Atlas Obscura - Latest Articles and Places

Kranj Ossuary in Slovenia

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:26:00 -0400

Just below the cobblestones of Kranj’s old town square lie the remains of thousands of the city’s medieval residents. Excavations revealed early iterations of the nearby church, including a baptismal font dating to the late Roman period, a 13th-century catacomb, and a later medieval ossuary. Visitors can access the underground site through the Gorenjski Museum, located around the corner in the Town Hall.

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USS Silversides Submarine Museum in Muskegon, Michigan

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:00:00 -0400

Submarine museums are already special in their own right, but what sets the USS Silversides Museum apart is the chance to spend the night aboard, sleeping in the same narrow bunks that WWII sailors once did.

The museum has hosted many exhibits over the years, ranging from Navy Divers featuring Carl Brashear, made famous in the movie Men of Honor, to its 2025 show Lake Michigan's Call to Duty in WWII. Inside, visitors can peer through working periscopes, explore a ship's control station featuring control yokes still used on modern submarines, and even play a giant version of Battleship.

Outside the museum is the USS Silversides herself, a wartime veteran credited with sinking 23 enemy ships over her years of service. Her myriad awards and war reports breathe life into history in a way that no book can. You can explore her hull, sit in the crew's mess, and peer into torpedo tubes as you walk the same spaces as WWII sailors. For the especially curious, behind-the-scenes tours are available for purchase, limited to an intimate six persons per tour.

Like most museums, there's a gift shop, but alongside the usual mugs and shot glasses, you'll find challenge coins, an illustrated record of the USS Silverside's war patrols, and even a classic Navy "Dixie Cup" hat!

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Gold Post Boxes in Nailsworth, England

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 14:00:00 -0400

In the quiet country village of Nailsworth in the Cotswolds stand two shiny post boxes. They were painted gold by Royal Mail to celebrate local hero Pete Reed, who won gold in the men’s four rowing at the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Although Reed was born in Seattle, USA, his family moved to England several months later, and he grew up in Nailsworth, attending a local school and later college in nearby Cirencester.

Reed went on to win gold at three successive Olympic Games: first in Beijing in 2008, then in London in 2012, and again in Rio in 2016. He also won five gold medals at the World Rowing Championships. He had been training for the 2020 Tokyo Games but retired beforehand.

Reed was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to rowing.

In 2019, the Triple Olympic gold medallist announced via Instagram that he had become paralyzed from the chest down after suffering a spinal stroke. Since then, Reed has become a vocal advocate for disability access and inclusion.

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Exploring Virginia’s Historic Triangle, Then and Now

Mila Tanghe — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:35:00 -0400

+ Few places blur the line between past and present quite like Virginia’s Historic Triangle. The places now known as Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg witnessed the arrival of the first British ships on Virginia’s shores, the rise of revolutionary ideals, and the battle that secured a new nation. But these events don’t just live in the past—they continue to shape American life, including how these iconic towns are experienced today.

Here, you can stroll through the former British royal governor’s neatly trimmed palace gardens as 18th-century leaders once did, or wander the modern wilds of the Williamsburg Botanical Garden. Climb aboard replicas of the 1607 Settlement Ships, then cruise the same waters on Yorktown Sailing Charters’ Schooner Serenity. Or step into the eclectic world of folk art at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum before discovering works by O’Keeffe, Rembrandt, and more at one of the oldest university-based art collections in the country.

From Monarchs to Meadows

Developed in the 1710s under Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood, the Governor’s Palace Gardens were as much about the plants as they were a symbol of royal power.

The sprawling 10-acre complex looked like a meticulously crafted tapestry, following the kind of highly-controlled, geometrical garden shape popular in the Tudor-Stuart period. It had “falling gardens,” canals, and fish ponds, and was specifically crafted to be admired from the palace windows. Guests would find a diverse array of imported plant species, a testament to the governor’s reach and wealth, that were tended to by enslaved laborers.

The Governor’s Palace Gardens are still walkable today, having been restored to their original grandeur in the 1930s, allowing visitors to experience the same vistas once meant to impress colonial elites.

Two centuries later, Williamsburg’s Botanical Gardens have a different purpose: one grounded in modern principles of sustainability, biodiversity, and community-driven conservation.

Found within Freedom Park, the 2-acre Williamsburg Botanical Garden includes more than 150 woody species, most of them native to the Virginia Coastal Plain. Paths wind down through both manicured gardens and more natural wild spaces, with special areas such as the Pollinator Palace for native bees, a Fairy Garden for interactive children’s experiences, a Therapy Garden designed for people with disabilities to grow their own vegetables, and a Meadow that hums with pollinators during late summer.

This volunteer-run garden is free to visit. Designed as a living classroom, it prioritizes wildlife support and sustainable practices typical of the Virginia Peninsula.

Tavern Time Travel

In 18th-century Virginia, taverns were the social and intellectual heart of the colony, where politics were argued over roast meats, card games and the free flow of ale. None proved more influential than the Raleigh Tavern. Built sometime before 1735, it hosted auctions, elegant balls, and lavish reception dinners for arriving Royal Governors.

But it was in the Apollo Room, with its paneled walls and banqueting halls, that the tavern cemented its place in history. In 1769, after Virginia’s royal governor dissolved the elected assembly, its members reconvened here as the “late representatives of the people.” There, they pledged to boycott British goods in protest of new taxes, one of the first organized rebellions against royal authority. The Raleigh became a gathering place for revolutionaries, where figures like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry debated ideas that set the stage for the American Revolution.

The tavern was the first building reconstructed in Colonial Williamsburg. Since 1932, visitors have stepped inside this restored landmark to imagine the fiery conversations that helped launch a nation. Guided tours, live reenactments, and occasional participatory events invite guests to discover the people and moments that shaped this place.

Virginia’s tavern tradition carries on at King’s Arms Tavern, where guests can travel back in time in this living-history ale house. Located in a recreated 1700s tavern that bore the same name, servers in period attire present 18th-century recipes with a modern twist. While savoring signature dishes like peanut soup or colonial game pye, visitors are entertained by balladeers playing traditional songs and townsfolk sharing “the news of the day.”

Step Aboard and Into the Past

The Mayflower and its Plymouth-settling crew may steal the spotlight, but it wasn’t the first English ship to reach what is now the United States. History buffs know that three ships—Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery—arrived 13 years earlier.

In 1607, after surviving four rough months at sea, the ships finally anchored in a marshy peninsula along the James River. On board were 144 men and boys who would go on to establish the first permanent English settlement on the continent: Jamestown, named after their King James I.

Right from the moment they set foot on the ground, life was harsh. The area was swampy and plagued by mosquitoes, with brackish water unsuitable for drinking. The settlers struggled with food shortages and disease, and attacks from the local Powhatan tribes. By the end of the first year, nearly half the colonists had died. Still, the settlement endured and eventually became the first capital of colonial Virginia.

Visitors can now step aboard exact replicas of two of the three ships at the Jamestown Settlement. On the Godspeed and Discovery, interpreters share stories of the sailors’ challenges and daily routines, and demonstrate knot-tying, sail-raising and 17th-century piloting and navigation, bringing their seafaring journey to life. Back on land, visitors can step inside the re-created 1610-14 fort where colonists first lived, or explore a reconstructed Paspahegh village. They can also learn more about the people and cultures that shaped 17th-century Virginia in the site’s interactive exhibits.

For those who want to sail the same routes as the early settlers, the Yorktown Sailing Charters and Jamestown Discovery Boat Tours offer modern excursions along the James and York Rivers. Visitors can follow the path of Captain John Smith when he was trading with the Powhatan along Yorktown’s Schooner Serenity, or cruise near Jamestown Settlement while hearing stories of the colony’s early years–keeping an eye out for dolphins or osprey along the way.

Defending Freedom

Strolling around its gently rolling hills, visitors could almost forget Colonial National Historical Park was once the site of a bloody battleground. That is, unless you happen to visit when saber-brandishing men on horseback gallop through the field.

Nearly 250 years ago, these very grounds rumbled with the thunder of cannons. The British, led by General Cornwallis, found themselves in the tobacco port of Yorktown, encircled by American troops and their French allies, and cut off from any escape routes. By October 19, 1781, Cornwallis had surrendered, marking the conclusion of the last major battle of the American Revolution.

Today, you can explore the Yorktown Battlefield, its earthworks and historic buildings where American independence was won. Driving around the siege lines and encampment areas, you’ll want to keep an eye out for original cannons and mortars positioned along the earthworks.

For a deeper understanding of the Revolution, visitors can head about a mile away to the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown. There, you can experience the Siege of Yorktown through a 180-degree surround screen, rumbling seats, and even the smell of gunpowder.

With indoor galleries and outdoor living-history areas, the museum traces the nation’s founding from the colonial period to the signing of the constitution, told through the personal stories of citizens, soldiers, and pivotal events. Inside are 500 period artifacts, including a 1776 broadside of the Declaration of Independence.

Outdoors, revolutionary-era life is vividly depicted in a re-created Continental Army encampment and farm. Guests can muster with troops, learn military drills and musket firing, squirm over 18th century medical practices, or even pitch in with chores on the farm.

Stories From the Earliest Schools

Few universities can say they’ve had their classes canceled because the British were coming. Such is the legacy of the Sir Christopher Wren Building at William & Mary, the oldest college building still standing in the U.S.

Constructed between 1695 and 1700 after a successful petition by the Church of England in Virginia, the Wren Building predates even Williamsburg. At the time, colonial Virginia’s capital was still located at Jamestown.

It began with three schools: grammar, philosophy, and divinity. The Wren Building, known then simply as “The College” was the first to open its doors to students.

Since then, the Wren Building has survived fires and wars, and its campus has hosted four U.S. presidents. Now in its fourth century, the building still hums with daily life, its classrooms and offices carrying forward the purpose it was built for more than 300 years ago.

On the same campus once stood Bray School, one of the earliest institutions in North America dedicated to educating Black children.

Founded in 1760 at the urging of Benjamin Franklin, the school’s purpose was to convince enslaved students to accept their circumstances as divinely ordained. A number of records show the children resisted the intention of those lessons.

The Bray School’s sole teacher, Ann Wager, instructed hundreds of enslaved and free students until her death in 1774, after which the school closed.

After going unrecognized for 250 years, the original school building, used from 1760 to 1765, was rediscovered on campus in 2020. A year later, it was moved to the Colonial Williamsburg Historic Area for restoration, with much of its original material preserved.

Today, visitors can explore the Bray School as an exhibition site. It is also used as a focal point for research and dialogue about the intertwined history of race, religion and education in America through the Williamsburg Bray School Initiative, a partnership between William & Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Collecting the Arts Through Time

Walking around the galleries of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM), visitors step into a colorful world of carved figures, carousels, and portraits created by self-taught artists.

The basis of the museum comes from Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s pioneering collection of folk art, begun in the 1920s and donated to Colonial Williamsburg a decade later. It opened in 1957, and is now the oldest continuously operating institution in the U.S. devoted solely to folk art.

Guests can wander its 11 galleries, divided into distinct folk art categories such as paintings, sculptures, furniture, textiles, and toys, featuring rotating exhibitions. Located within the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, AARFAM sits alongside the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, together comprising more than 70,000 examples of folk, fine, decorative, and mechanical arts under one roof.

A mile away is the Muscarelle Museum of Art, home to one of the oldest university-based art collections in the U.S.

It dates back to 1732, when William & Mary received its first gift, a portrait of physicist Robert Boyle. Over the centuries, the university received numerous donations, including American and English colonial works, as well as modern pieces such as White Flower by Georgia O’Keeffe, gifted by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller herself.

For years, these valuable artworks were spread throughout campus. It wasn’t until they were cataloged in 1970 that the university realized the true scale of the collection found within its walls, and the need for a museum. The Muscarelle Museum of Art was formally established in 1983, featuring works spanning European Old Masters, American icons, and modern and contemporary creators.

With the recent opening of the Martha Wren Briggs Center for the Visual Arts, the Muscarelle has tripled in size, showcasing nearly 8,000 works, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Henry Ossawa Tanner and Margaret Bourke-White. It also hosts workshops, lectures, and community events. Admission to the permanent collection is free.

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Temple Bell in Boston, Massachusetts

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:00:00 -0400

Strolling around Back Bay Fens, visitors will come across numerous sculptures scattered throughout the park. But one in particular stands out: an old Japanese temple bell with a fascinating story of how it ended up there.

The bell was originally cast in 1675 by Tanaka Gonzaemon under the supervision of Suzuki Magoemon and dedicated to Bishamon, a Buddhist god of children and good luck. It was installed in the Manpukuji Temple in Japan's Sendai region.

During World War II, the bell was taken to be melted down for ammunition. Thankfully, it never came to that, and in 1945, sailors from the USS Boston discovered it at a scrap heap in Yokosuka. They brought it back to the city of Boston to be given as a souvenir.

In 1953, instead of requesting its return, the Japanese government officially presented the bell to the city of Boston as a symbol of peace and friendship between the two countries.

It was first installed in Boston Common before being relocated to the Fens, where it underwent restoration in 1992.

It’s a unique piece, one you don’t see every day and well worth a look.

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Parc Frédéric Back in Montreal, Québec

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Parc Frédéric Back, once a massive limestone quarry and then a city landfill, has undergone an incredible transformation to become one of North America's most ambitious urban environmental rehabilitation projects.

This sprawling Montreal park now features rolling green hills dotted with otherwordly spheres that are actually biogas collection wells, converting the site's past waste into clean energy. It's a powerful testament to ecological ingenuity, offering vibrant green space for recreation, culture, and a unique glimpse into sustainable environment.

It's one of the hidden gems of the island.

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Provo Pioneer Village in Provo, Utah

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0400

With these real, not replica, pioneer cabins and a bunch of old artifacts (a magic lantern! butter molds! the pioneer craft inspiration for "Pop Goes the Weasel"!) the real charm this place has to offer is its laid-back atmosphere and cheerful volunteers (there are no paid employees) dressed in pioneer clothing to add to the quaint atmosphere. Tours are given whenever interested parties stop by (and there's a free volunteer). In a word: it's informal.

There's also a blacksmith forge that often has a demonstrator practicing making spoons, tools, or more; a carpenter's shop that sometimes has demonstrations as well; and multiple pioneer wagons.

Step into the schoolhouse, and you'll learn about the "Deseret Alphabet," an alternative writing system LDS leader Brigham Young tried and failed to get going, and that looks vaguely like an alien language. You can try out some pioneer games, and feel grateful for modern-day entertainment.

If you're lucky, you'll run into Mayor Steve, who helped restore the village decades ago when it had fallen into severe disrepair. He loves to say "Things here don't just look old, they are old!" and he fits that description himself, these days. Make sure to ask him about the time he dropped the large bell displayed in front of the schoolhouse, and it broke into a hundred pieces.

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Budweiser/Budvar Brewery in České Budějovice, Czechia

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:00:00 -0400

If you ask for a “Budweiser” in continental Europe, most likely you will not receive the famous American brand. That is because Czechia is home to a different company which claims to have far older origins. Another pale lager distinguished by a malt and vanilla scent and a slight taste of apple fruit, Budweiser Budvar is made from artesian water from on-site wells, Moravian barley, and Saaz hops. It is also lagered for a full 90 days, much longer than most mass-produced beers.

The country's “national beer” traces back to 1265, when the city of České Budějovice (“Budweis” in German) was granted brewing rights by the King of Bohemia. For a time, it was the Holy Roman Empire's imperial brewery, and 87% of the city’s revenue came from brewing in the early 16th century. When Adolphus Busch visited České Budějovice in 1876, he decided to make his own Budweiser in America, brewed in a similar manner. The modern brewery here was not founded until 1895, with the consolidation of several Czech brewers.

With both breweries having an international footprint, there have predictably been quarrels as to naming rights. Budweiser Budvar relinquished its rights to the U.S. market in 1939, but refused an offer to split rights globally in 1994. In 2010, Anheuser-Busch, which makes the American Budweiser, lost an attempt to trademark the name in the EU. As such, it has to sell their beer as "Bud" instead. On the other hand, those drinking Budweiser Budvar in the Americas will know it as “Czechvar.”

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Cardozo Velásquez House Museum in Oruro, Bolivia

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0400

In the early 1990s, Bolivian sculptor Gonzalo Cardozo and his equally artistic wife, María Velásquez, began transforming their family home in Oruro into a work of art, one to rival any of their pieces in the country's museums. By 1993, the Cardozo Velásquez House Museum opened its doors to the public, charging a small fee for a short tour of its art and collections.

The couple were well-connected in the art world and often traded artworks with famous Bolivian painters such as Mamani Mamani and Ricardo Pérez Alcalá, while also collecting ancient Wankarani artifacts. The family likes to say that they have a bit of every other museum in Bolivia, with sections devoted to Bolivian textiles, ancient pottery and metalwork, colonial art, Bolivian paintings, as well as their own creations. During tours, they personally explain the origins of each section.

In his later years, Gonzalo became fascinated by the concept of the sphere, creating over 6,000 of them from all types of stone. Visitors and friends would bring him rocks from around the world, which the sculptor shaped and mounted on stands carved in the form of human hands, symbolizing the Earth and humanity's responsibility for it.

He passed away in 2021, but his wife and his five daughters, Nayra, Wara, Tani, Lulhy, and Kurmi (all names from the Aymara language), continue to maintain the museum, lead tours, and run after-school sculpture classes for local children.

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Santa Barbara Mine Ruins in Huancavelica Province, Peru

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 05:00:00 -0400

In 1555, after the discovery of the cold amalgamation process for refining gold and silver, the Spanish Crown needed mercury, and found it in what would later become the Peruvian region of Huancavelica. Over the next three centuries, they extracted it relentlessly, using the forced labor of Indigenous workers. Mercury poisoning, cave-ins, and brutal conditions soon earned the site its grim name: Mina de la Muerte, the Mine of Death.

From Huancavelica, the mercury was carried by llama to the coast, shipped to Arica in modern-day Chile, and then hauled by mule across the Atacama Desert to feed the great silver mines of Potosí and Oruro in Bolivia. This new refining method allowed the Spanish to reclaim previously discarded ore, expanding their empire’s wealth at a staggering human cost.

After Peru’s independence in the 1800s, the mine was left to informal miners. When the California gold rush began, production dwindled. The Mining Act of 1899 briefly revived operations under private investors who brought in foreign machinery, built a cable car, and even constructed a hydroelectric plant. But when mercury prices collapsed in 1975, the site was finally abandoned for good- ending over four centuries of extraction and leaving the haunting ruins that remain today.

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Palace of Independence in Astana, Kazakhstan

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:00:00 -0400

Built in 2008, the palace became an architectural manifesto of the young state. Its dome resembles a traditional Kazakh shanyrak, and inside there is a unique hall with a 3-D map of the country.

It was here that Kazakhstan first hosted a world-class summit (OSCE), and today it hosts key international forums.

A special exhibit is the 100-kilogram silver book Kazakh Eli, which records the history of independence. The building is open to tourists —rare for diplomatic facilities of such status.

