Weird outdoor & roadside things to do in New York City
Looking for weird outdoor & roadside oddities in New York City? These 15 are the genuinely strange ones — Dream House, Jim Power's Mosaic Trail, Storm King Art Center and more — each hand-vetted and sourced, not pulled from a top-ten list. Great for an unusual date, a weird afternoon, or showing a visitor the side of New York City they'd never find on their own.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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…