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Quirky Little Museums, Offbeat Destinations, and Sights Less Seen

Arctish

Arctish

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We've all seen and heard about the great destinations like the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Field Museum in Chicago, the cable cars in San Francisco, etc. This thread is for sharing the cute, the weird, and the fun little destinations most people haven't heard about.

So let me tell you a bit about the Hammer Museum.

Not the one in Los Angeles full of art. The one in Haines, Alaska, full of hammers!

hammer museum.png

Smithsonian Magazine called it "the World’s First Hammer Museum". It used to be the largest but then a Lithuanian guy who also really liked hammers visited the one in Haines and then opened his own museum with a slightly larger collection.

It has a wide range of hammers on display, from surgeon's tools, to big sledgehammers for driving railroad spikes, to little bamboo hammers for tapping on martini glasses in lieu of applause in hoity-toity nightclubs. It has specialty hammers displayed with the patent applications that describe their purpose. There is a lot to see even though the museum itself is pretty small.

hammer museum 2.png

If you're ever in Haines, check it out!
 
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When I was in San Francisco I intended to go to the Print Museum but the airline lost my luggage and I spent the 2 days trying to get it back and then to replace my clothing. ( Not their fault, entirely. HA had bushfire related concerns at the time.)

If anyone ever gets there, please clue me in.
 
bilby said:
While we were in Tasmania last year, we visited the Pooseum in Richmond.

It is exactly what its name suggests. And surprisingly fascinating.
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Curious to know what makes it "unsuitable for younger children." I reckon most kids are aware of the existence of poo.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Sex

We visited the Museum of Sex many years ago on one of our many side trips to NYC, when we visited my parents in NJ.

The Museum of Sex, also known as MoSex, is a sex museum dedicated to preserving and presenting the history, evolution, and cultural significance of human sexuality. The museum focuses on a variety of sexual preferences and subcultures, including lesbian and gayhistory and erotica, BDSM, pornography, and sex work. Due to explicit content in its educational exhibits, visitors must be at least 18 years old. Despite initial controversy from religious groups and rejection for non-profit status by the New York State Board of Regents, the museum has operated without significant opposition since opening and has hosted interfaith events exploring sexuality and religion.

Located at 233 Fifth Avenue at the corner of East 27th Street in Manhattan, New York City, the museum opened on October 5, 2002, founded by Daniel Gluck. In 2024, the museum expanded with a second location in Miami, Florida.
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Next up: a great little place in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where a natural wonder (Hot Springs Mountain) brought together the rich, the powerful, the criminal, and baseball.

The Gangster Museum of America tells the tale of the town of Hot Springs, where on one side of a creek stood elegant bathhouses catering to the wealthy, the other side featured gambling dens, swanky bars and gin joints (Prohibition was very good for business), dance halls, brothels, etc., and the outskirts featured Spring training for several professional baseball teams, all overseen by two very powerful and well connected bosses who guaranteed the peace and security for visitors like Al Capone and Meyer Lansky, and brokered deals between crime families.

As visitors move from gallery to gallery, a museum tour guide dressed in a flashy version of 1940s style clothes narrates the story. The plain facts are wild enough, but the addition of the catch phrase "Folks here in Arkansas are really good at not noticing things" at some of the more eyebrow lifting parts of the story makes it especially fun.

And, of course, if you're in Hot Springs, Arkansas, visit the bathhouses. I highly recommend the Buckstaff. They use the original equipment to give visitors the Gilded Age experience.
 
The Olneyville New York System is a small family owned restaurant that serves New York System hot wieners.

I don't really know why they're called New York System, especially since they're a Rhode Island specialty, but I know from personal experience that

1) they're delicious, and

2) if you call them hot dogs you will be gently corrected by the staff who will remind you that what they serve are wieners.

I had mine with coffee milk.
 
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I'd also like to plug The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester NY.
They award an annual 'Toy Hall Of Fame'.
Quirky but not so little anymore. It's grown a lot since I was there.
www.museumofplay.org

Homepage - The Strong National Museum of Play

The Strong is a highly interactive, collections-based museum devoted to the history and exploration of play.
www.museumofplay.org
 
If you're traveling in southwest Idaho you can visit the Idaho Potato Museum , about 25 miles north of Pocatello in the town of Blackfoot.