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Hegeler-Carus Mansion in La Salle, Illinois

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:00:00 -0400

ToThe Hegeler-Carus Mansion towers over the rest of the small town of La Salle, Illinois. Designed by W. W. Boyington, the architect behind Chicago's iconic Water Tower, the mansion was originally the home of German industralist Edward C. Hegeler, who made his fortune as founder and partner of the Matthiessen and Hegeler Zinc Company.

Built in the Second Empire style, the house's original interiors, including elaborate parquet floors, were designed by August Fiedler. The house was built with many advanced conveniences like early sprinkler systems (thanks Chicago Fire of 1871) and an enormous clothes dryer you've ever seen! Naturally, a large number of items in the house are made out of zinc. The basement is home to what might be the oldest surviving private gymnasium in the US and a unique example of an extant German-style Turnverein (turnhall) gymnasium.

In addition to his industrial interests, Hegeler was an intellectual man who founded the Open Court Publishing Company in 1887 to publish works on philosophy, religion, and science. Its influential academic journal, The Monist, is still published to this day. Open Court's original managing editor was one Paul Carus, who married Hegeler's engineer daughter Mary. Mary went on to have seven children; after they were born, she became Chief Executive and President of the zinc company and was the company's guiding hand through the Depression, while her husband managed and grew Open Court, the offices of which were quartered in the basement of the mansion.

The Hegeler-Carus family occupied the mansion until 2004. In 1973 Marianne Carus, the German-born wife of one of Mary and Paul's grandsons, was the founder of the notable children's literary magazine Cricket.

Today the historic family home is a museum showcase for many of its original features and interior design elements. Many of its 50 rooms have been re-set to appear as it did when the Hegeler family first moved in. Tours are offered to the public Thursday through Saturday.

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The Clay Terrace Eyeballs in Carmel, Indiana

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:00:00 -0400

Since 2018, driving through the roundabout at the intersection of Circle Drive and Range Line Road, it’s hard to miss what is unmistakably a pair of huge, round eyeballs staring down from a nearby hill. These playful peepers were the brainchild of Carmel resident, Jason Selburg, who created the eyeballs simply to make people smile while driving through the Indianapolis suburb.

Initially, Selburg purchased a pair of white beach balls, painted pupils on them, and placed them atop a hill. With no long term plans for the eyes, Selburg assumed the eyeballs would be removed when lawnmowers and landscapers came out in the spring. However, when the time came, mowers simply mowed around the eyeballs.

As it became clear that the eyeballs were a welcome, cheeky addition, Selburg sought to install the beach balls more permanently. After going through at least three pairs of eyes due to strong winds, and a suspected senior prank at the nearby high school, Selburg finally, successfully affixed them to the hill, where they remain today - a delightful, albeit goofy, guardian watching over the suburb.

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The Surprising Culinary History of a Humble Puerto Rican Favorite

Sam Lin-Sommer — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:30:00 -0400

+ Aida Lugo McAllister still remembers the first time she tried Puerto Rico’s unofficial national dish.

“When I went to Puerto Rico, 1970, at age 17, that’s when I had my first mofongo. And it was heaven,” she remembers. “A mountain of this mashed plantain with pieces of pork in a sauce. Delicious.”

Mofongo is the first food people bring up when they talk about the island, says Lugo McAllister, a Puerto Rican home cook who has published recipes on her website Aida’s Kitchen and in her bilingual cookbook, Aida’s Kitchen a lo Boricua. A rich, starchy mash of fried green plantains, garlic, butter, and chicharrón (pork cracklings), it’s the perfect accompaniment to broths and stewed meats. Growing up in Gary, Indiana, Lugo McAllister and her family didn��t have ready access to green plantains, so she didn’t try mofongo until she moved to the island as a teen. But the dish’s impression on her was immediate.

“So delicious, so moist, and it came in a mortar,” she recalls. She has since published recipes for a “healthier” mofongo (sans pork cracklings) on her website and YouTube. Lugo McAllister is joined by influencers all over the internet who fry and mash plantains in wooden mortars. “When you think of Puerto Rican gastronomy, I’m sure that the first thing you think of is mofongo,” says the content creator Natalia Bercero on TikTok, before whipping up the dish for her fans.

Though it has contemporary appeal, mofongo’s roots are deep. The dish reflects the intertwined histories of African, European, and Indigenous people in Puerto Rico. Taíno people, native to the Caribbean islands, used a pilón, a wooden mortar and pestle, to grind ingredients together. Their civilization was flourishing before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492. Soon after, Spanish colonists attacked and enslaved the Taíno, putting them to work in gold mines and plantations. So many Taíno died under colonial rule that the Spanish brought enslaved West Africans to the island to replace their dwindling workforce.

In West Africa, cooks have long prepared fufu, a dish of plantains, yams, or cassava that is boiled, then mashed. Enslaved Africans brought that same technique to Puerto Rico. They also introduced plantains, which grew easily on the island and became “the main source of food for the slaves and the poor people,” said Lugo McAllister, who moved back from Puerto Rico to Indiana in her mid-20s.

Plantains are closely related to the banana, but in their green, unripe form, they’re not sweet, and can be used as a neutral starch similar to a potato. Over time, African cooks combined plantain-based fufu with European ingredients like garlic, butter, and chicharrón for flavor and moisture. The late food historian Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra wrote in Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity, that the word “mofongo” comes from an Angolan Kikongo term, “mfwenge-mfwenge,” which means “a great amount of anything at all.

But that doesn’t mean mofongo is a breeze to make. “It’s a food that’s preferred eaten at a restaurant,” said Lugo McAllister. “Because of the many steps involved.” Even some Puerto Rican restaurants avoid making the dish because of the amount of elbow grease involved in smashing plantains. Still, mofongo is a cornerstone of Puerto Rican gastronomy, and each restaurant prepares it in its own way. Some serve it in a pilón for extra flare. A soupy main course is typically served on the side or in a well in the middle of the mound.

In Kissimmee, Florida, where more than half of the city’s 85,000 residents are of Puerto Rican descent, there’s no shortage of good mofongo. The chefs at El Cilantrillo, a Kissimmee restaurant known for delicious cooking, huge portions, and live music, prepare a particularly good one. “I will say that I'm a mofongos tester,” said Yannick Jordan, a Puerto Rican-raised project manager for the company of restaurants that includes El Cilantrillo. “El Cilantrillo’s is still my favorite mofongo that I have ever tried.” On the softer side, with a strong garlic flavor, their mofongo comes in a pilón bearing the restaurant’s name, and can be ordered stuffed with everything from octopus to Impossible Meat. It’s their best seller.

As with any great dish, mofongo has seen its fair share of spinoffs in recent years. Creative cooks in Puerto Rico and the mainland are trying their own takes on garlicky mashed plantains. There’s Lugo McAllister’s vegetarian mofongo, for example. For a festive appetizer, cooks shape smaller amounts of smashed plantains into little cups and fry them to make “mofonguitos” that they fill with meat.

El Cilantrillo is a purveyor of another mofongo innovation: trifongo, a mofongo made with a trifecta of green plantains, yuca (cassava), and maduros (ripe, sweet plantains). Lugo McAllister said that when she first experienced mofongo in the 1970s, trifongo was uncommon.

The yuca in trifongo is a mildly sweet, starchy tuber cultivated by the Taínos that is now a staple throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. El Cilantrillo’s trifongo contains no chicharrón, and gets some extra moisture and umami flavor from chicken broth and seasoning.

Lugo McAllister says that when it comes to making mofongo, the challenge is in getting the texture right. “It needs to be moist but not greasy,” she says.

Yuca and plantain are all somewhat dry once they’re mashed, so it’s the job of the cook to add fat and liquid to moisten them. “If you don't put fat or some type of liquid, oh my god, you won't be able to even swallow it,” Lugo McAllister warns. Traditionally, cooks would derive moisture from butter and chicharrón, but many modern mofongos, like El Cilantrillo’s trifongo, are moistened with broth and olive oil. To prevent yourself from overdoing the fat, Lugo McAllister says to add it little by little, tasting to see when the texture is to your liking.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t a puree, but rather a mash with plenty of crispy chunks. Lugo McAllister recommends smashing the starches while they’re still hot from cooking, because they become much harder to manipulate once they cool down. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, you can put the starches in a stainless steel bowl, cover them with a kitchen towel, and pound them with a mallet. Placing them in a plastic bag and smashing them with the flat bottom of a cup or a pan can work, too.

Lastly, there’s the flavor. Yuca and green plantain are pretty bland, so salt, garlic, and other seasonings are crucial. “It’s supposed to have a lot of garlic flavor,” Lugo McAllister said. Her healthy take on mofongo includes cilantro, and El Cilantrillo’s gets a flavor boost from adobo, a blend of salt and spices like garlic, pepper, oregano, and turmeric that many Puerto Rican cooks keep on hand. Some cooks make it at home, but it’s also available ready-made in supermarkets.

The adobo, plus the dance between green plantain, sweet plantain, and cassava makes El Cilantrillo’s trifongo anything but bland. The yuca and maduros add a dimension to mofongo that isn’t ordinarily there, Jordan said. “The cassava is more salty. Sweet plantain, of course, is sweeter. So it's like an explosion in your mouth of these two different flavors.”

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The ‘Curvy Queen’ of Venezuelan Cuisine

Sam Lin-Sommer — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:29:00 -0400

+ If you’re looking for a handheld meal in Venezuela, one dish reigns supreme: la Reina Pepiada, or “the curvy queen.” It’s the country’s signature take on its staple food, the arepa. A creamy chicken salad in a crispy cornmeal pancake, it’s undeniably delicious. And it tells a distinctly Venezuelan story: one of indigenous peoples, migration, and a beauty; of rising up, falling down, and finding new homes all across the globe.

“Every arepera has Reina Pepiada,” says Irena Stein, a Venezuelan-American chef and author of the cookbook Arepa: Classic & Contemporary Recipes for Venezuela’s Daily Bread. When Stein lived in Caracas, the nation’s capital, from 1974 to 1980, people would dress up to go to areperas, or arepa bars. And families would also whip up Reina Pepiadas for casual meals at home.

In Kissimmee, Florida, the arepa has become a versatile staple. It’s served alongside espresso and Cuban sandwiches at pan-Latin Express Cafe; stuffed with bacon, eggs, and sausage at Susana’s Cafe; and at Venezuelan–Puerto Rican Pa’ Pikar Latin Grill, filled with chicken salad and avocado in the famous Reina Pepiada. About half of the Venezuelan-American population lives in the state.

What exactly is in this dish that has conquered palates all over the world? At its base is a cornmeal patty cooked on a griddle, and sometimes finished in an oven, until crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside.

Anthropologists estimate that people in Venezuela and Colombia have been eating arepas for thousands of years, since long before Europeans arrived. The Cumanagato people, indigenous to the Caribbean coast of what is now Venezuela, used the word “erepa” to refer to corn. Early conquistadors witnessed Indigenous people in South America eating flat corn cakes that they would toast on a hot clay surface called a budare. This staple survived to become the basis of both the Colombian and Venezuelan diets.

Venezuelan arepas are thick and stuffed with fillings, so they constitute meals in and of themselves. The Venezuelan writer Alejandro Puyana reported that before the 2014 crisis that crippled Venezuela’s economy, the average Venezuelan ate 66 pounds of cornmeal flour per year, amounting to about two arepas every day of the year.

The birth of La Reina Pepiada

La Reina Pepiada came on the scene in the 1950s, as Venezuela was experiencing rapid growth and change. In Caracas, the Álvarez family operated one of the country’s first areperas, El Chance, before opening a second restaurant, El Centro Criollo de Nutrición Hermanos Alvarez, in an area of the city near a famous nightclub. Revelers would devour their arepas after a night of partying, and word spread quickly about their delicious food. Many of the era’s famous writers and entertainers would dine there.

In 1955, a 19-year old woman named Susana Duijm became the first Latin American to win the Miss World Competition. The victory was all the more significant because Duijm, born to a Surinamese Jewish father and a Venezuelan mother, was not from the upper class, unlike the Miss Venezuelas before her.

As the story goes, the Álvarezes seized the moment of Duijm’s win and, soon after her victory, sat one of their daughters on a throne at the restaurant, dressed up to look like Miss World. A man passing by asked what the costume meant. When they told him that she was dressed as Susana Duijm, the man responded, “But I’m the father of Susana! I’ll bring her here.”

A couple of days later, Abraham Duijm returned with Susana, and the restaurant prepared a special dish just for the beauty queen: a toasted arepa stuffed with shredded chicken, mayonnaise, avocado, and peas. The Álvarez family named it Reina Pepiada, and the rest is history.

In that same decade, one more change occurred that cemented Reina Pepiada in Venezuelan cuisine. When the Álvarez brothers opened up shop, the only way to prepare the dough for making arepas was from scratch. That meant removing the corn kernels from a cob, soaking them, then mashing them in a pilón, a wooden mortar and pestle, to remove their skins and grind them down, before adding water and salt to make dough. It was hard work that was usually performed by the women of a household.

In 1954, Venezuelan engineer Luis Caballero Mejias came up with a way to de-skin, grind, and dehydrate corn into a flour that could be quickly made into arepa dough with a little salt and water. The now-ubiquitous corn flour brand Harina P.A.N. launched in 1960. Like dishwashers or washing machines, processed corn flour greatly reduced the burden of labor in Venezuelan households, and it made arepas far more accessible for restaurants and home cooks. Now, the vast majority of Venezuelan cooks use Harina P.A.N., although some people still make traditional arepas with freshly ground corn, or maiz pilado.

José Alicandu, a psychology student and trained chef who lives in Barquisimeto, recalls that he learned to make Reina Pepiada “through my culture, and, I’d say, with my family.” His family members would regularly buy avocados at the market, wait for them to ripen, cook a chicken for one meal, and use the leftover meat for Reina Pepiada.

“I think it’s a meal that’s easy to make and that leaves you feeling satisfied,” Alicandu says. “It’s nutritious; it has protein, and healthy fats. If you want, you can take out the mayonnaise and put in yogurt.”

And it's delicious. The combination of mayonnaise, avocado, and chicken creates a textural contrast that “totally stimulates the tongue,” Alicandu says. “It’s special.”

La Reina in diaspora

Alicandu was living in Colombia with his sister when he published a recipe for the Reina Pepiada on the German cooking website Kitchen Stories. “Sometimes, we missed our mom’s cooking,” he recalls, adding that, though there were arepas in Colombia, they were “very different” from Venezuelan ones.

Migrants abroad have turned to the arepa not only as a source of comfort, but as a source of income, Stein said. “When you go abroad and you don't know anyone, and you need to survive, what do you do?” she asked.

Stein wrote her arepa cookbook because she wanted to document the Venezuelan diaspora, offer displaced Venezuelans a taste of home, and give transplanted Venezuelans a way to share their culture with their neighbors. While doing research, she heard stories of people combining arepas with local flavors from their adopted homes. Stein calls the arepa “a very kind ambassador” for Venezuelans abroad, because it can be adapted to many food cultures.

Make your own Reina Pepiada

If you want to, you can make a good Reina Pepiada without much fuss. At its core, it’s simple: shredded chicken, mayonnaise, and avocado, stuffed into an arepa. The original served in the Alvarez family’s bar also contained peas, but most recipes these days omit them. Plenty of cooks add their own variations, including cilantro, lime, and sweet peppers.

The arepa is the most important part. “It has to be very crispy,” says Stein. “That’s the most important element of the Reina Pepiada, or any arepa.” In a good arepa, a crispy outside yields to a soft, slightly chewy inside. She emphasizes that, after grilling the arepas initially, it is “extremely important to put them in the oven until they puff up.” She suggests making a few rounds of arepas for practice before stuffing them and making them into a full meal.

When it comes to the filling, there’s a little more flexibility—think of all of the different things that can go in a good chicken salad. Stein says that the condiments in the filling, including salt and pepper, help create contrasting flavors, and separate a bland arepa from an exciting one. Stein’s and Egui’s recipe for Reina Pepiada, for example, includes homemade mayonnaise, cilantro, diced onion, a sweet red pepper called ají dulce, and avocado layered into the filling three different ways.

The method of cooking the chicken makes a difference, too. “If you use charcoal-grilled chicken, it’s a smoky flavor, and it’s crispy while still being moist,” Alicandu said. When he was growing up, his family would use leftover boiled or roasted chicken for reina pepiada. They both work.

“If you have leftover Reina Pepiada, you can make a real salad,” Stein said, “with lettuce at the bottom, and you can eat it with a good piece of bread.” And the queen lives on.

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A Dominican Stew That Feeds a Crowd, and Needs One

Sam Lin-Sommer — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:28:00 -0400

+ “One of my greatest moments in my life as a cook,” recalls the chef and food writer Arturo Féliz-Camilo, was a moment when his mother-in-law, his wife’s aunt, and other family were standing around a huge pot. They were preparing sancocho, a complex stew that is one of the Dominican Republic’s unofficial national dishes.

“They ask me, ‘Something’s missing. We don’t know what it is,’” he remembers. They knew he cooked, but he hadn’t yet proved himself to the family.

So he tasted the stew. It was indeed missing something, and he was surprised that his in-laws couldn’t pick up on it. “I think it's missing a little bit of salt,” he said. “And they all looked at each other, like, ‘No.’ And they added a little bit of salt, and boom—that was it. So from there, I'm admitted to the family.”

In the Dominican Republic, sancocho is a communal affair. It’s a rich, orange-hued concoction of root vegetables, meats, plantains, bananas, citrus, and Dominican herbs. The layered stew takes a village to cook—and to eat, too. Delicious and warming, doled out at birthday parties, Christmas, and on rainy days, it’s absolutely worth the effort.

Countries all over Latin America eat soups or stews that they call “sancocho.” But Dominican cooks—biased or not—say theirs is the best. It’s a charismatic dish indeed. Pumpkin-colored, with chunks of corn and sausage floating above the surface, it screams abundance. As the broth boils, the root vegetables release starch, and the meats give off collagen, so that the stew has a thick, velvety texture that Feliz-Camilo compares to that of a lobster bisque. And the taste is surprisingly fresh and floral for such a hearty stew, flavored by sweet squash, cilantro, oregano, culantro—a cousin of cilantro with a fresh, bracing taste—and bitter orange, a sour citrus with roots in the Moorish conquest of Spain.

Making such a layered dish is no easy task. “It’s something that you normally make with other people,” says Brenda Espinal, owner of the Dominican restaurant Perico Ripiao in Kissimmee, Florida.

Part of the reason that it’s so labor-intensive is that it’s usually prepared in huge quantities. The pot that Feliz-Camilo’s in-laws were fussing over was around four feet wide and two feet tall, he estimates. It’s normal for people to cook sancocho for hundreds of people and invite their entire neighborhood to eat, he says.

A bowl of sancocho can bring about a wave of nostalgia for Dominicans in the U.S. “It feels like going back home every time I try it,” says Espinal. “It’s very typical of the Dominican Republic, especially on rainy days or a family gathering.”

At Perico Ripiao, Espinal makes a sancocho that hews close to tradition. It’s one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes; her staff prepare around seventy servings at a time in a 60-liter pot, and often have to make three batches in one weekend.

This medley of root vegetables, along with the other ingredients, and the technique used to make it, reflect the branching rivers of history that feed into Dominican cuisine. “Dominican culture is a very Creole kind of culture,” says Feliz-Camilo, who has authored a series of books on Dominican cuisine. “The most well known three sources of Dominican culture are the Spanish, the African—mostly Western African—and the Taíno.”

