The web’s favourite catalog of bizarre locations rewrites historical past

Written by Ben Smith
Samir S. Patel discovered us a parking spot on Madison Avenue and 103rd Street earlier than it began raining final Wednesday, and led me underneath scaffolding into the grand foyer of the New York Academy of Medicine. There, a librarian, happy to be giving her first tour in additional than a yr, took us down a protracted hallway right into a room lined with uncommon books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that she opened to indicate eerie anatomical renderings of people with out their pores and skin.
The librarian, Arlene Shaner, had left a small field sitting on the desk, and opened it final. Inside was a jaw and a few enamel — decrease jaw dentures that had as soon as belonged to President George Washington. His dentist had proudly inscribed on the gumline, “This was Great Washington’s teeth.”
The go to to a little-known and macabre piece of historical past may be very a lot within the spirit of Atlas Obscura, the 11-year-old web site the place Patel is the editorial director. But he was additionally there to level out one thing else about Washington’s dentures: They embody six actual enamel, which can have been bought from poor New Yorkers or taken from individuals Washington held in slavery. That element provides a layer of darkness to what would in any other case be a mere historic curiosity.
Patel, a trim, bearded science journalist, and his crew have simply accomplished the primary stage of what Atlas Obscura calls its “decolonization project” — a assessment of among the 20,000 entries from a database, compiled by its neighborhood and workers, of curious locations world wide in gentle of the final yr’s shift in how Americans view their historical past. The crew has now woven the Sioux perspective into an outline of a battle in Colorado within the “Indian Wars” and explored the twentieth century particulars of inhumane therapy on the type of eerie deserted psychological hospitals that appeal to curious guests.
Samir Patel of Atlas Obscura, on the primary cease of a tour of locations off the overwhelmed observe, on the Most Holy Trinity Cemetery in Brooklyn, May 26, 2021. (Benjamin Norman/The New York Times)
“There’s an entire hidden history that underlies the world that we don’t get told about when we travel,” he mentioned.
There’s plenty of discuss within the media about wrestling with questions of race and energy and perspective at a second of shifting cultural and political values. Academic jargon like “decolonization” typically will get thrown round in that context.
In journey writing, it’s a bit extra literal. The entire style has at the least a few of its origins in nineteenth century gentleman explorers in pith helmets gawking at Indigenous individuals. Atlas Obscura itself attracts half-seriously on a European historical past that predates even pith helmets. It’s centered on an obscure seventeenth century German Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher, whom Joshua Foer, one among Atlas Obscura’s founders, reveres for his sense of surprise on the world. Foer as soon as wrote a weblog referred to as The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society and met his co-founder, Dylan Thuras, on the first and solely assembly of that society.
When the pandemic hit final spring, Atlas Obscura had simply obtained a $20 million funding from a gaggle of traders led by Airbnb. Atlas Obscura, on the time, was targeted on constructing the “experience” aspect of its enterprise — guided excursions and lessons — which it anticipated to snap into the enormous dwelling rental platform. (The New York Times can also be an investor in Atlas Obscura.) But Airbnb gave up on the initiative because it scrambled to climate the disaster. And like the remainder of journey media, Atlas Obscura has spent a yr principally catering to the fantasies of homebound vacationers. That led, the corporate says, to document site visitors and promoting income, in addition to a brand new enterprise in on-line lessons.
Samir Patel of Atlas Obscura, on a tour of locations off the overwhelmed observe, with the librarian Arlene Shaner in a room lined with uncommon books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the New York Academy of Medicine in Manhattan, May 26, 2021.(Benjamin Norman/The New York Times)
Now, the journey media and the journey trade are bracing — and hoping — for a surge of tourism. Though few within the journey media have taken on reediting of their product like Atlas Obscura, they’re additionally attempting to adapt to a modified political scenario, looking for to search out nonwhite writers who dwell within the locations they write about, or to have extra numerous American writers inform the tales of locations. Jacqueline Gifford, the editor-in-chief of Travel and Leisure, mentioned the journey media was attempting to ask itself, “Who gets to tell travel stories, why they’re telling them, and what’s the way we can be more representative of this country, of the world we’re living in today?”
But there are additionally built-in limits to how a lot you may revolutionize journey writing, mentioned Rafat Ali, the founding father of the journey enterprise website Skift.
“It’s always going to be outsiders looking in,” he mentioned.
The problem for editors and writers throughout media is the way to make journalism inclusive in addition to riveting and provocative, relatively than only a company media train in box-checking. (One high newspaper editor described that style to me final week as “DEI dutiful,” referring to range, fairness and inclusion initiatives.)
It shouldn’t be that tough. Complicated, shocking tales are sometimes one of the best ones, as illustrated by the very good “Reckoning With a Reckoning” situation that Adrienne Green, the options editor at New York journal, put collectively final week. It sought, because the journal’s editor-in-chief, David Haskell, wrote in an e mail, “to clarify stakes and also complicate them, to tell morality tales but avoid easy morals.”

Atlas Obscura, which additionally publishes magaziney options just like the disturbing story of how a Black girl’s stays wound up on show at a Philadelphia museum and the key queer historical past of Colonial Williamsburg, is one other good instance of how a writer can meet the second by deepening its content material with an inquiry into, particularly, the violence Americans typically select to overlook.
Indeed, Patel informed me he’s undecided “decolonizing” was the appropriate phrase for the undertaking. “Decolonization suggests removal, and that’s not what we’re doing,” he mentioned Wednesday morning, as we started our tour of surprising New York websites on the sting of the Bushwick part of Brooklyn. “Adding this kind of perspective to travel and travel writing makes it less boring.”
Then he referred to as a Times photographer to substantiate our vacation spot, “at a dead end that leads to something weird.” (He wouldn’t say something about our locations prematurely, in step with the Atlas Obscura vibe.)
We turned previous a genial group of individuals seated on folding chairs in the midst of Central Avenue, underneath a haze of marijuana smoke, and right into a sprawling cemetery the place German and Czech Catholics are buried underneath hole steel tombstones, a classically morbid Atlas Obscura website, earlier than pulling out for the lengthy drive to the Upper East Side.
After considering George Washington’s dentures and the opposite treasures of the New York Academy of Medicine, we headed to the northern tip of Manhattan, the place Patel parked his blue Nissan by Inwood Hill Park and emerged right into a thunderstorm.
“I didn’t think the rock was this far into the park,” he mentioned, furrowing his forehead on the map on a beta model of Atlas Obscura’s app, as we trudged previous a dozen males enjoying soccer within the rain.
A couple of minutes later, we had been standing in entrance of an enormous rock whose plaque gives the pat and acquainted story about how Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan for the Dutch from its Native American inhabitants in trade for some glass beads.
This spring, Atlas Obscura added to its personal write-up, explaining what historians now consider the inhabitants thought they had been doing: buying and selling a nonexclusive proper to make use of the land, not promoting it. There had been, it notes dryly, “differing concepts of ownership” between the Lenape and the Dutch.
“The classic story is that it was bought for a handful of trinkets,” Patel mentioned, “but I think this is more interesting.”