The United States is home to a diverse range of cities, each with its own unique history, quirks and character. You may think you know some of them pretty well, but we’ve unearthed a trove of lesser-known tidbits that reveal the hidden stories of America’s urban landscape. From unusual laws and unexpected origins, to world-beating phenomena and eccentric attractions, even lifelong residents might be surprised to learn these fascinating facts.

Click through the gallery to discover tremendous trivia about 25 American cities you thought you knew everything about...

Long before harsh gusts rolling in off Lake Michigan earned Chicago its famous moniker, there was no ‘Windy City’ rising up from this shoreline. The area was originally inhabited by Native American Algonquin tribes, including the Miami and Illinois peoples, who used the word ‘shikaakwa’ in their language. The term could be applied to two equally pungent natural stenches, the ‘striped skunk’ and ‘garlic’.

Wild garlic and other alliums grew abundantly in the forests here, and French explorers then derived the word ‘Chicagou’ from ‘shikaakwa’ to speak of the settlement. The first known reference appeared in a 17th-century memoir of the explorer and fur trader Robert de La Salle.

Known as the ‘Mother of Miami’, Julia Tuttle is widely celebrated as the sole female founder of a major American city. Originally from Ohio, she fell in love with the Biscayne Bay area following visits to her parents, who had a homestead in Lemon City.

When her father passed away in 1891, Tuttle – then a widow – used part of her family’s estate to purchase 640 acres of land on which the Magic City now stands. She was instrumental in bringing the railroad to Miami and was the driving force behind its incorporation as a new city. Pictured here is the Julia Tuttle Causeway across Biscayne Bay.

You’d hopefully have more common sense (and higher standards) than to go around LA attempting to tongue the resident wildlife, but let it be known that licking toads in the City of Angels is a genuine criminal offence. The law came into effect after scientists discovered that some California toad species, including the Sonoran Desert toad, could secrete a hallucinogenic toxin through their skin which, when ingested, could make a person high (not to mention seriously ill).

The National Park Service (NPS) has, on several occasions, had to warn visitors against the dangers of toad-licking.

With the peach being Georgia’s official fruit, you can expect to see plenty of nods to this in the state capital of Atlanta – from shops selling peach preserve to peach-picking farms in the wider area. But what’s most surprising is the sheer volume of streets in the city that have some variation of ‘peach tree’ or ‘peachtree’ in their name.

According to the Atlanta History Center, there are 71 of them. One of the very first to be named Peachtree predates the city of Atlanta itself and followed a trail trodden by the Indigenous Muscogee peoples, who settled at the confluence of Peachtree Creek and the Chattahoochee River.

Beneath the streets of Detroit, there’s a whole other city hiding; a subterranean kingdom hundreds of millions of years in the making. The Detroit salt mine (pictured) lies some 1,200 feet (36m) below ground, spans more than 1,500 acres and contains prehistoric salt deposits even older than the dinosaurs.

During the Devonian Period, around 400 million years ago, ancient seas poured into the Michigan Basin and gradually evaporated, leaving behind miles of salt beds. Today, the mine exclusively extracts crystals used for deicing roads. Due to safety regulations, public tours aren’t currently offered.

According to New York State’s Office of Language Access, more than 800 languages are spoken across the Big Apple’s five boroughs. And there’s no place in the world where you can hear a greater variety of mother tongues than in Queens, which has been called the global capital of linguistic diversity.

Thanks to its long history of immigration, the New York metro area is home to almost 20 million people. Besides English, some of the languages most widely used by New Yorkers are Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Mandarin, Korean, Urdu and Polish, while more uncommon ones include Chavacano, Waray-Waray, Minangkabau and Bukharian.

Did you know Philly was just one giant canvas? There are over 4,300 striking pieces of street art decorating the walls, buildings and public spaces here. The Mural Arts Philadelphia initiative started as an anti-graffiti project in 1984 but has today grown into the largest public art programme in the US, commissioning up to 100 murals each year and empowering communities through creative expression.

Vibrant scenes celebrate everything from Ballroom culture, civil rights and hip-hop to education and the city’s Chinese diaspora (pictured).

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In the early morning of 18 March 1990, Boston’s Isabella Gardner Museum (pictured) was ransacked by a pair of cunning conmen. After successfully outsmarting and incapacitating the on-duty security guards, the robbers – disguised as police officers – stole 13 priceless artworks from the museum’s collection, including paintings and drawings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet.

It remains the single largest property theft in the world and still no one knows who pulled it off. A substantial reward is on the cards for information directly leading to the safe recovery of the missing items.

Flanked by swaying palms, ‘Iolani Palace is the only royal palace on US soil and was the official residence of the last two ruling monarchs of the Kingdom of Hawai’i – King Kalakaua and his sister and successor Queen Lili'uokalani. Having been completed in 1882, it was only used as a royal home for 11 years before the fall of the independent kingdom and the collapse of the monarchy in 1893.

Following an attempt to restore Queen Lili'uokalani to the throne, she was held on house arrest in ‘Iolani Palace for nine months. The building is now a museum, having ceased to be the state capitol in 1969.

The St Louis No. 1 Cemetery is the oldest extant cemetery in NOLA. Here you’ll find several prominent tombs, including what’s believed to be the final resting place of voodoo queen Marie Laveau, as well as this unusual pyramid-shaped mausoleum belonging to the famously eccentric actor Nicolas Cage.