The Taíno are an indigenous people who had a thriving civilization on Hispaniola before the landing of Columbus. After the conquistadors arrived, they brutally exploited the Taíno, forcing them to work in gold mines, and decimated the population through violence and disease. To replace their dwindling labor force, they imported enslaved West Africans to work in newly established sugarcane plantations. Over the centuries, Europeans, Africans, and Taíno intermingled in the Dominican Republic along with other immigrants, forming the Dominican culture that exists today.

It’s difficult to say where exactly the tradition of simmering a potpourri of roots, meats, and other vegetables into a delicious stew comes from. “It is one of those dishes that exists in every single culture. It's that pot where people put whatever is available,” Feliz-Camilo says. “It's probably true that the Western Africans and the Spanish had something, some version of it.”

The Dominican-American writer Nelly A. Rosario connects sancocho to “the ancestral African custom of always keeping a pot of soup, as gift and welcome to any visitor.” She also points to a “bleaker, commonly held belief” that the tradition was borne out of enslaved people’s need to boil for long hours the meat scraps they were afforded by plantation masters.

Feliz-Camilo thinks that the most likely origin of the stew is in the cuisine of the Spanish Canary Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Africa, and a major source of immigration to the Dominican Republic. Spanish cooks make a dish called olla podrida, or “rotten pot,” a slow-cooked stew of beans and meat.

Whatever the origin of the stewing technique, the dish’s ingredients reflect the kaleidoscope of cultures on the island. The Taíno contributed yuca, yautia, corn, peppers, and the crucial auyama squash that gives the dish its orange color. West Africans contributed yams, plantains, and bananas. And Europeans contributed meats, garlic, onions, and herbs.

If you’re looking to make your own sancocho, it’s best to follow a few basic guidelines Espinal emphasizes that one should make the stew with help. “I would say if you’re beginning, don’t overcomplicate yourself,” says Feliz-Camilo. There are many varieties of sancocho—beginners should go for a simple one.

On some level, sancocho is meant to be flexible: It’s a time-worn version of throwing a bunch of ingredients together in a pot to feed many mouths. But in order to be considered sancocho, a stew needs to follow a few key specifications. Sancocho needs to contain yuca, plantain, and auyama squash—although in the absence of auyama, kabocha is a good substitute. And according to Feliz-Camilo, it can’t include overly sweet tubers, like sweet potatoes, and you shouldn’t add seafood.

Feliz-Camilo’s other piece of advice is to seek the counsel of someone who knows the dish.

He speaks like someone who has learned to defer to his elders in the kitchen. He once judged a sancocho contest between Dominican cooks. None blew him away. “It was like, they're okay, some were good, but I think my mother-in-law’s sancocho was probably better than all of those,” he said. “That's on record.”

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How Buffalo Became a City Within a Park

The Podcast Team — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:06:00 -0400

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Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

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Amanda McGowan: Have you ever been in a work meeting and all of a sudden your boss calls on you to give a presentation just on the spot? This has only happened to me in my nightmares, but this was Frederick Law Olmsted’s reality in the summer of 1868.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect, was visiting the city of Buffalo, New York on a business trip. So, he was brought to the home of this prominent local guy, probably thinking he was going to stop in and have a cup of tea. But then when he walked through the front door, he found 200 people staring back at him. As it turned out, he was the guest of honor at a community meeting and was expected to give a speech. Oh no.

Here’s the backstory. The city of Buffalo had invited Olmsted to town because they really liked some work that he had done in New York City designing a park: Central Park. You’ve probably heard of it.

Buffalo wanted its own Central Park and they had picked out a few potential spots. They brought Olmsted around to these spots. He took some notes and he told them he’d be back in a couple of days once he had time to think it over.

Then, of course, when he returned, they sprung that little surprise on him. He walked into that house and found that a full-on public meeting had been convened and they were expecting him to give a speech to unveil his pick for the park’s location. There were 200 people sitting there waiting for this news, including a former president of the United States, Millard Fillmore. He was a Buffalo boy. Who knew?

I like to imagine Olmsted walking up to the front of this crowd, maybe pulling on his collar a little bit, maybe sweating a little bit. But as it turned out, he had some tricks up his sleeve. As it turned out, he wasn’t going to pick just one of these locations. See, Buffalo told him that they wanted a Central Park. So, you know, one park within the city. Olmsted thought they could do something a little bit bigger than that.

Why not make Buffalo a city within a park?

Catie Stephenson: This moment was monumental. That decision is a moment that changed landscape architecture and urban design forever. It was never the same after that.

I’m Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible and wondrous places. This episode was brought to you in partnership with Visit Buffalo. And today, we are going to Buffalo to see this scheme that Olmsted cooked up. A system of interconnected city parks, almost like green arteries running through town. We’ll take a look at Olmsted’s quest to bring nature to the masses and the challenges that this groundbreaking system faces even today.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Amanda: Buffalo’s park system is enormous. Let me run some numbers by you.

Catie: So we have six major parks, seven parkways, eight traffic circles, landscape circles, which total 850 acres of historic parkland. If you have a vehicle and you want to drive the entire system, it can take three to four hours to drive the entire system.

Amanda: This is Catie Stephenson. She’s the executive director of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy. Olmsted’s parks wrap around the city like the arms of a big green sweater. At various points along the way, you can stroll around a lake, pop into an art or science museum, run through a splash pad, or take in a panoramic view of Lake Erie. But for first-time visitors getting their bearings, Catie suggests stopping by the Conservancy HQ.

Catie: We have an exhibit on display that shows the evolution and the development of the Olmsted system here in Buffalo. So you can learn more about him and learn more about what we have here in Buffalo. That’s a great place to start.

Amanda: When Olmsted first arrived in Buffalo in 1868, he was probably the most famous landscape architect in the entire United States. But this was a career that he had stumbled on kind of accidentally.

Catie: It’s funny because when you think about, you know, the way that we operate today, it’s like you’re 18 and you go to college and you have to figure out your path for life and you’re going to do that forever. Olmsted did not take that course at all.

He grew up in Connecticut and his mother died when he was a child. And the way that he and his father managed their grief was by going for walks out in nature. And so Olmsted established this love of nature very early on and recognized as he got older the role that nature had played in helping he and his dad, you know, manage their sadness.

Amanda: As a young man, Olmsted bounced between jobs. He worked at a dry goods store, trained as a surveyor, even became a sailor and went to China. But then he got a job as a journalist and started traveling around a lot. And he found himself thinking about nature wherever he went.

He took a trip to Europe and saw some of the giant planned public parks there. And he traveled through the American South in the years leading up to the Civil War. The trip convinced him that slavery was wrong. And it also made him think about democracy and public space.

Catie: That really influenced his belief that public space should be open to everybody, regardless of race, ethnicity, economic background, where you lived in the city. You really should have access to great public space.

Amanda: But by the late 1850s, Olmsted was out of a job. He heard that the city of New York was holding this competition to design a brand new park in the middle of Manhattan. Olmsted had never really designed a park before, or really designed much of anything. But he knew from his own experience and from his travels how important access to nature was, both for the body and for the mind.

Catie: He knew about the benefits of letting your feet touch the grass and letting your kids run around and play and like falling backwards and looking up and seeing the trees and feeling wind. And so he really wanted everybody, whether you had the resources to live across the street from a park or you didn’t, you were still able to have access to those spaces within walking distance of your home.

Amanda: He also luckily teamed up with a first-rate architect, a guy named Calvert Vaux, and together they put in a bid to design a city park, Central Park, which is now, of course, one of the most iconic parks in the world.

Buffalo saw what New York City was up to, and they wanted in. And when Olmsted arrived for the first time in 1868, he saw that the city was absolutely booming. Thanks to the Erie Canal, built just a few decades earlier, the city was now a major shipping port and link between the eastern United States and the west. Between 1860 and 1868, Buffalo’s population had tripled, from 100,000 people to 300,000 people in just eight years.

Catie: People at the time were living in very cramped quarters. The industrial nature of cities at the time made cities dirty and smoke-filled, and that type of living was stressful.

Amanda: Olmsted even wrote, “An escape from Buffalo to anything like rural quiet is difficult and disagreeable, if not impossible.”

So this was what Olmsted was thinking about when officials showed him around to the three locations they had picked out for a possible park. Each one was lovely. But if you didn’t live nearby, realistically, how often would you be able to go?

So Olmsted thought, “You know what, let’s just go with all three.” And then he took it one step further and said, “Let’s also connect them.”

Catie: The purpose of that was to allow people to have access to parks and to be able to travel between those park spaces without leaving a park-like setting.

Amanda: He came up with an idea for something called a parkway. And yeah, you’ve probably been on a parkway before. Today, the definition is a little bit loose and can just mean basically a street with trees on it. But Olmsted had something more specific than that in mind.

Catie: They are incredibly wide stretches of green space with roads on either side. There’s typically three to four trees that line those green spaces in a diagonal pattern. And when you walk down those sidewalks or down the center of the parkway, you’re in a park. You feel like you’re in a park.

Amanda: This was not going to be a park within a city. This was a city within a park.

Something this ambitious had never really been tried before. But Buffalo was game. In 1870, construction began and the first phase was completed in about four years.

To start with, there were three core parks in the Olmsted system, each one meant to be used in a slightly different way. First, starting in the north, was Delaware Park. This was a place to relax. Really, Olmsted wanted people to just hang out and wander around.

Catie: So his pathways are, you know, they’re undulating, they curve around a park. Every time you come around a different curve, you’re seeing something different.

Amanda: In Delaware Park, you can walk over these beautiful stone bridges, visit a rose garden. There’s even this giant man-made lake that was dug out, which you can row across in a rowboat in the summer or skate across in the winter.

The park was built around the existing Buffalo Zoo, and today there are other museums in Delaware Park as well that you can pop into as you’re working your way around.

But let’s move on to stop two. If we head south, we can visit a park that in Olmsted’s time was called The Parade. Today, it’s been renamed MLK Junior Park. This park was all about activity and recreation.

Catie: MLK Park was an incredibly active space. It had a huge basin that kids would swim in. It has a working greenhouse. It had a beautiful building that was open to the public for different types of events. When I look at old photos of MLK, it’s just amazing to see how active that park is.

Amanda: Finally, as we move west, you hit The Front, as in The Waterfront. This park was designed to connect the people of Buffalo with Lake Erie and the opening of the Niagara River.

Catie: And I think just standing in Front Park on the hill and looking at the water, it’s an amazing moment because you can get a sense of what Olmsted saw when he was here and why that space was so meaningful to him.

Amanda: And of course, connecting all of these parks were Olmsted’s new invention, the parkways, which brought people from one green space to the next.

Catie: There’s so much to do. You could come to Buffalo and spend a weekend and just explore the Olmsted system.

Amanda: Olmsted’s new connected park system in Buffalo kicked off basically a frenzy in American landscape architecture. Cities across the United States scrambled to have Olmsted come to their town and design their own systems.

Catie: Boston is a good example with the Emerald Necklace. There is a park system in Louisville, Kentucky. They’re a little bit different from what we have here, but they’re definitely in alignment with his concept.

Amanda: And this first phase of construction wasn’t even the end of Olmsted’s grand plan for Buffalo. Over the years, he added more parks to the city. And his dream was that these all would be connected by parkways, so you could travel pretty much anywhere around town and stay within a park the entire time. Unfortunately, this did not completely pan out.

Catie: There are parts of the system that were not realized. There are parts that have, you know, the connection points were not built, unfortunately. Then there are parts where the connection point was destroyed.

Amanda: Olmsted died in 1903, and over the years, the parks faced little tweaks and changes. Buildings decayed here, a rose garden bulldozed over there, a swimming basin replaced with a splash pad. But the most significant changes came in the years after World War II.

All over America, cities took really drastic steps to make themselves more car-friendly. And that sometimes meant tearing down entire neighborhoods and replacing them with highways. This came to be known as “urban renewal.” And in Buffalo, urban renewal came for the Olmsted parks.

Catie: And so one of the parkways that Olmsted had called the most beautiful in America was destroyed by the Department of Transportation when they put in the Kensington Expressway. That happened in a predominantly Black community. You can see the impact that that has had on that community today. I mean, the homes are beautiful. The homes are beautiful. But their front yard is a sunken highway.

Amanda: By the 1970s, a group of community members got together to push back on this. They formed a group called the Buffalo Friends of Olmsted Parks, and they started advocating for the park system, getting it listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, and gradually taking on more and more preservation and conservation work. Then in the year 2005, the city of Buffalo took a pretty remarkable and unprecedented step.

Catie: The city, you know, realized after decades of disinvestment that they just couldn’t do it alone. The city came to us and said, like, “We just can’t afford to do the maintenance.” And so we took that on. It was a really visionary, courageous moment.

Amanda: The Conservancy became the first nonprofit in the country to manage an urban park system. And they have really big dreams. They not only want to preserve the Olmsted System in Buffalo, but they also want to expand it. And Catie tells me they even are trying to get those highways removed. Still, Olmsted’s legacy lives on in Buffalo today. Ninety percent of Buffalo residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park. And that includes Catie.

Catie: The way that we live our lives is like, it’s so ingrained with the parks. We go there every day. We ride bikes there. My kids play there. They run around, play sports. I think for me, it’s like, it just brings such a sense of calm and a sense of neighborhood and place. And, like, building core memories with your family. I hope my kids remember this time.

What I think about a lot is that, like, Olmsted built parks not for himself. There obviously was a benefit for the people of his generation. But what he was really thinking about was the next generation. I think about that a lot. Because when I bring my kids to parks, I am hoping to instill in them a love of public space and a feeling of ownership over that public space so that they can be, you know, good stewards of that space for the future.

Amanda: If you would like to take a visit to Buffalo and visit Olmsted’s hidden masterpiece, we will post a link in the episode description with more information and tips on how to plan your itinerary. In Buffalo, you might say, it’s pretty easy to be green.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

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Zach Stafford on Places That Spark Wonder

The Podcast Team — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:57:00 -0400

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Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

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Dylan Thuras: I’m going to start actually by asking you a little bit about Tennessee.

Zach Stafford: Oh.

Dylan: Tell me about growing up there. What was that like?

Zach: Thank you for asking that. When I was beginning my career, I always identified as a Tennessee rider. And place has always been super important for me. And the place I grew up was really important for me. But Tennessee was a really complicated place to be black and gay. You know, I’m from a town north of Nashville, where my family was, you know, in the ’90s, one of the first interracial couples really to move there. I was one of the only mixed kids in my school. My parents are black and white, so I identify as a mixed kid.

And it’s a pretty conservative place where I’m from. It’s deeply religious, but religious in that way that like Southerners are really good at being religious. It’s like cultural. You say, “Bless your heart.” You go to church, but you still gossip a lot. Everyone drinks, they party. But they, you know, believe in Jesus because Jesus will clear them of all their sins if they just say a prayer. So it’s a really funny place. It’s not very like, like orthodox or really like stringent. It’s, you know, conservative with like a little C. And of course, they all vote red. So my family is deeply liberal, not very religious. And I was very much, you know, out of place while being in place there. So, you know, I always dreamed of another place.

Dylan: I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, I am talking with Zach Stafford. Zach is a writer, producer, and a co-host of the news and culture podcast, Vibe Check. And today I’m asking Zach about his life as seen through place, five places in particular, because Zach has this kind of crazy resume.

He grew up in Tennessee, but he got his start in Chicago at a local newspaper where he wrote a column about his personal life when he was just in his twenties. That helped launch his career as a journalist, where he went on to work at places like Out Magazine. Then he moved to a little startup called The Grinder for a while, and then at The Advocate. And then as like a fun little side project, you know, he produced a Broadway musical that won the Tony in 2022.

So this work, this career has brought Zach all over America to many different cities and towns. And each of these places has had some impact, some shaping function on his life and who he is. So today we’re going to talk about how these places shaped who he has become.

Dylan: When you were young and a teenager, you were looking for the exit. You were looking to kind of get somewhere.

Zach: I was always keenly aware that I wanted to leave where I was from. And, you know, I love where I’m from. It shaped me. I go back often, but I knew it wasn’t my forever home. So I always looked north and, you know, Chicago for me, for some reason, always captured my imagination. I think because it was an urban environment, it was a Black city, it was a queer city, it was all these things. So I always had this like North star and, you know, growing up, it was always like, endure, endure, endure, just get through this because one day you’ll get out.

And, you know, and I’m also a kid of, you know, Dan Savage, the podcaster and writer created the It Gets Better campaign, you know, in the Obama era. And I was definitely like a teenager when that happened. So I would took that to heart and I was like, “It will get better if I cross the Mason-Dixon line.” And then I eventually crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

Dylan: And tell me about arriving in Chicago. Tell me about that period of your life, you know, what that kind of cultural shift felt like. Tennessee and Chicago are different. These are different places.

Zach: Very different places, very different places. And I was very much, what was surprising to me upon arrival was I was still out of place. You know, my Southerness became really acute. And that’s why I think I started talking a lot about it. Because when you’re from Tennessee and you live in Tennessee, everyone’s from Tennessee. Like, why are we talking about it?

But I moved to Chicago and I had an accent. I had a way of thinking about the world and experiencing the world that was just so different than all my colleagues in college and my friends and then the people I’d meet. So it weirdly made me more Southern, but I think it was more of like, I was taking an accounting of what I wanted to keep in my Southerness and what I wanted to let go.

And what I loved about living in Chicago was this, like the beginnings of not feeling out of place. That I’d walk down the street and people weren’t as nervous to be around me. They weren’t as concerned with who I am. They weren’t, you know, all these questions kind of disappeared.

And what I loved about Chicago is I went to school at DePaul University, which if you’re familiar, and I think you’re familiar with Chicago, is on the North side of the city. It’s in Lincoln Park, a very affluent area. But what I loved about my college is that it was super close to the gayborhood, which is Boys Town.

And so I very quickly got to have this like immediate access to queer people of all different colors and genders and identities and ages that I had never even conceptualized. So it felt kind of like falling through the looking glass a lot, to reference Alice in Wonderland. And I loved it. I loved falling and it was really, really great time.

Dylan: Was there any culture shock going from Tennessee to Chicago? Or was it more like, I knew what I wanted and here it finally is?

Zach: There was so much culture shock. And if anything, there was like trauma shock, if that’s a word. I wrote about this a lot when I worked for The Guardian while I was in Chicago after I graduated. And I wrote, I covered race and politics and a bunch of other things. And something I found myself missing was the very straightforward racism of the South. And what I mean by that is—

Dylan: Sure, sure. Different flavors and different latitudes.

Zach: Oh, different flavors. So there was the big dream that you were told, especially as a Southerner, we talked about Northerners. I grew up talking a lot about Northerners. And the North was kind of a utopic place where racism didn’t exist, is what I was told. That’s why Black people left and went there.

And when I arrived, I realized very quickly through a lot of personal experiences that racism was still there. It was very, very, very present. It just looked different and it materialized very differently. And I found myself longing for the in-your-face direct hatred that I’ve gotten used to. You walk into a place and someone doesn’t want you there, they just told you.

