Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Giant objects, odd monuments and things built for no clear reason.
Fall River, MA
A 60-foot replica of the famous city gates of Ponta Delgada in the Azores rises beside Fall River's waterfront. The monument honors the city's large Portuguese and Azorean community and looks startlingly monumental beside modern streets.
Medford, MA
A monument at Tufts University recalls eccentric businessman Roger Babson's Gravity Research Foundation, established partly from his desire to understand — and potentially defeat — gravity. Babson funded anti-gravity research monuments on college campuses across the country after blaming gravity for a family drowning.
Carlisle, MA
At a working dairy farm inside Great Brook Farm State Park, cows can use an automated robotic milking system largely on their own schedule. Visitors can see modern dairy technology operating inside a historic New England farm landscape; barn access and demonstrations vary by season and program.
North Adams, MA
More than 200 wildly unconventional instruments at MASS MoCA include a nine-foot banjo, aircraft-fuselage drums and giant sound towers. Visitors are encouraged to play many of them, fulfilling artist Gunnar Schonbeck's belief that everyone can make music.
Gloucester, MA
Inventor John Hays Hammond Jr. built a medieval-style seaside castle as his home, laboratory and showcase for antiquities. The eccentric structure mixes genuine old architectural fragments with twentieth-century technology, and current programming even explores Hammond's experiments involving parapsychology and Spiritualism.
North Adams, MA
Resonating tubes mounted beneath a highway overpass transform traffic vibration into a low, continuous musical drone. Instead of hiding road noise, artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger turned the bridge itself into a massive instrument.
Boston, MA
Painted marks across Harvard Bridge measure its length in 'smoots,' a unit created in 1958 by repeatedly laying MIT pledge Oliver Smoot end to end. The final measurement — 364.4 smoots plus one ear — became a lasting engineering-school joke.
Salem, MA
A Salem yard is crowded with creatures assembled from discarded metal, tools and machine parts. The handmade figures sit near the ferry route and turn a residential property into an evolving outsider-art menagerie. View respectfully from public space unless invited closer.
Marblehead, MA
A 1920 stone castle inspired by Viking-era Greenland hides in Marblehead, complete with turrets and Gothic windows. Legends mention secret stairs and buried treasure, though those stories are unproven. The property has operated as lodging and is not a free-roaming public ruin.
Lynn, MA
A stone observatory tower rises high above Lynn from a hill long associated with astronomy and nineteenth-century Spiritualist experiments. The exterior grounds are accessible, while interior observatory access depends on scheduled public programs.
Boston, MA
A 40-foot wooden milk bottle stands beside the Boston Children's Museum. Originally constructed in 1930 as a novelty ice-cream stand, it was later moved to Boston by ferry and remains one of the city's clearest examples of giant-object roadside architecture.
Boston, MA
A professor secretly installed a U-shaped, two-backed bench beside Jamaica Pond as a guerrilla-art prank. Parks officials removed it, reconsidered, and ultimately allowed the strange seat to return, transforming unauthorized furniture into permanent public art.
Edgartown, MA
The small bridge between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs became famous through Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws.' Fans still recognize it as the location of a shark-attack sequence, making an otherwise ordinary Martha's Vineyard bridge a horror-film pilgrimage stop.
Medford, MA
A bronze Jumbo stands on the Tufts University campus honoring the enormous circus elephant that became the school's mascot. After Jumbo died in an 1885 train collision, P.T. Barnum donated his hide to Tufts; the original specimen was destroyed by fire in 1975, leaving the statue as the campus's most visible elephant memorial.
Boston, MA
A roughly 40-foot statue of Mary stands on a globe above East Boston, created in the 1950s by the Don Orione religious order. The oversized shrine is an unexpected landmark near Logan Airport and includes additional devotional spaces and religious objects.
Provincetown, MA
A giant shark sculpture near Herring Cove Beach is assembled from plastic debris collected from beaches. Nicknamed Mama Shug, the creature turns marine trash into an oversized predator while making the scale of ocean pollution impossible to ignore.
Boston, MA
A three-story stained-glass globe built in 1935 lets visitors walk through the center of a frozen-in-time world map. Because the political boundaries were never updated, countries such as Siam and the Soviet Union remain on the glass, while the sphere's acoustics create a dramatic whispering-gallery effect.
Needham, MA
A tiny railroad junction complete with miniature signs appears along a wooded trail, built around a small-scale railway installation. The unexpected infrastructure feels like stumbling across a functioning transportation system for woodland creatures.
Beverly, MA
Inside a Beverly artisan shop is an elaborate black dollhouse populated by taxidermied mice dressed as horror and pop-culture characters. Residents have included miniature versions of Lizzie Borden, Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill, and the tiny cast changes as individual pieces are sold.
Milford, MA
A tall pink-granite tower modeled after medieval Irish round towers rises unexpectedly from St. Mary's Cemetery. Built as a memorial to local Irish immigrants, it gives the cemetery the silhouette of an ancient monastic site transplanted into Massachusetts.
Cambridge, MA
A narrow Central Square passage has become a constantly changing legal graffiti gallery. One wall is regularly repainted by street artists, turning the alley into an artwork that may look completely different every time OddWay sends someone through.
Montague, MA
A used-book store fills a nineteenth-century gristmill beside the rushing Sawmill River. Its famously fatalistic slogan — 'Books you don't need in a place you can't find' — fits the maze of shelves, old machinery and riverside rooms.
Adams, MA
Massachusetts' highest summit is crowned by a 93-foot granite war memorial tower shaped like an austere lighthouse. The beacon and mountaintop setting make it look almost otherworldly above the Berkshires. Summit-road access is seasonal, while hiking access depends on current trail and weather conditions.
Somerville, MA
Two artists transformed a former Masonic hall into a floor-to-ceiling 'Temple of Art' covered with mythological figures, geometric patterns and intensely colored murals. Public access is event-based or arranged rather than conventional daily museum hours.
