Every long-lived city has a back catalog of weird. A 19th-century cemetery that started by accident. A speakeasy carved into sandstone bluffs above the river. A laboratory in South Minneapolis that holds the Guinness record for the quietest room on Earth. A Byzantine chapel modeled on Hagia Sophia, an Indigenous burial complex two and a half millennia old, a bonsai older than the United States. This is the running list. Some require a reservation, some are free, most reward an hour you would not have planned otherwise.
The Guinness record holder for the quietest place on the planet, absorbing 99.99 percent of sound. Visitors in the chamber report hearing their own blood moving and joints clicking. The longest anyone has lasted alone in the dark inside it is around 45 minutes.
Read full entry →A speakeasy and supper club carved directly into the sandstone bluffs along the Mississippi, still pocked with bullet holes from an unsolved 1930s gangland hit. Thursday-night swing dancing with a live big band.
Read full entry →The Sunday VIP tour goes past the velvet ropes through three levels of the great domed cathedral on the hill, including spaces normally closed to the public.
Read full entry →Thirty-six thousand square feet of red sandstone built in 1891 by the railroad baron who connected St. Paul to Seattle. The original art gallery, the pipe organ, and the family quarters are all intact and tourable.
Read full entry →A scaled-down Washington Monument with an open-air walkway on the 30th floor and a small museum about Wilbur Foshay, the financier who lost the building in the 1929 crash a month after opening it. The bottom-up view of the IDS through the gap is unique to this perch.
Read full entry →A grassy riverbank below the Washington Avenue Bridge where about a thousand Czech, Slovak, and Scandinavian millworkers built a stilt-house village in the 1880s before the city evicted them for a barge terminal in 1931. Almost nothing visible remains, which is part of the point.
Read full entry →The exposed foundations and tailrace canals of the flour mills that made Minneapolis the milling capital of the world from 1880 to 1930. Buried under a parking lot for decades, dug back out in the 1990s as a park you can walk through.
Read full entry →Minnesota's first cable-stayed suspension bridge, a single pylon leaning at seventy degrees over Hiawatha Avenue. Carries only bikes and pedestrians on the Midtown Greenway. Striking from below, calmer than it should be from on top.
Read full entry →Over a hundred trees in the Ordway galleries adjacent to the main glasshouse, including one specimen over 450 years old. The largest public bonsai collection in the upper Midwest.
Read full entry →A bronze cast of Mary Richards flinging her tam in the air, standing on the corner where the opening credits were filmed in 1970. Touching the hat for luck is local protocol.
Read full entry →Twenty-seven acres of headstones holding around 27,000 burials, including freed slaves, Civil War veterans, and the Layman family who founded it by accident when they buried a son on their farm. Closed to new burials since 1919.
Read full entry →A 1910 domed chapel lined with ten million hand-cut tesserae of marble, gold, and silver, modeled on Hagia Sophia. Frequently called the finest Byzantine mosaic interior in the country, and it is on Hennepin Avenue.
Read full entry →A working freight elevator that climbs through eight floors of the ruined Washburn A Mill, each level staged with the sounds, machinery, and smells of 1910 flour production. The museum itself is built inside the mill ruin, glass roof open to the sky.
Read full entry →Bob McCoy's old Museum of Questionable Medical Devices lives on inside the Science Museum as a permanent exhibit. A phrenology head reader, an Orgone Accumulator, the Kellogg Vibratory Chair, and other contraptions sold as medicine for a century.
Read full entry →A German beer hall in the basement of the State Capitol with 29 painted German mottoes, repainted over during World War I anti-German hysteria, then uncovered in the 1990s with scalpels and tweezers. The cafe operates only during legislative sessions; the room is always there to see.
Read full entry →A 24-by-9-foot mural built from over 600,000 glowing plastic Lite-Brite pegs by hundreds of volunteers. Holds the Guinness record. Hanging permanently in the Union Depot concourse, where almost nobody looks up.
Read full entry →Six Dakota burial mounds on a limestone bluff over the Mississippi. The only mounds remaining inside the Twin Cities urban core. The oldest were constructed around 2,500 years ago. The park has been renamed and reinterpreted with Dakota community leadership over the past decade.
Read full entry →If we missed your spot, tell us. Your pick joins a running tally of reader recommendations. We read every submission and work the strongest ones into the list. We do not publish your name or email.