Where in Chicago, there was all this passive aggression. There was all these ways in which they made it more difficult for you. They would ice you out at a restaurant and just not serve you for a while. Where I grew up in the South in the ’90s and people were just very open about it. Because they were like, this is just the way of life.

So that was the shock for me was that I saw a consciousness around race and identity and that people were trying to kind of subvert it through hiding it and trying to say—especially, this is the Obama era—where they were Democrats too. They’re like, “Oh, I’m going to vote for this man,” but they didn’t want to have dinner with me or treat me equally.

And that was very shocking to me because I thought, you know, Chicago is so Black, it’s so all these things, but quickly realized that it is the second most segregated city in the country. And I began to feel that as I moved through the city, it was like, “Oh wait, this changes by block, by zip code.”

And so for me, it was like a new way of experiencing my own Blackness in America. And it really radicalized me in ways that the South did not, which I think is a shock to people where people think of the South as radicalizing of many of the most famous writers and activists of the world. For me, Chicago is really activating as a Black person.

Dylan: So, okay. So in some ways you found sort of things that were really quite shocking. On the other hand, it sounds like in Boys Town, you found maybe something that you’d been seeking, which was kind of like a community where you felt maybe not just comfortable, but even some sense of kind of anonymity or just like, I’m just, you know—so what was Boys Town in your life in Chicago and how did that kind of change who you are today?

Zach: Yeah, I love Boys Town. To this day, I still have a fondness for it. Back then, you know, 2008, it was like, it was just an overwhelming sense of magic. Boys Town is, you know, in the North side of Chicago, it’s a neighborhood that’s sandwiched between Wrigleyville or Wrigley Field, where the baseball, the Cubs play, and the lake itself, Lake Michigan. And it’s this little sliver and it’s very gay. It’s becoming decreasingly less and less gay sadly. But at that time, it was like peak gayness, peak everything.

And there’s a triangle of streets there that I would walk with my friends because I wasn’t 21 yet and I didn’t have a fake ID at the moment. So I would just walk the streets. And on the streets, you get to see like, there were so many people doing, you know, street-based work, like sex work or drugs, selling drugs. I’d meet them and they look like me or they look like my cousins.

And then I would hang out with these people in the street and then I’d walk up and I meet drag queens who are walking to work. I would talk to guys who would flirt with me outside the bar smoking cigarettes. I got to see the LGBT Center there. I never even knew that there was LGBT centers in the world. And then I got to have access to one.

So for me, it was this opening of a whole new world of like these cast of characters and these possibilities of being that I just never considered. You know, we talk a lot about possibility models, especially millennials. Millennials love a possibility model, love thinking about representation. And at this time, you know, we had like Glee on TV and like Queer as Folk and a few shows, Will and Grace, but no one really looked like me. But to go to a neighborhood where there was a lot of me everywhere was just so affirming.

But it also was deeply depressing because to that point I made earlier around the ways in which race and gender show up in Chicago, it became very apparent that there was a hierarchy of Boys Town. You know, there are the people that were inside the bars that could actually pay to go to dinner there. And there were the people that were on the streets that were working the streets. There were the people that lived in Boys Town and those are the people that visited Boys Town.

So I very quickly became aware of just the ways so much class and identity and all these things mixed together. And it was a perfect recipe for me because when I arrived at university, I didn’t really know what I wanted to study. I just knew I wanted to be in school. And what I wanted most in my life was to have language around who I am. And I think really have a sense of place in the world.

And as I was in university, I started taking gender studies classes and critical race theory classes. So I’m learning all these terms around intersectionality and feminism as I’m also spending my nights, walking the streets of Boys Town, meeting people with friends and just hanging out. And it became very practical for me. This theoretical framework of thinking about identity in the world through academia became very realized in Boys Town itself. So it was just really affirming for me to want to lean into this neighborhood that was really contradictory, really dynamic and really complicated for me.

And so I just kind of created my own little home there and it made me a storyteller at the end of the day. And that’s really where my journalism career comes from is being so in love with meeting people on the streets and hearing their stories of what it’s like to live there or come to Boys Town is, I would say, the beginning of what made me a journalist was being like, “Oh, everyday people have something interesting to say and they should be heard because me hearing them really changed me.”

Dylan: Do you remember the first piece you published, the first piece you filed during this period, like for a kind of proper …?

Zach: Yes. Oh, God. Yes, I do. I do very, very well. Right when I graduated college in 2012, I think, I was brought on to the Chicago Tribune, which is the big regional paper of Chicago. And I wrote for their daily commuter paper that everyone got when you got on the train. So when you get on the L, there’d be stacks of this newspaper is called the RedEye.

So my editor hired me. And I remember him jokingly saying to me in the meeting, you know, you can be the gay Carrie Bradshaw because I loved Sex and the City at the time. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I can write about the city and my experiences in it.” And I’m just so, you know, at 21, 22, you think you’re just so important and your worldview is so needed that I just like leaned in.

So then I got a column to do so. So it really affirmed maybe a bad habit. And my very first column I ever wrote was called Won’t You Date My Neighbor? I just start dating as a recent college grad. And I met a guy and I don’t remember his name. But what I do remember is that he was moving a block away from me. And I was really nervous about this because I was like, “Oh, if he moves a block away from me, does that mean we have to be together?” And so I did what any writer would do after meeting a man for two weeks, and I wrote about him and a column about meeting this guy.

And there was this thing I talked to my friends about with like, what happens if you start sleeping or dating a neighbor? Does that change the dynamics? And through the column writing and then my lived experience, I learned that like they could be your neighbor it’s not going to really impact your love life too much, especially when it’s early on. So you shouldn’t be making big decisions of something you just started getting engaged with.

So yeah, my first columns were very much about the city and how I was moving through it. And I used it as kind of like a public diary, which was now looking back kind of embarrassing because I’d ride the train and people would be reading it. And I was like, “Oh God, this is kind of cringy that you’re like reading my dating life as I’m sitting next to you.”

Dylan: Yeah. I mean, you’re right to be like 22 years old out of college and basically have like this giant platform to do like opinion pieces about your own life is like, that’s wild.

Zach: It was so wild. I still don’t know why they said yes. Like I don’t know if they realized I had just graduated college or what, but it changed my life forever. That column is why I’m even talking to you today. It set off a domino effect in my life. So I’m really grateful for it. But now I don’t advise 22 year olds to write like that.

Dylan: Yeah.

Zach: I lived in Chicago for nine years, including college. And what took me out of Chicago was a job at the app Grindr. So Grindr, for those who don’t know, which I’m assuming everyone knows, is famous. It’s iconic and it deserves to be iconic because it launched in 2009 and it was one of the first apps in the app store, period. Before Tinder, there was Grindr. And I was obsessed with it as a college student because it was an app.

I was really interested in it from an academic standpoint because I was studying gender studies in college, but also cultural geography. So I was like, “Oh, I’m using this app to move through the city.” And I quickly realized I was being treated differently in different parts of Chicago, depending on where I went and how I presented myself.

So a lot of my academic work became about GPS technologies, actually. And I did get to grad school and decided not to go to grad school to be a geographer. But I did all this work around—

Dylan: You really do have place in your background in a big way. You almost became a geographer. Oh, that’s fascinating.

Zach: Truly. When I found out we were doing this show and that you were willing to have me on, I was like, “Oh my God, this is making my whole life.”

Dylan: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s so cool.

Zach: Because I literally, if I’d taken a different path in my life back then, I’d have a PhD now in cultural geography and I’d be studying digital spaces and places and identities. So I was really interested in how we take our physical self and upload it into a digital place.

So all of that work did feed into my journalistic career. And when I became a journalist with a capital J and started doing investigative work, used Grindr on certain assignments. So I once went to Kansas City for The Guardian and reported out a murder through using Grindr because it was a gay man that was murdered through a lover on Grindr.

So I was kind of using dating apps to do journalism in this really fun way that my mom thought was just my excuse to find a man, but I really was trying to use it for work purposes. But all of that caught the eye of Grindr and Grindr brought me to L.A.

I hated L.A. as a place before then. I’d only come a few times and I thought it was just so barren and shallow architecturally. I found it really uninteresting. I found the traffic to be overbearing and all of these things. And Grindr called and offered me a job to launch my own magazine. And I had to say yes. And they were like, “But you have to move here.” So I moved there. I moved here. I’m still here. And that was like the next phase of my life that really changed me.

L.A. was a place that not only wasn’t home, but was a place I’d never wanted to go. And I had to build a whole life here. And the first few years were really tough, but I got to build a magazine that I was really proud of. And it was a place where I got to do that Grindr-centric work around queer lives, but at a global scale. We had reporters in every country and it was so amazing. And through that work, I got to learn how to produce documentaries and work on television shows because Grindr’s a big company and we were optioning our IP.

So all of that work really changed me. And in L.A., at the end of the day, it’s become my favorite place to be. I love L.A. so much, but it was in this kind of feeling out of sorts here and out of place that I was able to really refine my practice as a storyteller. Because I think the through line through all the work I’ve done is all very story-based and also geographically based, I’ve learned over the years. It’s all about place and the stories we tell in those places, really.

Dylan: Yeah. Okay, so you’re out in L.A. Tell me a little bit—I mean, this is I truly just don’t know—what happened on the West Side Highway in New York?

Zach: While I was in L.A., I eventually went on to be the editor-in-chief of The Advocate. And while I was at The Advocate, I was like, “Oh, I can’t just have one job.” So I started hosting a morning television show in New York. And so I would spend my weekdays in New York and come back to L.A. And while I was there, you know, my life was really, really insane. It was just a lot.

And after a few years of that, the pandemic hit. And when the pandemic hit, my life, like all of our lives, came to a stop. And I lived in Chelsea at the time. And right before it all happened, I had met a man at my CrossFit gym who became a friend. And I had a big crush on him. And within the first month or two, he asked me to go on a bike ride down the West Side Highway. And because I worked so much, I never went to the West Side Highway.

I literally would wake up, go to the newsroom, work all day, then go to The Advocate, which Out Magazine too, and we do that all day. And then I would just my whole days were just that over and over and over. And when everything got really quiet, I got to really enjoy New York.

I’d never lived in New York before. I’d only gone there for work. But I began to feel kind of the magic of it. And at the time, you know, there was no traffic. No one’s on the street. So it was a very like, it was like being on a movie set at the time. A terrifying movie set because, you know, this pandemic’s raging. But it was a really, really interesting movie set.

And this man who eventually became my partner would take me on bike rides. And we would go bike riding every day on the West Side Highway. And it just was like such a moment of peace for me, of knowing that within all the chaos of life, that it’s really important to find some stillness where you can find it. And that you can find kind of the beauty in a place where you just like take a moment to enjoy it. And New York for me, I had never really seen the beauty in New York. New York was about plugging in and going. But being with him—and we are obviously still together and now we live in L.A.—but it’s like my happy place, you know, whenever you’re stressed, you think about like, “Oh, there’s too much going on in the world,” I can take myself mentally back to those walks on the West Side Highway. And it just really brings me back down to earth.

So I always, so now when I go to New York, I try to go to the West Side Highway every time just to pay respect to a strip of concrete or pavement that really helped me get through a tough time.

Dylan: As your career has evolved, as you have evolved, what does that look like? I know you’ve done a fair amount of travel. Like is there places you go where you can find that peace of mind or maybe sense of getting away from work and self-expectation?

Zach: Oh, yeah. But over the years, I’ve made Mexico City that kind of refuge for myself. I started going with Saeed Jones, who I host the podcast with in like 2016, I think was our first trip. And, you know, I grew up, I think we all grew up in an America where they talked a lot of shit about Mexico.

You know, I grew up hearing like Mexico City is so dangerous. And I forget why I went there, but he and I went on our first trip there in 2016. And it just reshaped my brain again, because it’s a place that I heard all these stories about. But then when I went there, it was radically different than what everyone told me. It was very queer, very modern.

Dylan: Crazy cosmopolitan.

Zach: Crazy cosmopolitan.

Dylan: Like New York kind of looks a little provincial like against Mexico City.

Zach: It’s just down the street, like it’s faster for me to go to Mexico City from L.A. than New York City. And I just met so many people there. And it just expanded my worldview in this way that was really important. It’s very different than going to Europe, because Europe feels like it’s another part of the continent. But these are like neighbors in our hemisphere.

And they think about America differently. They deal with America differently. And it’s all this stuff, and culture is different there. And their relationship to colonialism is really fascinating and how it kind of continues to echo today. But I went there and I think my ability to build community there, because I have a lot of dear friends there now that are local Mexicans and have businesses and lives and families.

And it just has become a place where I go to hide and not be wrapped up in work. I really find myself drawn to places where I can kind of disappear and not be working or not be on and kind of return to that original love of mine, which is just meeting a stranger and talking to them without really any expectation at all.

Dylan: Yeah. Are there any places within Mexico City that you really love? Any specific cafes, bars, areas?

Zach: Yes. I have to shout out a dear friend of mine, Cecilia. She just opened up a bar, like a Mezcal wine bar in the historic district. But it’s one of the only woman-owned Mezcal places in Mexico City.

And whenever I’m in town, I go to her retail space and we’ll have a dinner party there with her friends, my friends. And we just like, it’s after hours and we have quesadillas and drink Mezcal and wine. And it just feels so casual and so fun. So for me, that’s—I’m very drawn to the casualness of Mexico City. And not so much the, I don’t know, the Pujols or like the really famous big restaurants. I like going to a city where I can just be anonymous and be a part of the fabric really easily. So, yeah.

Dylan: It’s funny. It’s the theme that runs through these places we’ve talked about. Obviously, you’ve moved around a lot for work and done a lot of different stuff. But talking about Boys Town, talking about the West Side Highway, where you’re taking a bike ride with a romantic partner and that’s evolving. And then Mexico City is this place where you can kind of just like—these are all places where you’re unencumbered by a sense of, “Oh, here’s what I need to be doing. Here’s what I need to be, you know, here’s how, this is important because this opens up this thing.”

These are places where you’re basically able to sort of wander, move freely, just like experience the place and yourself in a kind of non-structured or non-judgmental way. Is that true? Is that like a, it seems like—yeah.

Zach: Yeah. Thank you for reflecting that back. Because as I was saying all of this, I’ve been tracking my mind and that is a reoccurring theme over and over. That sense of wonder is really important, which I don’t think I’ve ever really identified before.

And that also helps me. Thank you for saying that, I should send you a payment for therapy instead of my therapist. Because that helps me understand with my partner when we travel, you know, I’m the one that just books the place and gets our air tickets or whatever, however we’re getting there. And then I don’t plan anything in that middle period. I’m like, we’ll just see what happens. And he’s really good at finding the museums, the places, the things that we do.

But my natural inclination with places is just to unfold into them and see where they take me. It’s kind of like getting in a river. And I do think as you’re saying that, I’m like, yeah, that is really important to me just to be able to be somewhere and have no expectation of it all. Because I feel like I have, due to how much I work, I have a lot of expectation all day long.

Dylan: It’s quite hard to escape, right? Like we carry these little devices in our pocket, which can be asking us to do, kind of turn every experience into a version of work. It can be hard, you know, maybe you take a trip because it’s a work trip. And when you find those moments where you don’t have a clear schedule and you are actually free to be sort of uncertain about what is before you, there is a real deep joy and freedom and surprise in what you find is it’s often very affirming of your sense of people and possibility.

And it’s funny, I had a similar—I was in a different city. I was in Guanajuato, which is in central Mexico. But I just found myself there with a day to kill, basically. And I didn’t really have time to make real plans. And I spent most of the day just walking around the city. I went to a couple of—

Zach: That’s so nice.

Dylan: And it, you know, it’s one of my best travel memories of recent time because it was just that and you just let a place kind of—you’re just a person in a space and you don’t really, you don’t know why, you’re just there to sort of experience it as it is. And I think that’s really powerful.

Zach: Yeah, a person in a space. Yeah, we need more of that. Just a person in a space.

Dylan: You’re just there, yeah. Well, Zach, this has been a really, a lovely conversation. It’s really nice to get to meet you.

Zach: Thank you.

Dylan: Go check out Zach’s show, Vibe Check, anywhere you get your podcasts.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

This episode was produced by Tomeka Weatherspoon. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manola Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.

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How Rose Valland Saved Stolen Art From the Nazis

The Podcast Team — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 15:23:00 -0400

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Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

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Dylan Thuras: It’s 1944, and there’s a train packed full of paintings by the likes of Picasso and Monet and Van Gogh, and it’s circling Paris. And there is a woman, desperately and secretly, trying to stop this train. So Michelle, maybe you can set the scene.

Michelle Young: So we have a woman named Rose Valland, who is an art historian in a museum called the Jeu De Pomme, which is right next to the Louvre, a modern art museum. And she’s been secretly undercover, working inside this museum that’s been taken over by Nazis since 1940. And they’re using it as really a clearinghouse for looted art that they’ve been stealing from France, predominantly from Jewish families. And as the Allies get closer and closer to Paris following D-Day, the Germans think we have one chance to get as much art out to Germany as we can. And so she’s been watching this happen in the museum, packing, moving, labeling. And now we are in the days before Liberation Day, and she has passed her information to the resistance members in France, working with the train service, as well as the resistance in London. And she’s hoping she can stop this train from leaving France.

I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we are talking to author Michelle Young about her book, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of World War II Resistance Hero Rose Valland. It’s a kind of heist story in reverse. It is the story of how this French curator infiltrated the Nazi army to save art masterpieces from the Jeu de Palme Museum in Paris, how she wound up racing against a train full of stolen art to, in this case, stop the heist.

Dylan: What was Rose like? What kind of person was she?

Michelle: So Rose is a pretty difficult person to get to know. She’s, for many reasons, has had to subsume her real identity. She’s also an academic, a nerd of art history and art. And you can even see in photographs from school, all the girls are kind of hanging out together, putting their arm around each other, and she’s sort of on the side with her glasses and not really fitting in. She is a very direct person, brutally honest. This can sometimes rub people the wrong way. And she’s not simpering like the other women who work in the French museums. So she’s part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris, but in the world that she wants to get a job in, she’s definitely out of place and different.

And so for this and other reasons, she has a hard time getting a job. And in fact, one of her thesis advisors, who unfortunately turns out to be the head of the École du Louvre, which is the school she ends up at to train to be a curator, is also the head of the Louvre and all of the French museums. And his rival is her mentor. And he sees this upstart woman from the countryside in France with very modern ideas, and it makes him very uncomfortable. And so he gives her a terrible grade on her thesis and says, “This is not even art history whatsoever.”

Dylan: She’s on this kind of one-woman war, Rose’s war, to move into art curation, move into this world that has been—kind of just keeps getting denied from her. No matter how educated, no matter how much she knows or has to offer, she’s just getting ... But eventually, bit by bit, she kind of like, through sheer force of will, ends up there. But meanwhile, in the middle of this actual continental war is breaking out. So how are—as Rose is trying to do this personally, and this is happening all around her—how does she and the museum start preparing for this coming disaster?

Michelle: Yeah. So first, it’s lists, lists, lists. And this is what these art historians are trained to do, lists of different types. And so their job is to select which art needs to be moved out into the countryside. These are the most important works, but they can’t move everything. So they have different levels of priority. And finally, those that will stay in the museum in a protected state.

