Weird & unusual things to do in New York City
The genuinely offbeat side of New York City: 74 hand-vetted hidden spots — oddity shops, hidden bars, haunted history, sound baths, weird outdoor finds — built for an unusual date night, a weird afternoon, or showing a visitor a side of the city they'd never find alone. Like Enchantments, Flower Power Herbs & Roots, Original Products Botanica. Local secrets even locals miss — you didn't hear it from us.
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Enchantments
Opened in 1982, Enchantments is New York City's oldest occult store and a working witch shop, not a costume-a…
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Flower Power Herbs & Roots
This tiny apothecary has been run since 1993 by resident green witch Lata Chettri-Kennedy, an herbalist and a…
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Original Products Botanica
Established in 1959 (with roots going back to a 1930s Spanish Harlem shop), this is the largest botanica in t…
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Maha Rose Center for Healing
Maha Rose is a working healing center founded by acupuncturist and reiki master Lisa Levine that runs sound b…
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Morbid Anatomy
The cult-favorite Morbid Anatomy lives on inside Industry City as a library, oddities shop, and exhibition sp…
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Gothic Renaissance
Open since 1999, Gothic Renaissance is one of the last brick-and-mortar goth and alternative-fashion boutique…
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Merchant's House Museum
A Federal-style 1832 row house preserved with the Tredwell family's original furniture, clothing, and even Ge…
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Green-Wood Cemetery Catacombs (After Hours Tour)
A 478-acre Victorian garden cemetery and National Historic Landmark where roughly 600,000 people are buried b…
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Morris-Jumel Mansion
Built in 1765, this is the oldest surviving house in Manhattan, used by George Washington as a Revolutionary…
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McSorley's Old Ale House
New York's oldest Irish saloon, pouring since 1854 and a men-only bar until a lawsuit forced it to admit wome…
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Conference House (Billopp Manor)
A stone manor built around 1680 by Captain Christopher Billopp at the southern tip of Staten Island, overlook…
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Sleepy Hollow Cemetery & Old Dutch Church
The 90-acre cemetery and the adjacent circa-1685 Old Dutch Church burying ground are the real-world settings…
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House of Wax Bar
Tucked past the ticket booth of the Alamo Drafthouse, this dim bar is built around more than 100 antique anat…
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Creel and Gow
Set in the former stables of a historic Grosvenor Atterbury townhouse near Lexington and 70th, this luxe cabi…
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The City Reliquary
A nonprofit community museum crammed with the small civic relics of New York City: terracotta shards of landm…
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Requiem Oddities
Established in 2012, Requiem is a morbid curiosity dealer specializing in the macabre and the unusual, from t…
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The Oddities Flea Market (NYC)
A once-a-year market that gathers dozens of vendors selling osteological specimens, taxidermy, wet specimens,…
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Mmuseumm
Housed in a former freight elevator shaft barely the size of a closet, this is one of the smallest museums on…
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John M. Mossman Lock Collection
Tucked on the second floor of the historic General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, this is one of the wor…
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The Museum of Interesting Things
Filmmaker and photo restorer Denny Daniel runs this hands-on traveling collection of antique inventions and o…
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Derfner Judaica Museum
An unexpectedly serene little museum set inside a senior residence on a Hudson River bluff, presenting perman…
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Dream House
Above composer La Monte Young's loft, a single room has hummed continuously since 1993: a 32-tone sine-wave d…
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The New York Earth Room
Behind an unmarked SoHo door and up a flight of stairs sits Walter De Maria's 1977 installation: a pristine w…
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Susan Gardner's Mosaic House
Artist Susan Gardner began gluing objects to the facade of her 1860s brownstone as a therapeutic project afte…
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Jim Power's Mosaic Trail
Since 1985 the self-styled Mosaic Man, Jim Power, has wrapped East Village lampposts in tiled mosaics celebra…
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Mercer Labs Museum of Art and Technology
