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.
North Adams, MA
A natural white-marble arch spans a rushing brook inside the remains of an old marble quarry. The unusual combination of natural bridge, carved marble gorge and industrial quarry history makes this one of western Massachusetts' strongest geology stops.
Cambridge, MA
Metal Necco wafers appear to spill from a crumpled candy bag onto a boulder near the site of the former New England Confectionery Company factory. The tiny sculpture preserves a candy-making history that once filled this part of Cambridge with sugar and peppermint smells.
Leverett, MA
A gleaming white Buddhist peace pagoda rises from rural western Massachusetts, one of the first structures of its kind built in the United States. The grounds include shrines, gardens and spaces intended for quiet reflection.
Boston, MA
Actual knives and forks are embedded in sidewalks outside Italian food businesses in Boston's North End. The easy-to-miss cutlery reflects an old visual tradition of identifying food shops and rewards travelers who remember to look down.
Cambridge, MA
After a neighboring landowner reportedly refused to buy his narrow parcel, Francis O'Reilly built an eight-foot-wide building on it in 1908 simply to make use of the strip and spite the neighbor. The tiny structure still stands and remains occupied, so it should be viewed only from the public sidewalk.
Springfield, MA
A 15-foot wooden head carved by Peter Wolf Toth stands at the Route 5 entrance to Forest Park. It belongs to Toth's nationwide 'Whispering Giants' series and is dedicated to Indigenous peoples of the Pioneer Valley.
Newbury, MA
An isolated pink house stands in the salt marsh beside the Plum Island Turnpike, surrounded by decades of local stories about divorce, spite and why anyone would build there. The property has faced repeated preservation and demolition controversies; view only from legal public areas and never enter the house.
Greenfield, MA
A stone observation tower crowns Rocky Mountain above Greenfield. Its name recalls nineteenth-century writers who gathered on the hill, while the current tower gives the wooded summit the look of a miniature medieval fortification.
Lincoln, MA
A mysterious herd of rocking horses, hobby horses and plastic ponies gathers in a roadside field and continually changes as strangers add, remove and rearrange animals. The privately owned field has become an evolving folk-art installation with no formal curator.
Cambridge, MA
A miniature painted door at the base of a tree on Harvard's campus has long been treated as the home of Winnie-the-Pooh. The tiny installation has been repaired and recreated over the years, turning an ordinary stump into a persistent campus folk-art landmark.
Boston, MA
A stack of stone potato sacks marks the site of Charlestown's old railroad potato sheds, destroyed by fire in 1962. The deliberately mundane sculpture memorializes a vanished industrial landscape with one of Boston's strangest monuments.
Sutton, MA
A half-mile ravine slices through enormous blocks of granite, creating narrow passages, caves and overhangs with names that sound straight out of folklore. Glacial meltwater formed the chasm thousands of years ago; trail access can be restricted during hazardous winter conditions.
Boston, MA
A tiny brass plaque on Anderson Memorial Bridge commemorates the fictional suicide of William Faulkner character Quentin Compson as if he were a real person. Literature has been quietly inserted into Boston's physical landscape.
Fitchburg, MA
When quarrying threatened a 110-ton glacial boulder beloved by Fitchburg residents, workers blasted it into pieces, hauled those pieces downtown and painstakingly reassembled the rock on a traffic island. The resulting landmark is both an Ice Age remnant and a giant stone puzzle.
Mattapoisett, MA
A towering blue-green seahorse survives from a 1950s roadside gift shop and now stands preserved in a small public park. Salty is pure mid-century roadside advertising: oversized, cheerful and completely unrelated in scale to the animal it represents.
Tyringham, MA
A storybook estate in the Berkshires includes a dramatically curved shingle-roofed structure commonly called the Gingerbread House. Sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson reshaped the property into an architectural fantasy that looks closer to a fairy-tale illustration than a conventional New England home. Access is limited to current events, rentals or authorized visits.
Dennis, MA
A 30-foot cobblestone observation tower rises on Scargo Hill above Cape Cod. The present tower dates to 1901 and replaced two earlier structures, giving visitors a castle-like viewpoint over Scargo Lake and, on clear days, Cape Cod Bay.
Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA
Under the right dry conditions, shuffling across this beach produces a distinct squeak or 'singing' sound as similarly sized sand grains rub together. Summer parking and access are tightly controlled, so check current municipal rules before routing here.
Boston, MA
Boston's famously narrow 'spite house' squeezes into a tiny North End lot. Local tradition says one brother built it to block another brother's view after a property dispute, although details of the story vary. It remains a private residence.
Lynnfield, MA
A large skull face peers from an exposed rock wall beside the road. The painted or carved-looking feature has become a local visual landmark that makes an otherwise ordinary stretch of stone suddenly resemble a giant human head.
Bellingham, MA
A large Mr. Potato Head styled as a construction worker stands outside Hilltop Farms only a short distance from Rhode Island. The metal 'Spud of Steel' is one of the few publicly displayed Potato Head statues surviving outside the toy's home state.
Salem, MA
A remarkably old First Period house dating to the seventeenth century now operates as an inn and tour location. Its uneven rooms, massive fireplaces and centuries of alterations provide a much more intimate experience of old Salem than a reconstructed attraction.
Brookline, MA
A convincing Dutch Renaissance-style building sits among Brookline homes because it was originally constructed as a cocoa-company pavilion for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, then moved east. It remains private property and should be viewed only from public space.
Somerville, MA
A shop devoted almost entirely to fungi sells unusual edible mushrooms, cultivation kits, tinctures, books and mushroom-themed objects. It functions as a small mycological gallery and community hub for people fascinated by the hidden world of fungi.