Dylan: Let me ask a stupid question: Why do they need to move all this stuff? What are they afraid of?

Michelle: That’s a great question. And it’s not looting. It is the fear of the art being damaged by bombs, incoming troops, and such. And that is the same for the Jewish art collectors in Paris. If they moved their art collections, it was not in fear of the Germans stealing it. They did not know that was going to happen. It was in fear that it would be damaged.

Dylan: So it seems like they’re getting ready to ... They’re making lists. They’re figuring out how to get the most valuable stuff out of the museums and somewhere else. When do they actually start doing stuff? When do they start moving stuff? When do they feel like, okay, we have to start now?

Michelle: They start doing it about a week before war is declared. Basically, the countries, England and France, declare a war alert. And that means certain actions can now be taken by the government, emergency declaration. They can start to move the artwork, start to pack it, and then move it.

Dylan: What is Rose doing during all of this? Is she participating in this crazy art evacuation?

Michelle: She’s participating from Paris, from her museum. And once she’s packed everything up, and it’s very clear, as usual, she’s extremely efficient, so she’s done very quickly with the packing. And then it’s about how do we protect the museums? And so the Jeu De Pomme has these huge double-story windows, and they repeat throughout the whole both facades, long facades of this building. And so they need to sandbag and tape up these windows in case of bombing. So that doesn’t completely shatter and injure someone, kill someone, or damage things in the museum. And she’s moving things into the basement. At some point, they realize that the statues are just way too heavy and cannot be moved into the museum or the basement. So they have to sandbag all of those. She is also working with the guards in her museum. Those are French guards, and she’s worked with them for six years. So she’s liaising with them. And she also just knows intimately how this building works. So likely she’s checking that the fire system is operating and the electrical system is working.

Dylan: And then after, so this is all prep. It’s like, get the art out of here. It’s like, cover the things that can’t be moved or try and make them slightly explosion-proof, you know, tape up the windows so shattering glass doesn’t fly in and whatever. But then, you know, war’s coming. Do they need to get themselves out of town?

Michelle: The first bomb alerts happen, air raid alerts happen within days of war being declared. So Rose, at this point, has been sleeping in the museum in a straw mattress.

Dylan: Wow. So the museum’s like empty or mostly empty. And she’s kind of like staying behind like a captain going down with the ship kind of vibe.

Michelle: Yeah, because her boss has been recalled to the Air Force. He’s a World War I aviation hero. So he’s been gone for a month. So she’s in the museum completely in charge, and she gets some straw mattress. And they’ve configured a bomb shelter. It’s not very robust, but they’ve configured a place they can go to in the basement. And you’re right, the rest of the museum is eerily empty.

Dylan: Okay, so at this point, Rose and the museum staff have basically been preparing for war to break out, which seems inevitable. And then that summer, things kind of come to a head at the museum. And then Rose finds herself, I guess, leading this massive evacuation of the Jeu De Paume. Can you tell me about that?

Michelle: Yeah, so she gets a call the morning of June 13th as the Germans are about to breach Paris. And her boss says, “Leave the museum immediately,” and puts her in charge with evacuating 150 museum employees, their families by boat along the Seine on a flat bottom boat, basically a barge. And so you have to imagine the city at this point is virtually empty. Everyone who was able to flee has left. There’s basically just like stray dogs and sheep wandering around.

And that’s the scene you’ve got, right? And by the time Rose’s boat leaves from where they’ve started, the Seine is also empty. So she writes that there’s only like abandoned boats floating by. And so it’s a really eerie scene. And they make it all the way to the industrial outskirts of Paris, at which point a huge boat traffic jam appears. And it’s backed up for miles. And they’re worried that they’ll just be sitting ducks at that point because the German planes are starting to come in. They get word from the river lock, which is why there’s a backup, everyone has to go through the lock one by one. And they’re told it’s going to be another day before you can get through here.

And so Rose and another woman, a young woman who works in the museums, make the decision that they’re going to go back to the Louvre on foot to tell the guy in charge there to help them get trucks to evacuate this huge barge of employees. And so they do this, you know, just as the Germans are coming in, and they’ve only got a few hours to get there and back. And they go on foot. I think they like, hail a car at some point for part of the way. They get there. They get agreement to get the trucks.

They come back to that intersection, and the boat is gone. And so all the museum employees, the barge, the captain of the boat—who’s actually just an editor of the Louvre publications, he’s not a real boat captain—he’s also gone. And of course, there’s no phones. There’s no way to get in touch. And so here you have these two women who need to make it out of Paris to the Loire Valley. And it’s hundreds of miles away. And so thus begins a very treacherous journey by foot, by wagon, by any means possible for these two women to get to the Loire Valley, full of near-death scenarios.

Dylan: I assume they make it, or this would be the end of the episode.

Michelle: Yeah, yeah. That would be the end of the book, I guess, because there would be no more Rose. So they do make it, but it’s just incredible what they see and experience along that journey.

Dylan: And then it seems like, you know, not that long after that, like less than a year after this very dramatic evacuation, where she’s told to leave the museum, Rose finds herself back in the Jeu De Paume, but under these extremely different kinds of circumstances. So Rose evacuates from the Jeu De Paume Museum. She makes it out to the countryside. She spends some time in this region of France, but then, less than a year later, she is called back to Paris and back to the Jeu De Paume. Although the Germans had taken Paris, the museum was still technically managed by the French National Museum. And they wanted folks there keeping an eye on things during the occupation. So Rose, having escaped, now returns. Returns to Paris, returns to the Jeu De Paume. But at this point, this city looks very, very different from the one she left.

Michelle: The Germans are setting up shop. They’re changing the signage in Paris to have to be German signs. And it’s starting to feel like a new Germany. The Nazis in any country they invaded, they basically set up shop and started looting art at the same time, because they already knew in advance. They already had lists, their wish lists of art they felt rightly belonged to them. Maybe it had been plundered in a war by Napoleon. Maybe they had unfairly, in their opinion, given it up in the Treaty of Versailles. Or they just wanted it.

And so in the case of France, they had a list of the 15 major art galleries, predominantly owned by Jewish dealers, and they liquidated those in a week with commando units. And the art is quickly piling up in the German embassy, all the stolen art, and there’s now almost no room. So they request a new location to put it in, and it’s going to be in three rooms of the Louvre.

And so at that point, they tell the French museums, we need our own place to store and catalog this art, mostly because they didn’t want anyone to be seeing what they were doing. And so Rose’s boss offers up her museum, the Jeu De Paume, likely because he already knows there’s someone in there who can spy. And at the end of October, he’s given her that order to remain at all costs at the Jeu De Paume, an order she takes very seriously for the next four years.

Dylan: So once she was ordered to leave, immediately leave, and now they’re like, you must stay. So what is she doing there? She’s trying to work effectively at this museum, but it’s under this kind of Nazi administration, and they’re bringing other art that they are sort of looting to that museum. And she must presumably know, like, this isn’t good, like it’s not going to end well for the art. So what is she kind of doing? What is she keeping an eye on? Is she actually spying?

Michelle: Yeah. So it’s really an uneasy marriage that’s going on between France and Germany, because they’ve only signed an armistice. That’s a temporary truce. And the Germans believe that the British will surrender imminently, at which point there will be a final peace treaty, and the art that they’ve looted will now be used as reparations for the damage done to them, not done to France, right?

So it’s sort of this whole temporary situation, and therefore they needed official permission to take over this museum. And Rose’s boss, Jacques Jaujard, gives his permission with one stipulation. That is: The French get to do their own inventory of everything that’s coming in. So her initial role on day one is, yes, again, to make more lists of the art that’s coming in. But she’s immediately shut down by a very devious-looking Nazi, and he shuts her notebook roughly and says there will be no inventory, and anyone else who’s in this museum who’s French need to leave. He can’t get rid of her because it’s part of the agreement that’s being made.

And so initially, she is just trying to understand what’s going on. Who are the players? And you can see in her notes, she’s listening phonetically to the German that’s being spoken. She does have a secret weapon here, and that is that her life partner, Joyce, here, they’ve been living together since the mid-1930s, if not earlier, is half German and has partially grown up in Germany.

And so she’s figuring out their names and what they’re doing. And then over time, she becomes more daring. And so she starts to steal documents from the museum, taking them out of garbage cans. She’s made duplicate keys of the building and the safes inside the building. She steals negatives of the photographs of all the art they’ve been taking and these very corny, almost portraits that the staff have taken of themselves, with props.

Dylan: Selfies. Selfies. They’re taking selfies with the art. Yeah. Okay.

Michelle: Yeah. So she’s stolen all these negatives. And somehow at night, she’s having them developed and then putting them back carefully into the files the next day. And then later, she’s trying to decipher where the art is going. So not just which families they’re coming in, what the art is, who the artists are, but then when the Germans start shipping them off to Germany, she wants to record if she can.

And there are several times where she comes into a lot of danger. And there’s one time that she is caught trying to decipher a label. And her nemesis, that art dealer, Bruno Loza, catches her doing it and tells her, “Well, you know what could happen if you’re caught doing something like this. You could be shot.” And she answers him point blank, staring at him, she had really like nerves of steel.

Dylan: She’s, yeah, what she’s doing is quite risky. Is there a chance, like, do they know that she’s doing this?

Michelle: I think they suspected, but she was careful enough not to reveal what she was really doing. And one of the things was that she could have a plausible cover just wandering around the museum, whether it was for maintenance reasons or art historical reasons, preservation reasons. And so she herself says that she could pass it off as the bumblings of a curious employee. And she also would start to make some mistakes to hamper their efforts in various things, which also kind of made her look less smart. And then she trained the other people that worked for her to do similar little pieces of sabotage.

Dylan: Rose spends the next four years at the Jeu de Paume museum under Nazi occupation. It is dangerous and terrifying, but she is spending all of her time doing everything she can to make sure the art is being protected. She’s willing to take almost any risk to assure that it stays safe, that it stays there, it does not fall into the hands of the Germans and is taken out of the country. And here is where we enter the train scene.

Michelle: So one thing to note is that the Germans hated modern art. They had a catchy phrase for it called Entartete Kunst, or degenerate art. And so since the ’30s, the Germans have been trying to figure out how to get rid of this art. So in Germany, they took it out of museums, they burned some of them, they sold some. So in France, similar problem. They would loot all these collections, take all the old masters, which had value because it’s what Hitler wanted and what Göring wanted following suit.

And then, uh-oh, what do we do with all these Picassos? And so they stuffed them into one room of Rose’s museum. And it was called the Room of the Martyrs, the Salle des Martyrs. And it just gradually got filled floor to ceiling, every available space with art because they didn’t know what to do. And occasionally, they would do these exchanges. So Bruno Loza, that art dealer, came up with this idea. What if we exchange, like, 20 Picasso and Matisse paintings for one Vermeer? And now we can liquidate it quickly.

So they were doing that, and Rose was really concerned about this and really concerned about the fate of the art in that room. But then, yes, we come to early August 1944, and this room is still full of modern art. And she’s really worried about it. She sees activity going on, and she realizes they’re trying to make one last transport. So they fill this rail car.

And I also want to mention that the guy in charge of the Jeu de Paume is a Nazi out of central casting. He’s got one glass eye, and he wears long coats, military coats with wolf hair colors.

Dylan: You’re describing, like, an Indiana Jones nazi. This is a ridiculously cartoonish villain.

Michelle: Yes. And if you saw that in a movie, you’d be like, oh, come on.

Dylan: A little much, everybody.

Michelle: But I looked at his photos. I was like, indeed, glass eye.

Dylan: Yeah. You know, fur, trench coat. Yeah. Okay.

Michelle: Exactly. So he is hell-bent on getting this artwork out because he knows it can be sold not in Germany but in Switzerland and other places for a lot of money. But not only does he want this artwork, he thinks, why don’t I take additional 47 trained cars of furniture, bric-a-brac, things like linens and forks, everything that they’ve taken really, because they would go into these Jewish apartments right after they were deported and liquidate it completely. So they just had so much stuff.

This last train car is 52 cars long of cargo wagons, right? So it’s sitting in a train station on the outskirts of Paris. And this nazi, Kurt von Behr, is pacing up and down the platforms, trying to get this train loaded. Finally, it’s ready, but it’s too heavy. Or the train system tells him it’s too heavy. But at the same time, Rose has made contacts with her resistance networks. So she’s told her boss, Jacques Jaujard, who is connected to the London-based resistance network, and then Rose has her own resistance contact who works with the train system, which was rife with resistance operatives in World War II.

So she’s trying every method possible, whether it’s through the civil service, bureaucracy, through the resistance network, how do we stop this train? And so the resistance steps in and does everything it can. So the train is too heavy. The engine is broken. The signals are broken. And so it kind of stumbles along from train station to train station with things breaking down all the time.

Then a few days before the liberation, they remove the engine altogether. Oh, sorry, we were unable to fix it. And it will have to await a new locomotive, because they’re just delaying it in any way possible. And finally, I don’t know if I should give out what happens, but ...

Dylan: I think we have to know. Okay. We have to know.

Michelle: Okay. So the final act of resistance was to disable another train, kind of like blow it up a bit so that it would block the path that this train could take.

Dylan: They succeeded. Okay. So I guess through this combination of administrative and on-the-ground resistance, Rose and her colleagues are basically able to stop this train from leaving Paris.

Michelle: Exactly.

Dylan: And what happens to the art on the train? Like what is it—who gets it at that point? Or does it sit there? Like, when does the war end?

Michelle: They call on the Allies, the Allied Forces, in the end, the free French, and say, we need you to go and come in near this train sitting in the outskirts of Paris. So when they go, at that point, the German guards have abandoned it, but there’s a few still in the train, and the door opens, and they stumble out, all confused. And then they see that inside, it’s full of artwork crates that are labeled with, like, Picasso and Monet and Van Gogh. So it’s this, like, cinematic moment while the rest of Paris is being liberated.

Dylan: Right. So Rose, they succeed. They manage to stave off the shipping of all of this art out of Paris for long enough for allied soldiers to get there and kind of rescue the art. What about Rose? What is sort of the end of her story? What happens to her after all this?

Michelle: So she writes that she ran, so I don’t know if it’s physically ran, but that she ran to the station to see the train for herself. And then she helps move the art back to the museum, the Jeu De Paume museum. So it makes this really nice full circle moment. And she says she lays down all the artwork flat to spend one last moment with them before they get sent back to their rightful owners.

And then a year after, when Germany is defeated, she is sent as a captain in the French army and then also the U.S. army to work as what they call now a monuments woman in post-war Germany and Austria, working on art restitution. So she spends eight years there working on art restitution. At some point, she pops back to France and serves as an interrogating witness at a war crime tribunal of her nemesis, Bruno Loza, an art dealer.

Dylan: Oh, wow. She gets like the last word a little bit there. That’s, yeah. Okay.

Michelle: Yeah. Which contributed to his enduring hate. Then she returns back and she gets, well first, she’s told that she can’t keep the same pay she had in Germany. So she has to return to her previous title and pay level.

So she has to go back to that. And there’s all this attempt to try to get her a better position. And in the 1960s, early ’60s, she publishes her memoir. It becomes a movie not long after. And so she has this big brush with fame in the ’60s into the ’70s. She is awarded lots of medals.

But when she dies in 1980, there’s almost nobody at her funeral. She got lost from the record, basically between 1970 and 1980. She became a real inconvenient witness to what happened in the war, to collaborators that she still wanted to see justice done. And she was reminding people that there was still art that was looted that needs to be returned.

And the world was in the Cold War and everyone kind of felt, we’ve already dealt with the worst criminals from World War II and Nuremberg. So why don’t we move forward? I think for many reasons, both society changing, but also a deliberate silencing of her, she was forgotten by the 1980s.

Dylan: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because the sort of Monuments Men is a pretty well-known story at this point. And I think her piece in all this is much less known. So thank you for telling me that story, Michelle.

Michelle: Yeah. Thank you so much. This was a blast.

Dylan: That was Michelle Young. She’s the author of the new book, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of World War II Resistance Hero Rose Valland. It is a really dramatic book. It is full of incredible historical details, and we are just scratching the surface here. Go check it out. We are going to put a link in the show notes, and you can still visit the Jeu De Paume museum today where you can walk through those exact same halls where Rose Valland fought the good fight. Okay. I will see you next time.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

This episode was produced by Manolo Morales. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holdford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.

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Our Favorite New Places This Week

Daniel McDermon — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0400

+ Each week, we highlight a selection of extraordinary new places submitted by you—our Atlas Obscura community of curious travelers. Where will you go next?

Alyko Hotel Ruins

This beachside resort hotel project on the island of Naxos was halted in the 1970s, and has been frozen in time ever since. It has been drawing graffiti artists from around the world for years. — Contributed by jakechouston

Fossil Lake Safari Quarry

Visitors can split rocks to find 52 million-year-old fish fossils at this quarry in western Wyoming, on land that used to be the bed of a prehistoric lake. — Contributed by estorm

Eiffel Tower of Lahore

There are many replicas of the Eiffel Tower in the world, but this one stands in especially stark contrast to its surroundings in Pakistan's second-largest city. Funded by the government, it was constructed in just 120 days and rises to about a third the height of the original in Paris. — Contributed by Max Cortesi

Balancing Rock

On the shore of the Digby Neck, a Canadian peninsula jutting out into the Bay of Fundy, stands the remarkable sight of this stone, startlingly upright above the waters. It looks precarious, as if it might fall at any moment. But visitors report that seeing it in person is worth the one-mile hike. — Contributed by jdstillwater

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Do You Know the Marree Man?

The Podcast Team — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 09:15:00 -0400

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Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

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Elah Feder: The first of the anonymous faxes arrived in July of 1998 and Peter Moore got one of them.

Peter Moore: You have to remember it was a fair bit of time ago and the interest at first wasn’t particularly strong and then it did become very popular.

Elah: Peter lived in Marree back then. It’s a small town in the Australian outback, though maybe town is too strong.

Peter: In those days, Marree had about 80 residents. So you’ve got a police station, you’ve got a school, you had a lovely two-story pub, you’ve got like a very small country town.

Elah: Marree is hot and dry, even in the winter. Houses sit on big red dirt lots. You could grow a lawn if you really wanted to, but fresh water is mostly reserved for drinking. You even bathe in salt water.

Peter: Yeah, the best thing we can do is use dishwashing liquid to bathe in.

Elah: Peter doesn’t live there anymore, but back in 1998 he owned the Marree Hotel, which is where he was the day that he got the fax.

Peter: One morning in the hotel, I got basically an untraceable fax saying that if I go for a fly out of Marree, there could be something of interest for me.

Elah: The title of the fax was “Tourist Attraction for Marree.” No sender name. Peter wasn’t the only one who got it. Other businesses in the area got it too. And here’s how it opened: “On a plateau 36 miles west-northwest of Marree, there is a giant drawing of an aborigine more than two miles long. This makes it five times larger than the largest drawing at Nazca in Peru, 24 times larger than the largest English chalk hill carving, and 50 times larger than any portrayal of the human form. It appears to be the world’s largest work of art.”

Elah: The fax included a map of the exact location. And the gist of the whole thing was this: You have an amazing gift waiting for you. It’s going to totally change your life. You’re welcome in advance. But Peter’s initial response was …

Peter: A load of rubbish, whatever.

