In Louisville, Kentucky, it is illegal to drive a pig through the streets, unless the animal is in a vehicle.
There is a house in Rockport Massachusetts, built entirely of newspaper. The Paper House at Pigeon Cove, as it is called, is made of 215 thicknesses of newspaper.
Throughout its history, the White House has been known as the "President's Palace," the "President's House," and the "Executive Mansion." President Theodore Roosevelt officially gave the White House its current name in 1901.
Today, the New York Public Library is visited and used annually by more than 10 million people. There are currently 2.35 million cardholders, more than for any other library system in the nation.
Tourists are being invited in to visit the horrific Kresty prison in Russia (for a steep price — 6.25 pounds per person). The prison is currently operating on a meager budget of 14 pence a day for each inmate's diet of pearl barley soup. Although the space was designed in Tsarist Russia to handle 2,000 prisoners, it now holds more than 10,000.
In the original architectural design, the French Cathedral of Chartes had six spires. (It was built with two spires).
It takes an average person 15 to 20 minutes to walk once around the Pentagon.
It took 214 crates to transport the Statue of Liberty from France to New York in 1885.
It would take 11 Empire State Buildings, stacked one on top of the other, to measure the Gulf of Mexico at its deepest point.
King George III bought Buckingham House in 1761 for his wife Queen Charlotte to use as a comfortable family home close to St. James's Palace, where many court functions were held. Buckingham House became known as the "Queen's House," and 14 of George's 15 children were born there. In 1762, work began on remodeling the house to the King’s requirements, to designs by Sir William Chambers at a cost of £73,000. Buckingham House later became Buckingham Palace, the official London residence of Britain's sovereigns, in 1837. Queen Victoria was the first British monarch to take up residence in Buckingham Palace.
London's Millennium Dome, the largest of its kind in the world, is over one kilometer in circumference and covers over 80,000 square meters.
Mann's Chinese Theater is Hollywood's most celebrated and visited landmark, and was declared a historic-cultural monument by the city of Los Angeles in 1968. Prestigious for actors and film industry members to be chosen to immortalize their hand and footprints in cement in front of the palacial theater; thousands of tourists visit the site annually.
Mansard, gambrel, hip, gable, and lean-to are types of roofs on buildings.
Many of the Vatican’s museums were never intended to be museums at all, but were designed instead as unique apartments or residences. As a result, visitors must work their way through the numerous blind passages and bottlenecks that contain many of the most beautiful works housed in the museums.
More than 5,600 men died while building the Panama Canal. Today, it takes more than 8,000 workers to run and maintain the canal. It takes a ship an average of 33 hours to travel the length of the canal.
Tucked into a limestone recess high above the Verde Valley of Arizona stands Montezuma's Castle, one of the best preserved and most easily accessible cliff ruins in all of North America. This five-story, twenty-room cliff dwelling served as a "high-rise apartment building" for prehistoric Sinagua Indians more than 600 years ago. Early settlers assumed that the imposing structure was connected to the Aztec emperor Montezuma, but this "castle" was abandoned almost a century before Montezuma was born.
Twice the size of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, the Pentagon has three times the floor space of the Empire State Building in New York. It is one of the world's largest office buildings.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was named one of the "Seven Wonders of the Modern World" by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1994, along with the Hoover Dam, Interstate Highway System, Kennedy Space Center, Panama Canal, Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and World Trade Center.
Until recent times, Eskimos built their snow houses not only as permanent dwellings but also as temporary shelters for use on long hunting trips. Often, igloos were occupied for just one night and then abandoned. An experienced builder could make an igloo large enough to shelter two people in under an hour. One important problem an igloo builder faces is finding enough of the right kind of snow. It must be firm, compact, and not too icy. Ideally, it should be produced by a single storm, as snow that has fallen on separate occasions does not hold together well. Lighting a fire inside an igloo may seem foolhardy. But rather than melting the building, the heat from a small fire or seal-oil lamp actually strengthens and insulates the structure.
The golden mosaic ceiling inside the main entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum is one of the museum's most magnificent features. The ceiling is made from cut squares of imported Venetian glass. Its sparkling gold, rust, and bronze background is inset with red, blue, and turquoise patterns, similar to the colorful mosaics of the Byzantine world and Eastern Europe. Worked out on the golden field are geometrical borders and panels. These frame decorative floral designs and sixteen pictorial images symbolizing different historical cultures.
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