailey claimed a $30,000 loss. Undeterred, he bought a second elephant and named her “Little Bet,” and kept on touring. Ten years after the first loss, Bailey lost Little Bet in much the same way, when she, too, was shot down under mysterious circumstances in a small New England town.

Bailey stayed in the menagerie business for a while, continuing to tour in tent shows with other acts and attractions, a foreshadowing of the grand days of the American circus to come. In 1827 he erected the monument to Old and Little Bet back at his Somers hotel—a wooden carving of an elephant on top of a granite obelisk. It’s a small reminder of the majestic animals who died cold and alone a long way from home.

In the picture above, Rudy Giuliani, Hizzoner, Mayor of New York City, is having a grand old time with Mother Teresa. This meeting took place in June of 1997, just a few months before her death, when she came to New York for a surprise visit to the South Bronx branch of her organization, Missionaries of Charity. What did the world’s most famous nun need to talk to the Mayor of New York about?

Parking.

As the New York Times reported, the main item on Mother Teresa’s agenda was making sure that her nuns had special parking permits that would allow them to park in normally illegal spots. According to the mayor, she got them: ''I would do anything Mother Teresa wanted,'' he told the Times. "If Mother Teresa wants more parking, she can have more parking.”

Among all the opaque and hidden systems of New York City, the unwritten rules of public parking are one of the most mystifying, both to outsiders and the people that live here. Understanding how it works can feel like unlocking an obscure code.

At the core of this mystery is an astonishing fact: some of the most valuable land in the country, if not the world, is available, for free, to store parked cars. Because such a valuable resource is available for no money, the cost is measured in different currencies. To park on the street in New York City, it’s almost necessary to have access to either time or political influence.

One of the stranger rituals of New York City life is alternate side parking. Every street in the city has a designated period when parking is forbidden and the street cleaned. When ASP kicks in, the cars parked on one side of a street move, en masse, to double park on the other side. It’s a strange phenomenon: I once saw a car with Alabama plates crawling down the street during ASP, its occupants clearly baffled, the person in the backseat filming the whole thing on their phone, as if they had encountered crop circles or some other disturbing sight. This practice is also illegal. If you look at the city’s website, the most frequently asked question about ASP is “Can I double park when ASP is in effect?” The very clear answer: “No, double parking is illegal at all times.”

But during ASP periods, parking enforcers ticket unmoved cars, while ignoring the flagrant lawbreakers across the streets. Everyone knows the system. Everyone accepts it. There are variations, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street. Some places, the drivers wait out ASP in their cars; elsewhere it’s acceptable to lock your car and come back in an hour. On some streets, you can pay a neighbor to move your car; in some wealthy areas, doormen perform this service. On one street near me, a retired cop coordinates the weekly migration—if someone doesn’t move their car fast enough, he’ll knock on their door or holler until they come out and perform their part.

The second hidden system of parking in New York is the one Mother Teresa was trying to take advantage of. The city government issues permits to certain groups of people—teachers, government employees, clergy, and employees of other not-for-profit organizations. These permits allow their holders to bend the rules: a car with a clergy permits, for example, can be left in no parking zones near hospitals for up to three hours.

“You’re a member of protected class and a rarified class if you can get a magic placard that lets you park wherever you are,” says Paul Steely White, of Transportation Alternatives, a local advocacy group that believes New York’s streets should be made more friendly to all forms of transportation, not just cars.

The group has a problem, on principle, with the permits, which White call the “crony-ish and corrupt way parking is distributed to certain groups of New Yorkers,” but also, more pressingly, with the way they’re abused. Surveys of areas popular with permit holders show that people with permits park anywhere they want—by hydrants, in crosswalks, on sidewalks, none of which is allowed under the terms of the permits. But they’re rarely, if ever, ticketed. As with the ASP double parkers, it’s almost like a car with a permit becomes invisible. Plus, it’s extremely easy to create fake permits. “You make some official looking sign and you slap some on laminate and you can park pretty much wherever you want,” says White.

Presumably, though, Mother Teresa and her nuns were not going to just create fake permits for themselves. Instead, they had to flex what muscle they had—they had to have Mother Teresa go directly to the mayor. According to the Times, this had happened from time to time over the years. At a memorial from the nun just a few months later, Giuliani said, “If she wanted parking spaces, we gave her parking spaces. If she wanted parking signs for her nuns, we gave her parking signs...She didn’t even have to ask.”

Which wasn’t quite true—like any other parking-hungry supplicant, coming to the city in search of more space, she did have to ask.