Elah: Still, he had a small plane. So he hopped into it and set off for the place marked on the map. I’m Elah Feder and this is Atlas Obscura. Today, the story of the Marree Man, a drawing that mysteriously appeared in the Australian Outback 26 years ago. Ostensibly, it was a gift for the locals, though that’s not exactly how it was received.

Peter: I can honestly say all hell broke loose.

Elah: For this episode, I did what so many have tried and failed before me: I went looking for the culprit. And I was led to a piece of the puzzle that was not one I expected at all, or really in any way wanted.

Peter: This data that we were supplied had the genitals in place. Where’d the genitals come from? Where did they come from?

Elah: As promised in the fax, Peter found the drawing on a plateau a short flight away. On this big, flat stretch of desert, someone had carved a drawing of a man. He measured more than two miles from head to toe. It seemed like they’d done it with a plow or some other kind of machine that dug trenches in the ground.

The man had a beard, hair in a bun, and horizontal lines across his chest that looked like traditional Aboriginal scarring. He was standing in a hunting pose, like he was about to throw the spear in his left hand. Also, the man was naked. That’s going to be important later on. The mystery faxes called him Stuart’s Giant, in honour of the 19th century Scottish explorer McDouall Stuart. But pretty soon, everyone just called him the Marree Man.

It wasn’t clear exactly how long the Marree Man had been there. The anonymous faxes didn’t say. But at least since June. A pilot flying over the area had seen it and even told a few people. But apparently, it didn’t get much traction. So this anonymous artist’s masterpiece just lay there, mostly unappreciated into July. And it seems like whoever made it was growing impatient. It was time for a little PR.

The fax that Peter Moore got that morning in July was the first in a series. And whoever sent them was obviously very proud of this drawing. They called it a world-class tourist attraction. They suggested the best times of day to go look at the drawing, which were apparently morning or late afternoon. And they even offered basic care instructions.

And it worked. By mid-July, the Marree Man had everyone’s attention. Pretty soon, the press descended, and tour operators were giving flights to anyone who wanted to have a look. It really was a great tourist attraction, just like the faxes promised. But some people wanted the Marree Man to be destroyed.

I didn’t understand this at first. A really big drawing in the desert? Like, what could be wrong with that? Well, first, this wasn’t just a random patch of desert. The plateau was on land claimed by at least two Aboriginal groups at the time. A spokesperson for one of the groups said they wanted the image erased and whoever made it to face criminal charges. Which might seem like a strong reaction to a drawing in the desert, but imagine someone carved up your backyard, without your permission, called it art and invited the whole world to come see it. Except it wasn’t just your backyard. It was what was left of your ancestral land.

So that was the first problem. The second problem was environmental. Whoever made this didn’t just dig up some red dirt. There were also scattered grasses and shrubs on the plateau, and some got ripped up in the process. And Australia is very protective of its native species, as you’ll know if you ever tried to enter the country. When I flew there, they literally sprayed the plane and everyone in it with insecticide to make sure that no invasive species got in.

So we have destruction of native plant life, vandalism of Aboriginal land, and there is one more problem.

Phil Turner: The Marree man is naked. So when he was put on the ground, he had his full set of genitals in place.

Elah: Phil Turner owned the Marree Hotel for a few years. He actually bought it in 2011 from Peter Moore, who you heard at the top of the episode. And Phil is a big fan of the Marree Man. He comes up in almost every news story about the drawing. But Phil says the Marree man’s nudity offended some locals.

Phil: And they went up in their cars and did doughnuts in the dirt and scrubbed the genitals, scrubbed them all out. So the Marree Man ended up with this little airbrushed section.

Elah: Okay, so some of you might want to take the off-ramp at this point in the story because in my interview with Phil, the word “genitals” came up a lot—26 times in total. Twenty-four by Phil, twice by me. While we were talking, Phil sent me an email. The subject line, in all caps, “GENITALS.” It had no text, just a surveyor’s drawing of the Marree Man’s nether region.

But these mentions were not entirely gratuitous. We actually had to talk about them. Because as Phil explained, the genitals would be key to identifying the culprit. So to understand that, let’s start at the beginning of the investigation.

Phil: When it was first discovered, people were looking for blame. And they singled out the tour operators, reckoned it was a tourist stunt.

Elah: Tour operators, obvious suspects. I mean, these were the people who were going to make money on this. Another suspect was an artist named Bardius Goldberg, who has since died. He even told some people he did it. But most of the people I interviewed didn’t buy it. They said, nah, Bardius didn’t have the tech.

On the other hand, a local tractor driver had recently started using GPS, which wasn’t widely available then, but would have been very handy to make this kind of artwork. But the faxes themselves pointed in another direction. They pointed to Americans.

In the faxes, measurements were in imperial units, so in miles and inches. They referred to South Australia as “your state.” And when police went to the site, they found a small American flag. So all signs pointed to Americans. But which Americans?

Well, about a three-hour drive away, there was a defense facility. It had been run jointly by Australians and Americans since the Cold War. Americans, who everyone said had advanced GPS technology. So they had the means to do it, but there was nothing concrete linking them to it. And besides, what would be their motivation? Why would they care if some random community in the desert got a tourist attraction? Six months passed with no solid leads. And then, in January 1999, a new set of faxes arrived.

The new faxes were sent to local businesses and some journalists, and this time they had a bit of an edge to them. Whoever sent them had obviously been following the news and seemed to be feeling a little bit defensive. Back in July, an Australian anthropologist had publicly criticized the Marree Man as cartoon-like and culturally inaccurate. The faxes insisted that guy didn’t know what he was talking about and that the figure was an “accurate tribute to tribal Aboriginal culture.” That last part was in all caps in case anyone was on the fence.

So partly they were trying to defend their honor. But the real point of this new round of messages seemed to be to keep the game going. They announced that answers to the questions everyone had been asking had been buried at selected sites around the world. And over the next few weeks, they would reveal the exact locations. It sounded like a great treasure hunt, but ultimately it was a letdown.

Notes were, in fact, discovered in two spots, both in England, but they actually answered very little. They did say that no locals were involved in any way. That didn’t really narrow it down. And most importantly, they offered no proof. So for all we know, the faxes weren’t even sent by the same people who made the Marree Man. It was all just a big tease.

Over the years, a lot of people have tried to solve this mystery. Most notably, a wealthy businessman named Dick Smith of Dick Smith Electronics. He spent two years on the case and offered a cash reward to anyone who could solve it. But in the end …

Phil: I’m no closer to finding out who did it, but you never know. One day someone on their deathbed may admit to it and then we’ll know what the true story is.

Elah: I didn’t want to wait for someone to die. So 26 years later, here I was reopening a cold case. But there were still embers. People who obviously knew more than the press had reported. Especially Phil Turner.

Phil has given a lot of interviews. So I thought I had a pretty good sense of what he’d tell me: That there were a lot of theories, but that ultimately it was a great mystery. But that is not how our conversation went. Phil named a new suspect. Someone I’d never seen coming. And the evidence to back it up?

Phil: The genitals. The importance and the significance of the genitals is a major, major issue.

Elah: Phil stumbled on his suspect by accident. He wasn’t trying to solve this mystery. He was actually trying to save the Marree Man. Because by 2015, it had started fading considerably and was at risk of disappearing altogether. And Phil just did not want that to happen. So that year, he found himself at a meeting of the Arabana Aboriginal Corporation. By then, they were recognized as the title holders of this land.

Phil: And I happened to say to them, I said, “Look, you’re sitting on a gold mine.” That’s a thing called the Marree Man. But it’s now been there for nearly 20 years and we can only see about 20 percent of it. The rest of it’s just eroded away with time. And I said, “You should restore it.” And they said, “What a great idea.” The upshot it was, “Hey, Phil, why don’t you restore it?” And I’m like, “Gee, here we go. Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

Elah: I did contact the Arabana Aboriginal Corporation, but they weren’t able to talk to me in time for this story, so I can’t actually confirm any of this. I don’t know if it was really them encouraging Phil or if it was more like an, “Okay, sure, Phil, follow your bliss,” not really believing he’d pull it off. I just don’t have their version of this story.

Either way, Phil got to work. He set off to restore the Marree Man. So to do that, he’d first need a map. He couldn’t just head over there and retrace the drawing with a plow, since so much of it was gone by that point. What he’d need was a detailed set of GPS coordinates that his vehicle could follow.

Phil: So I happened to engage with a quality surveyor chatting over the bar at the hotel and I told him what the problem was. And he put his hat in the ring and said, I’ll crunch all the data for you.

Elah: He did that by going online and studying all the pictures of the Mari man that he could find and basically creating some GPS coordinates to match them.

Phil: Very excited with this. This was some nine months later, towards the end of 2015, early 2016.

Elah: Okay, so whoever made the original Marree Man appeared to have done something like this. They first created an outline on the ground, marking it out with bamboo stakes. Then they would have used their digging machine to dig out the actual lines of the drawing, basically connecting the dots between the stakes. In 2016, some of the original bamboo stakes were still there. So Phil could check just how accurate his surveyor’s map was by seeing how the coordinates lined up with the stakes that were still in place.

Phil: Unfortunately, he was about 20 meters out and I said, “It’s not good enough.” I said, “We have to be true to the original work.” He said, “Well, I’ll go back and do a bit more work.”

Elah: A few months passed.

Phil: And it was in May 2016, he sent me an email to say, “Bingo, I have a set of coordinates that are extremely accurate.” So we went up again, and he was accurate to within half a meter of every single bamboo stake in the ground. And I went, holy moly, this is absolutely magic.

Elah: Now that he had the coordinates, Phil could finally start digging. He put together a team of five people.

Phil: And the surveyor’s dog. So five people and a dog.

Elah: Five people and a dog. And together, they spent 11 days out there, marking out the outline and digging out new trenches. Everything went smoothly. And when they were done, the Mare Man was back, crisper than ever. You can see it in satellite photos taken before and after. But one thing didn’t add up.

Phil: So the Marree Man data that we were originally working with was generated from historical website data, which naturally didn’t have the genitals in place. You understand where I’m going? So now go to 2016, now 2017, and this data that we were supplied had the genitals in place. Where did the genitals come from? Where did they come from?

Elah: So I actually had to listen to our interview a couple of times to understand this. But what Phil was saying was actually pretty simple. His surveyor, the one who came up with their map, he must have had help. Because to draw this map, he’d worked off of old photos of the Marree Man. Photos that apparently did not include the genitals because those had been scrubbed out. So how did the surveyor manage to redraw them so accurately? Well, Phil doesn’t think he did.

Phil: It wasn’t redrawn. These are the original coordinates for the original Marree Man.

Elah: Somehow, the surveyor must have got his hands on the original data, genitals included.

Phil: And I got in touch with my surveyor and said, “I need to know where you got this file.” And he said, “I’ve been sworn to absolute secrecy. I can’t tell you.”

Elah: But Phil couldn’t let it go, because soon, he found himself in a bit of legal trouble. Remember how protective Australia is of its native vegetation? Well, in restoring the Marree Man, Phil had disturbed the land again. And the Department of Environment took action. They investigated him for violating the Native Vegetation Act of 1991 and threatened him with a big fine if he did not turn over any and all documentation related to this transgression.

Phil: So I went back to my surveyor and said, “Listen, you’re going to get subpoenaed to reveal the source of this data. Where did it come from?” And you’ll never guess where it came from: the Department of Environment.

Elah: The very organization threatening him with a fine.

Phil: So my barrister concluded that the Department of Environment was involved with the actual creation of the Marree Man, or at least they knew about it in 1998.

Elah: Phil says that once he presented the Department of Environment with this info, they abruptly dropped the case, which does seem odd. So I wrote them. Officially they’re called the South Australian Department for Environment and Water. And I didn’t expect them to write back, but they actually responded right away. But they declined to comment on the allegation that someone on the inside was the culprit. Interesting. One thing was clear: I had to track down the anonymous person who sent the data, or at least see some proof that they existed.

The surveyor that you worked with who received the anonymous data, is he still around?

Phil: Yeah.

Elah: Like, can I talk to him?

Phil: I’d love to … I could do it to him.

Elah: No? He could be anonymous if he wants.

Phil: It’s got implications. And if they knew that he was involved, he’d be in a lot of trouble. This was Phil’s answer every time I asked to speak with one of his leads. He’d say, no, he couldn’t drag this person into it. Or …

Phil: Yeah, I haven’t seen him for some years now.

Elah: Or …

Phil: I’ve got no idea where he is. I can’t even remember his name.

Elah: Which was, frankly, a little suspicious. Why didn’t Phil help me corroborate his story? Phil Turner, who always spoke of the Marree Man with so much admiration. Phil Turner who had dedicated months of his time to restoring the drawing at his own expense.

At the same time, he was directing me to a suspect that was mind boggling. Someone at the Department of Environment? Why would they break the laws that they themselves were enforcing? All to create a tourist attraction for a town in the desert? They didn’t even work in tourism. So I started to think, either Phil did it, or he was just having a bit of fun with me.

I called up Phil Turner to ask straight up if he’d done it.

Phil: No. Absolutely no. Didn’t even know it existed, that guy.

Elah: Do you have an alibi? Where were you, June of 1998?

Phil: God, where was I then, 1998? I could actually tell you exactly, because I had kept a work diary of every day of my working life.

Elah: Phil was traveling when we spoke. But he promised to send me an account of his whereabouts in the summer of 1998. But actually, he’s pretty low on my list of suspects. Because if Phil Turner really was the original creator of the Marree Man, I don’t think he would have gone through all that rigmarole in 2016 to restore it. He would have just gone ahead and dug it out again in secret.

So after two weeks of lightly exerting myself, I did not solve the mystery of the Marree Man. I just had a long list of suspects. The artist Bardius Goldberg, still in contention. The Americans from the defense facility, highly suspicious. The Department of Environment, who wouldn’t comment on their involvement. Hell, even Peter Moore from the top of the episode, the one person I spoke to who actually lived in the area back in 1998.

I hadn’t been able to rule any of them out definitively. And I was starting to think this was like a Murder on the Orient Express situation, where everyone was in on it. That’s just the kind of wonder and paranoia that the Marree Man inspires. Which I actually think is the point.

If someone told me in 1998 that a group of locals teamed up with some Americans and used advanced GPS technology to draw a very, very big Aboriginal man, I’d think, hmm, that’s impressive, probably should have asked for permission, and then I would move on.

But the fact that we don’t know who did this, that’s what makes this a story people like me still want to look into 26 years later. And whoever sent the faxes in 1998, they were working the mystery angle hard. The anonymous messages, the buried clues. It turned a piece of art into a big game.

That summer, in their first series of faxes, they sent one they called the final press release. Though, then they came back six months later to keep going. But in any case, that final-not-final press release ended like this: Half the art is mystery. And so enduring, let it be.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make this show include Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.

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How Zozobra Set Alight the Hearts of Santa Fe Residents

The Podcast Team — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 20:27:00 -0400

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Dylan Thuras: In the months leading up to Labor Day, people are hard at work at the Santa Fe Plaza Mall. Inside of this strip mall, the people of Santa Fe, New Mexico, are building a gigantic 50-foot-tall marionette out of wood and chicken wire. And now, it’s stuffing time. Hundreds of people show up ready to stuff a gigantic puppet full of shredded paper.

Ray Sandoval: We invite the community to have a pizza party to come and stuff him. And I will tell you, it was kind of funny this year because we were going to open the doors at 9 a.m, and when we did, there was a line, you know, all the way—you couldn’t even imagine it. And his 50-foot body was stuffed—every chicken wire hole—was stuffed by 1 p.m.

Dylan: This is not your standard puppet. This puppet’s name is Zozobra. Technically, Zozobra is a ghost. This tall, thin ghost wearing a robe, which makes it look like he is floating just above the ground. He has big green eyes, big flappy ears, and long, dangling limbs.

Ray: So his arms move, his mouth moves, his head goes back side to side, his eyes move. And so it’s really a lot of specialty work shaping the face, shaping a nose or eyebrows or, you know, the ears or making the monster as beautiful as we possibly can.

Dylan: So what are the people of Santa Fe, New Mexico planning on doing, exactly, with this giant, horrifying, beautiful monster? Well, they’re going to light him on fire.

Ray: We’ll have people come up to us and say, “You can’t burn that one. It’s too beautiful. That one’s too nice.” You have to create yourself some emotional distance because Zozobra can be viewed as a big stuffed animal, right, that you just kind of get a little too attached to. And so I’ve got to keep my distance since I’m the guy that gets to light him on fire. You know, I have to remind myself often that that’s his purpose. His purpose is to be destroyed.

I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode was produced in partnership with Visit Santa Fe. Do you have anything in your life that is kind of bumming you out? Once a year, the city of Santa Fe, they’ve got an answer for you. We are going to head to the burning of Zozobra, where a crowd of 50,000 people gets together to release their gloom and light a gigantic puppet on fire.

Ray: The city of Santa Fe has a love affair with a 50-foot monster. You know, restaurants have Zozobra painted in their windows. You see Zozobra on fire trucks. You see Zozobra on murals. You see him, you know, on kids’ menus.

Dylan: This is Ray Sandoval. He runs the Burning of Zozobra Festival for the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe. In other words, Ray is really the person responsible for lighting Zozobra on fire. Ray’s own love affair with Zozobra goes a ways back. He first visited the festival when he was just around five years old.

Ray: I remember staring up at this, you know, this huge effigy and then all of a sudden the lights go off and it starts to come alive. It starts moving and it’s doing these, you know, growls. And I remember looking down at my cousins and they were grabbing my parents’ legs and they were crying and they were putting their face into my parents’ legs. And I just thought, “God, they’re so stupid. They’re missing this.”

Dylan: Today in Santa Fe, the Burning of Zozobra is a huge festival attracting crowds of over 50,000 people. There are fireworks, there is performance art, there is dancing, lots of serious pyrotechnics. But the roots of this festival go way back, over a hundred years back. And back then, it started out on a much, much smaller scale with a little act of arson. Maybe you could call it a cathartic burning. It begins in the 1920s when a painter named Will Shuster blew into Santa Fe.

Ray: He was gassed in the trenches of World War I and he developed a lung ailment. And so he was told that he needed to come out west because he couldn’t live in Philadelphia anymore. The humidity was going to kill him. And so he gets here and meets up with four other painters and they become the Cinco Pintores.

Dylan: The Cinco Pintores lived in a kind of ramshackle house in the center of town. They didn’t have much money, they were just scraping by at the time. But then one Christmas, Shuster caught a big break: He sold one of his paintings. And with this cash in hand, he thought, “All right, guys, let’s go out on the town. We’ll have a nice dinner. We will celebrate.” So, they went down to this fancy new hotel to have their Christmas dinner. But everybody was in a terrible mood.

Ray: And so he carried a sketchbook with him and he took out pieces of paper and put them on the table and he demanded that they write down what was bothering them. And then after they did that, he put them all together on the table, grabbed the candle and lit them on fire and said that their sadness was gone.

And of course, the bartender comes out and sees this fire on top of the table and he kicks them all out. And so they’re now in the Santa Fe Plaza, it’s starting to snow and they just all start laughing. And so Shuster comes up with this idea that you could symbolically burn away those things that are bothering you if you could write them down and then light them on fire.