Built into part of the former Century 21 building downtown, Mercer Labs is a 36,000-square-foot, multi-level…
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Storm King Art Center
Storm King spreads more than 100 monumental sculptures across 500 acres of fields, hills and woods in the Hud…
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The Sisyphus Stones
Albanian-born artist Uliks Gryka has been stacking shards of glittering Manhattan schist into precarious, hum…
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Jim Power's East Village Mosaic Trail
Vietnam veteran Jim Power, dubbed 'the Mosaic Man' by the Village Voice in 1988, has spent nearly four decade…
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Spot (the Dalmatian and Taxi)
A four-story fiberglass Dalmatian balances a real, motor-stripped yellow-cab Prius on the tip of its nose out…
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Life Underground (Tom Otterness)
More than 130 cartoonish little bronze figures by Tom Otterness are scattered across this subway station, lur…
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Civic Virtue ('Fat Boy')
This 17-foot MacMonnies marble group shows a heroic nude man, sword over his shoulder, standing atop two writ…
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Socrates Sculpture Park
Sculptor Mark di Suvero founded this waterfront park in 1986 on a former illegal dumpsite and landfill juttin…
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Nitro Girl (Werbany Tire Town)
An 18-foot fiberglass giantess has loomed over Werbany Tire Town since 1965, bought by founder Ed Werbany Sr.…
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Untermyer Gardens (Walled Persian Garden & Vista)
A Gilded Age industrialist's obsession survives behind a high stone wall: a quadrilateral Indo-Persian charba…
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Septuagesimo Uno
Often called NYC's smallest park, this 0.04-acre sliver squeezes between two townhouses on West 71st Street.…
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The Elevated Acre
Nearly an acre of lawn, gardens, and a tiered wooden amphitheater hidden 30 feet above the street, reached by…
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Hua Mei Bird Garden
At the northern part of Sara D. Roosevelt Park, a community garden hosts a decades-old morning ritual: Chines…
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Renwick Smallpox Hospital Ruin
NYC's only landmarked ruin: a Gothic Revival stone hospital designed in 1856 by James Renwick Jr. (architect…
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Staten Island Boat Graveyard (Witte Marine Scrapyard)
In the Arthur Kill waterway sits a marine scrapyard where the rusting hulks of tugboats, ferries, and cargo s…
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Attaboy
There is no sign and no menu. You ring the buzzer at an unmarked metal door with a small "AB" where a peephol…
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Apothéke
Tucked on the crook of Doyers Street, the city's old "Bloody Angle," this bar is styled after a 19th-century…
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The Back Room
You enter through a gate marked for the "Lower East Side Toy Company," walk down an alley, and climb a flight…
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Please Don't Tell (PDT)
To get in you walk into Crif Dogs, a grungy hot dog joint, step into a vintage wooden phone booth, and pick u…
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Patent Pending
By day the storefront is Patent Coffee, an ordinary espresso bar; after 5pm a door behind the menu-board wall…
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Mace
Founded by globe-trotting bartender Nico de Soto, Mace builds every signature cocktail around a single handpi…
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The Office of Mr. Moto
This unmarked storefront hides a Victorian-era mailbox with a pin pad; reservation holders receive a cipher l…
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Brooklyn Glass — One Day Neon Workshop
Brooklyn Glass is a working neon shop with an on-site supply warehouse, not a craft-mall pop-up, and the one-…
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Gotham Taxidermy
Award-winning licensed taxidermist Divya Anantharaman teaches small, hands-on classes in a private Brooklyn s…
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Craftsman Ave — Knife Forging
Tucked inside Industry City, this beginner-friendly forge hands you a propane forge and a hammer and has you…
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The Arm Letterpress
The Arm is a real working letterpress shop that also restores Vandercook proof presses and trades in vintage…
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New York Wedding Ring (Sam Abbay)
Master goldsmith Sam Abbay runs day-long, one-on-one workshops where couples actually fabricate their own wed…
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Olfactory NYC — Make Your Own Perfume
At Olfactory NYC you build a custom fragrance by picking one of nine core scents and layering in accords unti…
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UrbanGlass
UrbanGlass is one of the country's oldest and largest open-access glass studios, a nonprofit where you can ta…