The museum is located in an old railroad depot built in 1912-1913. It's set up so that visitors first learn about potato cultivation by the Inca and their legend of a Potato God who taught them how to safely eat the tubers. Then visitors learn about Idaho history, the first families that farmed potatoes there, and modern methods of growing, harvesting, and storing the crop. The museum has displays of farm and kitchen equipment designed for potatoes, a couple of potato related videos, and more potato-y things than you might think someone could fit into a fairly small building.

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The building also houses the Potato Station Cafe in the old baggage area, where they serve "bakers" (baked Russets potatoes) with the topping of the day. They had just run out of the broccoli and cheese topping when I was there so I got one with the next day's topping, chili. They also serve a few other potato based items like potato bread and potato chips dipped in chocolate.

It's a fun little place for a museum trip and lunch.
 
Correction: The Potato Museum is in Southeast Idaho. I don't know why I mixed that up.
 
About 45 miles away from the Potato Museum in a flat and empty part of Idaho near Craters of the Moon National Park is a small blocky brick building housing EBR-1, the world's first successful breeder reactor and also the first reactor to produce usable amounts of electricity. It is now a National Historic Landmark and a museum run by the U.S. Dept. of Energy.


Ebr-1.zdv.jpg

The equipment inside is state-of-the-art 1950's technology, which makes it look like the set of an old sci-fi movie.

EBR-1 Reactor.jpg

idaho-experimental-breeder-reactor-no-1-ebr-1-worlds-first-nuclear-F6D3F1.jpg
The history of the place (including a partial core meltdown!) is really interesting. It's well worth a side trip to see it.
 
Arctish said:
About 45 miles away from the Potato Museum in a flat and empty part of Idaho near Craters of the Moon National Park is a small blocky brick building housing EBR-1, the world's first successful breeder reactor and also the first reactor to produce usable amounts of electricity. It is now a National Historic Landmark and a museum run by the U.S. Dept. of Energy.


View attachment 53620

The equipment inside is state-of-the-art 1950's technology, which makes it look like the set of an old sci-fi movie.

View attachment 53622

View attachment 53621
The history of the place (including a partial core meltdown!) is really interesting. It's well worth a side trip to see it.
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I visited the Calder Hall Magnox reactors back in the '80s; They were the first nuclear power generating plants in the UK, and the first industrial scale nuclear power plant in the world; They opened in 1956, and even in the '80s had a really dated sci-fi feel, like a set from the original Mission: Impossible or the very earliest Doctor Who episodes.

Designed with a lifespan of twenty years, they closed in 2003, after 47 years of operation. A plan to turn them into a museum was abandoned in 2007, citing high costs, and much of the site, including the cooling towers, has now sadly been demolished and removed.
 
A little less than an hour's drive west of Colorado Springs, CO, and just past the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is the Florissant Fossil Quarry, a privately owned quarry where visitors can hunt for fossils in the mudstone and shale deposits.

Florissant fossils are from the Eocene epoch and include beautifully preserved insects, leaves, and flowers. It's finders keepers at the quarry unless you find something really unusual, in which case the quarry owners will turn it over to researchers at the National Monument. I suppose you get listed as the person who discovered it.

Anyway, it's fun to be a fossil hunter in the Colorado Rockies for a few hours.
 
There's a little town in the California desert west of Death Valley called Lone Pine. You might not have heard of it, but you've probably seen it, or the nearby hills, hundreds of times.

It's where the Lone Ranger rode Silver at a full gallop while the William Tell Overture played, where Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sang Happy Trails, where John Wayne and Randolph Scott fought bandits and desperados, where the Cisco Kid and Hopalong Cassidy righted wrongs and charmed ladies, where British troops fought Thugs and where the Light Brigade charged, where Val and Earl became heroes by running really fast and saving their neighbors from graboids (Burt and Heather helped a lot), and where Tony Stark blew shit up.

There is a neat little museum there, the Museum of Western Film History, that documents the town's history in the movie business. It has a pretty cool collection of movie props and other memorabilia, too.

Worth a visit if you're in the area.
 
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