Dylan: The following spring, Shuster went down to Mexico for Easter and he witnessed something that kind of rewired his brain. There was this parade where people would carry an effigy of Judas through the streets and you’d spit at the effigy, you’d throw shoes at him. And then you would get burnt at the end of the parade.

Ray: So this sparks a little bit of an idea inside his head. So, Shuster decides this is the perfect way to do this. If we can create a monster that everybody decides is bad and we can stuff our glooms in them, then we could burn them away and we can kind of have this ritual to cleanse our community.

Dylan: Shuster came up with his own Judas to burn, his own character that represented everything he wanted to get rid of. This gloomy old ghost named Zozobra. It’s the Spanish word for “anxiety” or “worry.” He built a little five-foot marionette and he held the first burning in his backyard in 1924. The next year, Zozobra got bigger, and so did the event. It became public, attracted more people. And then the next year, Zozobra got bigger and then bigger and bigger.

Ray: Zozobra caught fire and he’s still burning.

Dylan: Will Shuster kept the burning of Zozobra going until the 1960s when he turned the event over to the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, which still runs it to this day. Of course, a big part of what they do is getting this figure of Zozobra just right. He’s huge, kind of scary, but also kind of cute.

They’ve also doubled his original size, taking him from the max that Shuster brought him up to, which was about 20 feet, and growing him all the way to 50 feet high. But what is equally important is what is inside Zozobra.

So earlier, we were talking about how all the volunteers get together before the festival to stuff this giant puppet with shredded paper. In the world of Zozobra, these little papers are more than just kindling. The papers are called glooms. And in the weeks leading up to the event, you write your own glooms down, whatever is bothering you, whatever you want to let go of, and then you can drop them off in gloom boxes throughout the city of Santa Fe.

Then volunteers will take these glooms and stuff them inside of Zozobra. So all of the whole city of Santa Fe’s glooms can go up in flames together. But say you have something that’s really bothering you, and writing it down just won’t cut it. In that case, you can drop off other things that you’d like to see burn, too.

Ray: We had a wedding dress that just went up, and then we’ve had really personal items. I know that I had a woman who had survived breast cancer, and so she wanted to burn her bra in Zozobra. And we’ve had, you know, old love letters. We’ve had wedding albums. We’ve had, you know, wedding invitations. We’ve had just, you know, citations, old mortgages, really bad diagnosis, somebody’s death certificate, somebody’s ashes, who put in their will that they wanted to be, that they wanted a portion of their ashes to go up with Zozobra.

Dylan: So picture this: You have a massive crowd of 50,000 people. The giant ghost puppet of Zozobra looms ahead of you, waving its arms, moving its eyes. There is music, there is dancing, and all of your glooms and your dooms from the year have been stuffed inside of this figure.

Ray: You’re having this deeply personal experience, which is you are reflecting on what you yourself want to let go of. What is it that’s holding you down in your life? What is it, what gloom is holding you there? There we start chanting, “Burn him! Burn him!”

And so basically what happens is that there’s a firework inside Zozobra’s mouth. So when you light the fuse, the fire goes into the mouth. And if you get it just right, these flames start going up across his cheek. And so it looks like he’s breathing fire.

When people see that, that firework go off in the mouth, you have this collective gasp by 50,000 people all at once. And then all of a sudden you hear this pause and then this roar comes over the crowd. And it’s just, it’s amazing because the amount of energy that you can feel from that crowd. And it’s something that just needs to be experienced.

Dylan: The festival has been going on for over 100 years now. To shake things up a bit from year to year, Ray and the Kiwanis Club have been experimenting with dressing Zozobra up in slightly different costumes. This year, Zozobra was wearing kind of steampunk getup, big goggles, an old-fashioned coat. If you want a little preview of next year, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. So they’re giving Zozobra a little bit of an American Revolution theme.

Ray: Zozobra has stolen King George, his powdered wig, his scepter, his royal robes, and a crown.

Dylan: No matter how Zozobra looks on the outside, Ray says at the core, the festival has really stayed the same. It’s part public celebration, part private reflection, and everything in between. It is a chance to let go.

Ray: Zozobra is really the story between the duality within ourselves as human beings, that good or bad. And really that battle is, who are you going to be like? Are you going to be more like Zozobra and spread gloom into the world, or are you going to be more like the fire spirit and spread light? So this, you know, this dichotomy of being with 50,000 people and having this very communal experience and at the same time having a very personal experience, I think is just really, truly the magic of the event.

Dylan: The burning of Zozobra takes place every year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Friday before Labor Day. Start planning your trip now.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

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The Explorer’s Guide to Nevada’s Night Skies

Holyn Thigpen — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 11:00:00 -0400

+ Nevada’s big night sky nearly bursts with twinkling stars, and you don’t have to travel far to trade the urban lights for celestial spectacle. In Valley of Fire, just an hour outside Las Vegas, inky black skies are interrupted only by awe-inspiring rock formations. And Great Basin National Park, located near the Utah border, is internationally renowned for its designation as a dark sky park.

Whether you’re an astronomy enthusiast or just a night owl who doesn’t know your Merak from your Mizar (those are stars in the Big Dipper, FYI), settle into one of these spots to open your mind to the vast expanse of the universe. Head to these parks for their unmatched stars, and stay for the surrounding adventures—from hiking to camping to wildlife viewing.

Valley of Fire State Park

Nevada’s oldest state park is a sprawling nature preservation area known for its dramatic, red sandstone formations, which look as though they’re on fire when reflecting the sun’s rays. Valley of Fire is 40 miles (about an hour’s drive) outside of Las Vegas, meaning it is unaffected by the city’s neon lights.

The park is open from sunrise to sunset unless you’re camping in the designated campgrounds at Atlatl Rock or Arch Rock. It isn’t unusual to spot the Milky Way with the naked eye on clear nights (especially on or around the New Moon). The park often hosts professional astronomers, allowing visitors to view constellations and planets through telescopes and hear the stories associated with different celestial bodies. Guests can also embark on self-guided moonlit hikes from September to May when the weather is mild and the stars are at their brightest. But no matter what time of year you explore the valley, sitting among ancient rock formations in total darkness is a truly magical experience.

Once home to the Ancestral Pueblo farmers, the valley is now a hot spot for camping and hiking, with popular trails including the Fire Wave and the Rainbow Vista. The petroglyphs of the park’s ancient inhabitants can be discovered amongst petrified trees and eroded rocks with unique shapes and textures (one even looks like a giant elephant!). After dark, the valley inspires wonder in a completely different way. A number of nocturnal animals—from lizards to bobcats to ground squirrels—come out to play, and the sky lights up with thousands of stars.

Great Basin National Park

Recognized as an “International Dark Sky Park” by Dark Sky International, Great Basin is one of the world’s best spots to stargaze. Due to its high desert setting, the air in the park contains little view-blocking moisture, making it easier to view constellations with the naked eye. During the summer (peak stargazing season) the skies above Great Basin reveal over 6,000 stars and glimpses into the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies.

This sprawling, 77-thousand-acre park contains wonder at every turn, from groves of ancient bristlecone pines—among the oldest living trees on Earth—to ethereal stalactites and stalagmites inside the Lehman Caves. The difference between the park’s highest and lowest trails is over 6,000 feet, from the top of Wheeler Peak to the bottom of Mountain View Trail. But no matter where you are in Great Basin, you’re in for some amazing nighttime views.

The park notes that it is committed to reducing its light pollution footprint, employing red exterior lights instead of white and even measuring the brightness of the night sky every month. This careful monitoring ensures that no outside light encroaches on the park’s pristine darkness. Also, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Great Basin Astronomy rangers lead programs at the Astronomy Amphitheater every Thursday through Sunday.

Black Rock Desert

This rugged landscape in northwest Nevada is the largest collection of publicly managed land in the continental U.S. Once home to Lake Lahontan, a massive inland sea from the last ice age, the area is now known for its Black Rock Playa—a flat, dry expanse that stretches over 200 square miles (and is famous for being the annual site of Burning Man).

Most Black Rock campers stay in the center of the playa, where miles lie between your vantage point and the nearest mountain ranges. Black Rock Desert is known for its meteor showers—most notably the Perseid Meteor Shower, which bursts through the serene night skies each August. During Perseid, Friends of Black Rock-High Rock hosts a meteor shower campout, where amateur astronomers can view the phenomenon through telescopes (and drink some complementary hot chocolate!). Rocket enthusiasts, too, make regular trips to the playa to conduct breathtaking night launches that shine against the desert’s wide, flat terrain.

Driving through Black Rock, adventurers can also spot volcanic rock formations, fossilized, prehistoric remains, and native wildlife like mule deer and horned lizards. If you choose to stay the night and pitch your tent in the desert, you’re in for a whole other set of natural wonders.

Walker River State Recreation Area

In 2017, the Walker Basin Conservancy donated over 12,000 acres of land to the State of Nevada, including several large ranches that had been closed to the public for over a hundred years. Today, the ranches and surrounding land compose the five distinct park units of Walker River State Recreation Area.

Nine Mile Ranch, also known as the “Elbow,” is the least developed of Walker River’s five parks and still looks just like the large ranch area that it was a century ago. Visitors can camp out in the Elbow’s Bighorn Campground, where there is easy access to the river and—more importantly—the darkest, most astonishing skies in the whole recreation area. Occasionally, Walker River park rangers host on-site astronomy nights, where visitors can experiment with different telescopic equipment and learn more about the numerous planets viewable from the park.

The East Walker River runs through this rolling landscape, with designated access points for kayakers, floaters, and fishers, and the area’s winding dirt roads are popular with hikers, mountain bikers, and equestrians. While Walker River is a popular site for daytime treks and picnics, it’s also an incredible place to spend the night. Whether you choose to pitch a tent, hook up your RV, or rent one of the campgrounds’ riverside cabins, there’s a whole new world to explore when the sun sets over Walker River.

Lunar Crater

Recognized as one of Nevada’s six National Natural Landmarks, the Lunar Crater volcanic field is one of the state’s most remarkable, otherworldly features, containing a whopping, 400-acre crater thought to have been formed by several shallow volcanic eruptions. Lunar Crater and its surrounding, smaller craters are so much like the landscape of the moon that the area was classified as an official “Terrestrial Analogue Site” and used for NASA’s Apollo astronaut training during the 1970s.

While its space-training days may be over, Lunar Crater is still an unbeatable spot for taking in the night sky. Explorers of the crater can camp anywhere along the pull-offs of the Backcountry Byway, all of which offer unobstructed views of the inky black sky and, often, a look at the Milky Way. The crater is a great place to experience zodiacal light—the sunlight that reflects off dust in the sun’s orbit path and produces a faint, pyramid-shaped glow in the night sky. Stargazers at Lunar Crater can also witness an astonishing red and green airglow across the sky and even get glimpses of the Dark Horse Nebula in the Milky Way’s Great Rift.

The Lunar Crater Backcountry Byway passes by the crater with a stopping point where visitors can get out of their cars for a closer look. Along the bumpy dirt road, it’s easy to spot natural formations like cinder cones and basalt flows, as well as some lovely wildflowers. The Byway also takes you past 20 different extinct volcanoes and ancient, obsidian-covered lava beds.

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Sam Sanders: How to Become a Nature Girly

The Podcast Team — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 07:15:00 -0400

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Dylan Thuras: So obviously we’re going to be talking about place and the way that place impacts who you are. I would love to hear about growing up in Texas.

Sam Sanders: I grew up around San Antonio in the San Antonio greater metro area. And my home-home-hometown is this little town called Seguin, Texas, which is about 30 miles outside of San Antonio. And it is the self-titled pecan capital of the world. As in like, we are pecan mecca. There were actually a bunch of pecan stores in town growing up. There were two pecan trees in our front yard in my childhood home in Seguin, Texas. And in front of the courthouse in Seguin, the sculpture in front is not like Lady Justice with the scales. It is a giant, oversized concrete pecan with the words under it, “world’s largest pecan.”

Dylan: It’s my kind of town.

Sam: Hell yeah. And it’s one of those small towns where everyone knows everybody. My father had lived there for decades. My parents were small business owners. And at points during my youth, they owned both a funeral home and a daycare. So I grew up there. And then in middle school, we moved to one of the closer suburbs. And then I ended up going to undergrad in the heart of San Antonio. But San Antonio is home. And that metro area is home. And like, in adulthood, all of the complexities of modern life that I’ve had to make peace with, I began to understand those complexities in San Antonio, Texas.

I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, I am talking with reporter, host, podcaster, man about town, Sam Sanders. And I asked him to tell me about his life as told in four distinct places. Sam spent 12 years at NPR. You’ve almost certainly heard his voice at some point. He’s launched shows like It’s Been a Minute. He knows a ton about pop culture and hosts podcasts like Vibe Check and The Sam Sanders Show. And along the way, throughout this career, it’s meant that he has had to move around a bunch. He grew up in Texas, moved to the East Coast, out to the West Coast. And it all started back in Texas, when he was just a kid with a growing obsession for pop culture, kind of trying to find his place in a small town near San Antonio.

Sam: San Antonio is this weird place because Texas is not quite South, not quite Southwest, just Texas, and San Antonio sits right at that nexus. It is in the middle. It’s in the middle. And there are parts of my upbringing there that felt incredibly Southern, with a mother who comes from Alabama and a father from East Texas, which is basically Louisiana. But in many ways, my experience growing up felt very Southwest. And I grew up in a city that was decidedly majority minority, as long as I was there. And even now, to this day, San Antonio was about two-thirds Latino. So I also ended up growing up in this red state that is Texas in a blue oasis. San Antonio is blue. And San Antonio is a city led by people of color. And so I never had this distinct and visceral hatred of Texas because of its politics, because it’s like, oh, I actually know the politics are much more complicated. And in actuality, every big city in Texas is actually blue. Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, El Paso. I could go on. San Antonio, Austin. Those are blue cities. I want to say Houston had a lesbian mayor before it was cool. These places are progressive. And so I’ve always been able to appreciate the political complexity of a place like Texas because of San Antonio.

Dylan: Texas is like, it’s like maybe the third or it’s way up there as the most, one of the most diverse states in the union.

Sam: Have you been to Houston?

Dylan: Yeah.

Sam: It is the model UN, baby. Like it’s everything, everywhere, all at once.

Dylan: Yeah, big time. When you grew up in Texas, you grew up in a little bit of a, maybe more of a conservative or at least religious household. Is that right?

Sam: Oh my God. It was so religious. So my parents didn’t go to the same church. My father was Methodist, kind of boring black Methodist, nice upstanding, quiet church services. My mother was always churchy and loud, charismatic Christian. And by the time I was like eight or nine, we had joined the strictest version of that church. It was Pentecostal slash apostolic, but she was a church organist. The defining ethos of the church and the practice of our faith, it was like doing things that showed that we were not like, quote unquote, the world. We weren’t like the secular. So in the way we looked, acted, and the things we did, it wasn’t just to serve God, but to prove that we weren’t like the heathens.

So for instance, the women could not wear jewelry or makeup or pants and they could not cut their hair. So they all wore long skirts and had long hair in buns and wore no makeup or jewelry. We did not go to the movies or school dances because that felt too secular. I had to beg to go to prom. And my mom was like, “Don’t tell the church, but you can go.” We were not supposed to enjoy any cultural content that wasn’t focused on God. So it was a gospel music only household. And my brother and I snuck a lot to watch a lot of TV. Although my mother was such a champion of Black entertainment and Black culture, she would make exceptions for us to watch things as a family, like In Living Color or Roots, the miniseries. Because she was like, “You gotta see this. You gotta see it.” You know?

But my entire upbringing was built consuming that secular pop culture in secret. As soon as I could sneak away from my mom in the mall to go buy CDs at like Sam Goody, I would. And I would buy secular CDs. And I would bring them home in the back of my underwear. And I would listen to them on my Walkman in the bathroom for hours. I remember getting ahold of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions in like eighth grade and sitting in the bathroom as an eighth grader for hours, just playing it over and over and over again. And I would get all these weird looks from my mom. And I was like, she thinks I’m masturbating. In a way I was. But I was just listening to Stevie Wonder. I was just listening to Stevie Wonder over and over and over again. But my entire upbringing, I snuck and listened to these CDs. I snuck and watched VH1 Behind the Music. I snuck and watched MTV music videos. And I think part of why I have a career now where I just talk about popular culture is because of that. It was forbidden fruit in my youth. So now I relish the chance to get paid to talk about it.

Dylan: Take note, parents, the boomerang effect is real. Let’s talk about some of the places that you felt kind of define some aspects of yourself.

Sam: Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Dylan: So talk to me a little bit about the Charles River.

Sam: The Charles River. So I got my graduate degree at the Kennedy School, which is Harvard’s School of Policy and Government. And the campus, as well as my first year apartment in Harvard Square, sat along the Charles River, which meant that every day to get to class, I walked about a mile along the Charles River. I liked the walk. But within the first few weeks of walking along the Charles, I kept seeing all of these runners running along the Charles. Early in the morning, late at night, when it was raining, when it was sunny, when it was snowing. Just literally an army of happy-go-lucky, smiling white people in short shorts running. And I was just like, what the hell? What are they—what is happening? And eventually, I saw them do it enough and look so happy, I was like, I need to try this.

Dylan: They got you. They got you.

Sam: They got me. And then I started running, and I loved it. And what happened for me within those two years of being up there and embracing running along the river, it was the first time in my adult life where I said to myself, physical fitness and activity should be part of your adult life, even if it’s not part of a thing you’re doing for school or a sports club you’re involved in. You can just do it for you. And so the reason the Charles River is so important to me is because it really solidified what has become a big part of my personal practice for every day, which is, every day you should move. I kind of don’t feel like my day has started until I’ve gotten my heart rate above 150.

Dylan: I feel this. I’m a biker, and I do a bike commute to my office. It’s an eight-mile bike ride, and I very much feel the same way. It’s like, you just unburden yourself a little bit. You feel lighter and more ready for whatever is going to come next after a little bit of movement. It’s true.

Sam: And it’s meditative. I always get to a point in a run—so these days, when I do run, I try to do five miles. That’s it. No more, no less. And something happens around mile three or four, I get lost in the sound of my feet and my breath. And I’m just tracking those sounds and living in my body and hearing those sounds. And the thoughts I’m thinking are still there, but they’re in the rear view. And I say, when I get to that part, and I say this non-religiously, I say it deeply, capital S, spiritually, when I get into that flow, that’s what I’m talking to God. And I want that time. That intense, I’ve connected with my body and the world and this space, and I’m in flow. I don’t know. I don’t know. I sound hella California right now, but you know what I’m saying.

Dylan: I know what you’re saying. I know what you’re saying. I mean, speaking of California, I mean, you moved from one kind of desert-ish landscape, Texas, it depends on where you are in Texas, but to another. Now you live in LA. What is your relationship with LA, with place, with the outdoors, where you are now?

Sam: Yeah. I became a full nature girly once I got to California. In part, there was a beach right there. So I didn’t have the Charles River anymore. But for a good number of years when I was living on the Westside, my morning practice was getting up around six, making my coffee, and driving to Venice beach to do my five mile loop from the Venice part of the beach to the Santa Monica pier and back. It’s a five mile loop. It’s the best way to start your day. I would do that. And then I would sit in the sand and meditate for like five minutes. And if I felt frisky, I would jump in.