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Sunshine Laundromat & Pinball
From the street this is a fully functioning laundromat, rows of washers and dryers and all. At the back, a br…
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Wonderville
An indie-arcade bar that ditches the usual Pac-Man cabinets for roughly thirty homemade games built by local…
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The Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club
A 17,000-square-foot vintage-Florida fever dream on the edge of the Gowanus Canal, with ten regulation shuffl…
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The Gutter
A vintage eight-lane bowling alley and bar in Williamsburg, with original 1970s-era lanes kept on manual scor…
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Barcade (Williamsburg)
The original arcade bar that coined the format, open since 2004 and still running its cabinets on quarters (o…
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Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center
A scrappy Mott Street arcade open since 1944 that was once famous for a live tic-tac-toe-playing chicken and…
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Second Sundays Stargazing at Pioneer Works
On the second Sunday of each month, this former ironworks turned art-and-science center throws open all three…
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Stargazing on the High Line
Every Tuesday from spring into late October, members of the Amateur Astronomers Association set up high-power…
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Nitehawk Cinema (Williamsburg)
A dine-in repertory theater where servers slip food and cocktails to your seat in the dark while the film rol…
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Manhattan Kayak Neon Night Paddle
From a boathouse pier that juts nearly a quarter-mile into the Hudson opposite the Intrepid, this 30-year-old…
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Custer Institute & Observatory
Long Island's oldest public observatory, founded in 1927 and run by volunteers, opens its doors every Saturda…
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Warwick Drive-In Theatre
A family-run triple-screen drive-in spread over 11 acres of farmland, showing first-run double features under…
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Astronomy Live at the Hayden Planetarium
Inside the Hayden Planetarium's domed Space Theater, Museum astrophysicists run Astronomy Live: live, interac…
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Taconic Sculpture Park
Self-taught sculptor Roy Kanwit spent some 40 years populating his hillside yard with more than 30 figures fr…
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Opus 40
Sculptor Harvey Fite spent 37 years single-handedly fitting thousands of bluestone pieces into a sprawling si…
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World's Largest Kaleidoscope
Built inside a 56-foot former grain silo at the Emerson Resort, this is certified as the world's largest kale…
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Secret Caverns
This limestone cave is famous less for geology than for its gleefully deranged hand-painted folk-art billboar…
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Wing's Castle
Artists Peter and Toni Wing began hand-building this stone castle in 1970 out of roughly 85% salvaged materia…
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The Cardiff Giant
This ten-foot 'petrified man' was secretly carved from gypsum, buried on a Cardiff, NY farm in 1868, and 'dis…
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The Big Duck
This 20-foot ferrocement building shaped like a giant white Pekin duck was built in 1931 by a duck farmer to…
Unusual things to do in New York City — FAQ
What are some unusual things to do in New York City?
74 hand-vetted weird spots — like Enchantments, Flower Power Herbs & Roots, Original Products Botanica — plus oddity shops, hidden bars, haunted history, sound baths, and offbeat outdoor finds. Every one is real and sourced, not a top-ten landmark.
Where can you go for a weird date night in New York City?
Try Enchantments, Flower Power Herbs & Roots, Original Products Botanica — strange-but-real spots that make a memorable date. Filter by neighborhood, vibe, or how far you'll drive: in town, nearby, or a day trip.
What's a weird thing to do in New York City tonight or this weekend?
For tonight, filter to "in town" and low-key picks; for the weekend, the day-trip ring opens up genuinely strange spots a short drive out. Start with Enchantments, Flower Power Herbs & Roots, Original Products Botanica — and sort by how far you're willing to go.
Are there free or cheap weird things to do in New York City?
Yes — 37 New York City spots are free or low-cost, like The City Reliquary, Mmuseumm, John M. Mossman Lock Collection. Roadside oddities, public art, and outdoor curiosities usually cost nothing.
How is this different from the usual New York City tourist lists?
We skip the landmarks everyone knows. An agentic research system digs up the genuinely hidden, offbeat spots — the local secrets even locals miss — and verifies each against real sources before it makes the list.