But what really made me a full nature girl in California were the national parks. I would always go home for Thanksgiving. And I’ve had a dog for most of my adult life. So on holidays, when I was going home, I’d want to take the dog with me. So I would drive home. For years, I’ve been making the drive to Texas from either DC or from LA. But I would drive past a lot of national parks. Growing up, my family wasn’t into national parks. I wasn’t really an outdoors person. I mean, I was in marching band, that kept me outside. But I was not seeking to be outdoors all the time. My father was a cattle rancher. And we had that family farm about two hours away from the house. When we’d go up there on the weekends, my brother would be out there in the brush with my dad with the cows. I literally would be in the house on the farm watching Bob Ross. I just was not an outdoors person. I had never camped. The outdoors was not part of my practice. And even though at that point I was running, you run and you go inside. You’re outside while you run, then you go inside.

All this to say, once I began making that road trip from LA to Texas over and over and over again, I would keep seeing these national parks. And I was like, maybe I should stop one day. So I’ll never forget on one of those trips home, I said, I’m just going to go into Joshua Tree National Park. It’s along the way. And I went into Joshua Tree with my dog, Zora, Zora Neale Hurston. And I was like, I remember being a little angry. I was like, how did no one tell me that this place is just here? And it’s got these trees out of outer space and you were like walking on a different planet. And it’s just like this park that you can just go hang out in. How did no one tell me? And then on another road trip, I discovered White Sands National Park, which is also like being on another planet. It’s wild. And so quickly after being in California, I made being in national parks and experiencing national parks, like part of my practice. I now have one of those all passes that gets you into every park for like 80 bucks a year. And I make it a point to plan trips where I’m just going to a national park. I did the Sequoias a few months ago and it was transcendent.

But yeah, Joshua Tree was the first place in my adult life that said to me, you can be outside for no other objective than just to enjoy the outdoors. And that’s not just cool, it’s kind of ideal. I was not a person who just hung out outside to hang out outside before I discovered Joshua Tree National Park. And now I’m like, when can I sit outside? Please, I want to be outside. I’ll have friends that want to meet up and do stuff. And I’m always like, can we go on a hike? And my adult embrace of just being outdoors was fully brought on by the beauty that is Joshua Tree National Park. I also think, and listeners thank me for this, two pro tips for Joshua Tree National Park: don’t go when it’s hot, go when it’s cold. It’s just as sunny. And the cold air makes it feel extraterrestrial even more. And then two: when you drive into Joshua Tree National Park, especially for the first time, you need to be playing U2’s Joshua Tree album. It works. Trust me, it works. It just is incredible.

Dylan: LA has given you this appreciation for nature. I love Joshua Tree, obviously for the nature. Part of this has also been, you said you had a dog. So that dog is also, I imagine, gets you out and about. Maybe talk about how that relationship, both with nature and then with taking care of an animal has evolved and how place comes into that.

Sam: Yeah, I have two dogs. I rescued a pit bull when I was living in DC from a shelter in Northeast. I rescued Zora. She was maybe like eight or nine months old. And that was probably like 2010 or 11. So she’s been around for a while with me and she’s moved across the country with me several times. And during the deepest COVID lockdown, we just road tripped across the country a few times, me and her. So she has just been a constant in my adult life. Last summer, I thought she was dying. There were a bunch of emergency surgeries and she was just old and just not with it. So in my fear of her pending death, I got a second pit bull, a little puppy with a cow colored coat. I named him Wesley Snipes. And so now I have two. When Zora was young, for a few years, she had so much energy. She would come on those five mile runs with me in DC. We’d run the monuments and back in the morning. But once I got to California with her and with Wesley, the new puppy, my favorite dog place with them quickly became Huntington Dog Beach. You know, all of California is beaches and each of them have a different personality. Huntington Beach is maybe an hour south of LA along the coast. But in Huntington Beach, there is like a mile and a half strip of that beach that’s just reserved for dogs to be off leash. And it is the closest thing to heaven on earth you’ll ever find.

Dylan: For you or the dog?

Sam: Both. The first time I went there, I didn’t know that sometimes they have themed dog meetups. So the first time I went to Huntington Dog Beach after I’d heard about it, I show up there on the morning of the pug costume meetup day. It was in October. And hundreds of pug owners brought their pugs to the dog beach and each pug was in a costume. Can you name a more beautiful scene?

Dylan: This does sound quite delightful, I have to admit. I am charmed from a distance even.

Sam: Right? And then, you know, with this beach, having a dog off leash on the beach, it always makes me just appreciate the beach in a new way. I’ve lived in LA well over a decade now and I think I know beaches, but when you see a dog off leash, on a beach, it gives you a newfound respect for the beach itself. The things you don’t notice, they do. The things they want to run around to, you don’t want to run around to it and then you see it differently through them. I imagine in the same way that, you know, parents of young kids say that like the young kid helps them see a world that felt static and boring in new and alive ways because you watch them discover things for the first time. The equivalent for a single gay man is a dog at Huntington Dog Beach.

Dylan: And thousands of pugs in costumes. No, it’s good. I like it.

Sam: And so there’s this very interesting dynamic with my young dog, Wesley Snipes. He is equal parts a goofball, but also scared out of his mind, but also wants to try to be there for his people. And he does this thing where whenever he wants to wander off and explore and go crazy, he’ll be off in his own world and then he’ll forget where I am and he’ll look back and just stop in his tracks and be like, you still there? You still there? He does it all the time. And he does it the most at Huntington Dog Beach. And it’s just this beautiful reminder that this dog who I have to fully care for—he is my responsibility, he does not pay rent—even in that power dynamic, he still wants to care about me. He still wants to make sure that I’m there. And I think having dogs, as long as I’ve had, they’re this amazing reminder that all sentient beings, one of the things that we long for most is to care for things other than ourselves. And dogs remind you of that. Because dogs don’t have to do shit. I would feed you anyway. Like you get this house anyway, but they’re always in their own little dog ways caring for me.

Dylan: All right, last question. You’ve lived a lot of places, Texas, Boston, DC, LA. Do you think, is this your forever place or do you think maybe there’s somewhere else that’s calling you?

Sam: I love LA. I love LA because it’s like one endless scavenger hunt. You’re never done discovering this city. You’re never done discovering all of the cool things there are to do here. Someone smarter than me said that you have to look at LA as not a city, but like a nation state. And it will take you years to figure it all out. And that’s the beauty of it. So I like that. I like the puzzle that is LA. I think at some point I would like to be doing something that feels off the grid, doing something that’s, you know, big old farm with eight pit bulls. I don’t know. But that will happen when it like just falls into my lap. I don’t think I’ll seek it out. If the opportunity opened itself up, I would do it. But for now, I was blessed enough to get a mortgage about a year and a half ago. I was renting this house and the owners just sold it to me. They moved to France during the pandemic. They’re like, we’re not coming back. Would you buy it? So I had to say yes.

Dylan: That’s how I got my house too.

Sam: Really?

Dylan: Yeah. Renting and the owners said, hey, we want to sell. Would you buy it? And I was like, heck yeah.

Sam: But that’s kind of what I try to let guide a lot of my decision-making about big decisions. If you just like try to have a good day, live a good life, be around good people, the opportunities that you should take part in, they kind of just present themselves to you. When I made Vibe Check with Zach and Saeed, it was kind of just this no brainer. I was like, we have to do it. This new show I just launched with KCRW, they called me. They were like, come do this thing. And so I tried to, in my adult life, not stress over the big life decisions about love, career, housing, location, because inevitably those paths kind of just present themselves. I think, I hope. I’d rather it be that way. I hate big decisions.

Dylan: I agree with that philosophy. Sam, thank you for coming on the show and spending some time chatting with me.

Sam: Thank you for indulging me. I just, I’m a rambler, as you can tell.

Dylan: I loved it. It’s great. Yeah, but you’re a professional rambler, Sam. Like this is, you know what I mean? You’re not an amateur rambler.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

This podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. This episode was produced by Tomeka Weatherspoon and the production team includes me, Dylan Thuras, Johanna Mayer, Chris Naka, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, and Talon Stradley.

Our technical director is Casey Holford. This episode was sound designed by Tomeka Weatherspoon and mixed by Luz Fleming and Sam Kass. Tomeka Weatherspoon and mixed by Luz Fleming. Our theme and end credit music is by Sam Tyndall.

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Nectar Soda

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 11:00:00 -0500

Though Cincinnati is best known for breweries, another effervescent beverage has a long history in the Queen City: the nectar soda.

Home to the oldest pharmacy college in the U.S. west of the Alleghenies, the Eclectic Medical Institute (1845-1952), and Lloyd Brothers Pharmacists, Cincinnati was long on the forefront of the pharmaceutical industry. The city had a number of apothecaries with soda fountains, as well as confectioners serving countless carbonated concoctions—some claiming to cure a variety of ailments, and others simply providing customers with something sweet and refreshing to drink.

Enter the nectar soda. The flavor is a combination of vanilla and bitter almond, and the drink is pastel pink in color—a nod to the hue of almond flowers, according to Dann Woellert, a Cincinnati food historian, etymologist, and the author of Cincinnati Candy: A Sweet History. Nicknamed the “drink of the gods,” the bitter almond flavor of nectar soda balances out what would otherwise be overly sweet vanilla, creating an addictive taste that grows on you with each sip.

Nectar sodas have been served in Cincinnati since at least the late 1870s, though, like many iconic foods and beverages, its precise origins are murky. The only other U.S. city to embrace nectar sodas was New Orleans, but unlike Cincinnati, the tradition fizzled out in the Big Easy in the mid-20th century. Plus, Woellert says that the Queen City popularized them first. “They were served in Cincinnati nearly a decade before New Orleans,” he says.

While the Cincinnati nectar soda has multiple origin stories, each crediting a different pharmacist or confectioner, Woellert has concluded that John Mullane created the flavor after traveling to Quebec City to learn the art of confectionery from a prominent Canadian candymaker. He began serving nectar sodas in his confectionery shop in downtown Cincinnati in the late 1870s.

So, why did the nectar soda end up in Cincinnati and New Orleans, of all places? Wollert suspects that the bitter almond and vanilla flavor was used by the French Acadians who settled in both Quebec City and New Orleans.

Though nectar sodas aren’t as common as they were in the early 20th century, when they could be found at countless confectioneries and pharmacy soda fountains across Cincinnati, they’re still served at establishments throughout the city and the surrounding area. Nectar sodas have been on the menu at ice cream and chocolate shop Aglamesis Brothers since it opened in Cincinnati in 1908, if not shortly thereafter. That’s according to company president and CEO Randy Young, who is also a third-generation family member.

It’s unclear when nectar sodas were added to the menu at Graeter’s, a Cincinnati ice cream and chocolate shop that opened in 1870 and now has locations throughout the city and the Midwest, but Chip Graeter, chief of retail operations and a fourth-generation family member, says that they were especially popular throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

In a January 28, 1947 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Tom Moore, the head of the soda department at Dow Drug Store—which operated 32 soda fountains throughout the metropolitan area at that time—said that “nectar is one of the most popular flavors in all of their stores, and has been for many years.” Five years prior, Dow ran an ad in the same newspaper which read: “Be glad you live in Cincinnati, the only place in the country where you can enjoy a Dow double-dip nectar soda.”

Originally, nectar syrup was made by combining half-and-half or milk with water, bitter almond extract, vanilla extract and red food coloring. While Aglamesis eventually switched to a dairy-free shelf-stable syrup, Graeter's recipe has never changed—it still contains milk and needs to be refrigerated.

Both Aglamesis and Graeter’s make nectar soda by mixing nectar syrup with a dollop of whipped cream, adding a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream, then topping it off with some soda water and more whipped cream.

Though Young says that nectar sodas are most popular with older adults, they’re also a hit with members of younger generations who try them. “People who grew up with them still love them today,” Graeter says. “We still make them in all of our stores, but they're not nearly as popular today as they once were, simply because milkshakes and smoothies have taken over.”

According to Young, there is a commercially available descendant of the nectar soda. “Commercial soda companies like Barqs and others came out with their version of cream soda—a bright pink soda—which got its flavoring from nectar soda,” he explains.

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Tiquira

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 19:17:00 -0400

Indigenous Brazilians have fermented alcoholic beverages from the cassava root for thousands of years. These beer-like beverages go by names like cauim, caxiri, and tarubá. Fermentation is an important step in cassava processing—the raw root has chemicals that can turn into cyanide in the human body. Native peoples found that a bit of human saliva and some naturally occurring yeast could eliminate these toxins and improve the nutritious value of the tuber. When the technology of distillation arrived to the Munim River region (now in Maranhão), locals who already drank lightly alcoholic cassava beverages began to distill them. Tiquira was born.

The name tiquira is likely derived from the Tupi word tykyre meaning "to drip." But it is a curiosity that the spirit has flourished in only one Brazilian state, Maranhão. Margot Stinglwagner, founder of Guaaja Tiquira, the first modern brand to produce the spirit starting in 2016, says “It’s a spirit that is also unknown in Brazil. A few people have heard about tiquira—but usually only people who have gone to Maranhão once.” Accordingly, the state moved to declare the spirit as a piece of Cultural and Intangible Heritage in September 2023.

Part of the reason that tiquira has remained so isolated is that cachaça, Brazil’s rum, is far easier to produce. Because the rum comes from sugarcane, the sugar for fermentation is already there. “With cassava, you don’t have sugar,” Stinglwagner explains. “You must first transform the carbohydrates into sugar and then you can ferment and distill it.” To achieve this end, Guaaja Tiquira uses food enzymes instead of the traditional human saliva. Guaaja also differs from other distillers because they use full cassava roots where most tiquira moonshiners rely on processed farinha de mandioca, or cassava flour.

“The majority of people produce it illegally,” laughs Stinglwagner. “The state does nothing about it.” Outside of the urban center, tiquira is invariably a homemade product. Generally, tiquira makers don’t separate the "heads" (the first drops of liquor from a distillation, which contain harsher alcohols including toxic methanol and other pungent and volatile flavor compounds) from the "tails" (the final liquid produced from distillation, which has a low alcohol content and can have unwelcome bitter flavors), meaning the spirit is stronger and may contain more toxins and impurities. Some even macerate marijuana into the combined spirit to produce the doubly-illicit tiquiconha.

Maranhenses believe that you cannot get wet or bathe after drinking tiquira, lest you become faint or dizzy. Zelinda Machado de Castro e Lima, one of the great chroniclers of folk culture in Maranhão, has recorded other traditions surrounding the drink. Firstly, it is typical to pierce a cashew with a toothpick and soak it in a glass of tiquira for several hours. It is then sucked as a sort of boozy lollipop. She also writes about the belief that those drinking coffee should avoid tiquira, while locals say that fishermen on the coast used the liquor to sanitize wounds incurred on the job.

Finally, there is the curious question of the color of tiquira. In the tourist markets of São Luís, the spirit is always blushing a translucent violet. “They say that the color of tiquira is from tangerine leaves, but we tried to do it and the color from the leaves is not stable,” says Stinglwagner. “It is also not a strong color. The norms and laws for tiquira prohibit the addition of the leaves.” The violet color may be artificial (perhaps from food dyes), but some tiquiras do have a citrusy flavor.

Tiquira today is still largely relegated to the world of moonshining, but with the government’s recognition of the spirit and new legitimate ventures like that of Guaaja Tiquira, Brazil could be seeing more of the cassava liquor outside of its home in Maranhão.

“All the people say to me, ‘What is this new spirit?,’” says Stinglwagner. “I say, ‘It’s not a new spirit, it’s the oldest spirit from Brazil.’”

Know Before You Go

Tiquira is widely available in the downtown markets of São Luís, Maranhão. Both the local Mercado Central and touristic Mercado das Tulhas have many vendors selling tiquira. The commercial brand, Guaaja Tiquira, is also available in São Luís at Empório Fribal, in addition to Copacabana Palace and Fairmont Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, and Mocotó Bar e Restaurante in São Paulo.

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Maultaschen

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 11:00:00 -0500

The origins of Germany’s Maultaschen are deliciously devious. Legend has it that, in the late Middle Ages, a lay brother named Jakob invented the stuffed pasta dumplings at the Maulbronn Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site founded in 1147 by Cistercian monks in southwest Germany.

One direct translation of Maultaschen is “mouth pockets,” though “Maul” could just as easily refer to Maulbronn. Maultaschen are usually square dumplings (though sometimes they're rolled) and can be fried in a pan or served in broth. Commonly described as Germany’s version of Italian ravioli, they allegedly emerged as a way to use up an unexpected bounty of meat that Brother Jakob stumbled upon in the forest outside the monastery walls.

The twist? Although they abhorred waste, these monks weren’t allowed to eat the meat of four-legged animals, especially during the Catholic fasting period of Lent in the spring. So Brother Jakob minced the meat with herbs and onions and wrapped everything inside pasta dough, hiding the forbidden flesh from the eyes of his fellow monks—and even from the eyes of God.

In Swabia, the region encompassing much of Baden-Württemberg and part of Bavaria where Maultaschen originated, one of the colloquial names for the food references this deception directly: Herrgottsbescheißerle means “little God-cheaters.”

Everyone in Swabia has their version of the legend with more or less embellishment. Ludwig Nestler holds a master’s degree in heritage conservation and works for the State Palaces and Gardens of Baden-Württemberg, a government organization that oversees monuments like Maulbronn Monastery. His version of the tale includes a sack of stolen meat dropped in the woods by a fleeing thief, which inspires Brother Jakob’s trickery in the kitchen. But he acknowledges that there’s no undisputed “historically correct version” of how Maultaschen came to be. Similarly, everyone in Swabia has their own Maultaschen recipe, with unique ingredients for the minced filling, called Brät.

“Traditionally the Brät is made from pork mixed with herbs, onions, and occasionally bread crumbs for texture and stability,” says Nestler. Swabia, however, “was a rather poor region with limited amounts of meat due to rather unfertile land, so being adaptive and innovative has always been a part of the people’s nature.” As Maultaschen became popular, fish and seasonal vegetables like spinach, carrots, beets, and mushrooms became common inclusions.

Today, the European Union ties Maultaschen to Swabia with a Protected Geographical Indication, which lists required ingredients the authentic product should feature, but even the necessary inclusions are pretty loose, such as “pork and/or beef and/or veal” for meat Brät and “typical regional vegetables” for meat-free Brät. It speaks to the way the dumplings developed as subsistence food, used to stretch leftovers and reduce food waste.

Today, Germans throughout the country enjoy Maultaschen in dozens of flavors in all seasons thanks to grocery stores that stock packaged varieties made by companies like Ditzingen-based Bürger, whose mascot, Erwin, is a Maultasche (the singular form of the plural Maultaschen).

But the dumplings remain most popular in southern Germany. Maulbronn Monastery offers a special tour that pairs Maultaschen with wine from the monastery’s vineyards. And many locals, including Nestler’s family, still make them from scratch on special occasions—even during Lent, when meat might otherwise be off the menu. There’s no telling if it’s a fraud good enough to fool God, but it’s worth a shot.

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