No, you haven’t missed anything – Cage is very much still alive and kicking. He purchased the plot in 2010 but has chosen not to reveal his reasoning for such a striking grave site. The only inscription on the pyramid at the moment is the Latin phrase ‘Omnia Ab Uno’, meaning ‘everything from one’.

While many American cities have their own Chinatown neighbourhood, there are only three historic Japantowns in the country – and they’re all in California. The largest and oldest of these can be found in San Francisco, where visitors can taste exciting and authentic cuisine (there’s more to Japanese food than sushi and ramen), meet the custodians of traditional crafts and attend special events like taiko drum performances.

But SF’s Japantown is more than a mere tourist attraction, it’s an important community and cultural hub dating back to the arrival of the West Coast’s first Japanese immigrants in the mid-19th century.

While travelling in Germany in 1959, Seattle hotel executive and chief organiser of the 1962 World’s Fair, Edward E. Carlson, was struck by a sudden flash of inspiration. After seeing the Fernsehturm in Stuttgart, a telecommunications tower with a panoramic restaurant at the top, he wanted a similarly dominant structure to be the face of the fair in his home city.

Grabbing a napkin from a hotel café, he sketched his early vision for the Space Needle, convinced that it could one day become a permanent Seattle symbol. His dream subsequently came true, and the Space Needle has now commanded the city skyline for over 60 years.

The museums and monuments of DC’s National Mall are as recognisably American as the Star-Spangled Banner. But beneath this sprawling public park is a clandestine passageway few are aware exists, linking the Smithsonian Institution Building (often referred to as The Castle) with the American Museum of Natural History.

While this might call to mind images of espionage and adventure, the function of the off-limits tunnel is actually much less thrilling – it allows the two buildings to share a boiler. According to a Smithsonian representative, the path of the pipes can be traced above ground in the winter, as their warmth melts the snow on the Mall.  

It’s obligatory when visiting Sin City to snap a photo of this emblematic sign. But we’re sorry to break it to you – you’ve been lied to all your life, because the iconic placard isn’t actually in Las Vegas at all. It lies four miles (6km) outside the city limits, in the unincorporated Clark County township of Paradise.

The same can be said for most of the Las Vegas Strip, which also falls in Paradise. This is because early casino owners could avoid paying taxes to the City of Las Vegas by building their dens of vice outside the city proper, so created Paradise in order to swerve the red tape.

Check out these incredible vintage photos of Las Vegas

 

It’s no secret that Memphis is a city with music built into its bones, but the extent to which the city has inspired singers and songwriters through the decades is nothing short of astonishing.

The Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum has been keeping a list since 2008 of recordings where ‘Memphis’ is included in the song lyrics or titles. It currently features over 1,000 commercially recorded songs and over 800 unique titles, allegedly making Memphis the most musical city in the world.

Snow is incredibly rare in the desert city of Phoenix, but did you know just how rare? In the recorded history of the Arizonan capital, an inch (2.5cm) of the white stuff has only fallen on two occasions – in January 1933 and January 1937.

As reported in the Phoenix New Times, the city has only received a measurable amount of snow once in the last quarter of a century. From 21 to 22 December 1990, 0.4 inches (1cm) of snow was recorded.

With no roads connecting Juneau to the rest of Alaska or mainland North America, the only way in or out is by air or water. The remote state capital sits along the Alaskan panhandle on the Gastineau Channel, surrounded by dramatic peaks and dense forests.

With capricious glaciers and icefields the size of Rhode Island rendering any overland link to Juneau impossible, visitors will just have to embrace the expeditionary nature of getting here for the foreseeable future. Besides, the city’s isolation and unspoilt scenery is all part of what makes it worth the journey.

The last location you’d expect to find the world’s quietest place is in the middle of a heaving metropolis, but it’s all there in the Guinness World Records. Inside the Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, an anechoic test chamber specifically designed to suppress sound measured an ambient sound level of -24.9 decibels on 19 November 2021.

Those that have entered the pin-drop silent room, with its thick fibreglass acoustic wedges and reinforced steel and concrete walls, describe being able to hear their blood pumping around their body and even the clicking of their blinking eyelids. 

In the midst of the Cold War, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s only daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva defected from her motherland and settled in the US. She met and married an American architect and the two had a daughter. Born Olga Evans, Stalin’s granddaughter now goes by the name of Chrese, practises Buddhism and cooks borscht at home in Portland, Oregon – a far more palatable symbol of her heritage than the dictator’s legacy.

After turning down a job working for the International Revenue Service (IRS), Evans opened her own antiques shop in the city and lives the kind of free-spirited lifestyle her dedushka would have despised.

The most populous city in South Carolina was a hotspot for pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries, including notorious marauders Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach, better remembered by history as Blackbeard. In 1718, Blackbeard’s campaign of crime along the Eastern Seaboard led him to blockade Charleston Harbor, but not for gold and jewels as you’d typically expect.

After shutting down the city and taking several hostages, he demanded a chest of medicine. Why? Because his crew was riddled with venereal disease, most likely syphilis. The governor quickly obliged and Blackbeard’s ship sailed off into the distance.

The charming city of Alliance in Ohio is located about an hour’s drive from Cleveland and boasts the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of Troll dolls. Specifically, it’s the Troll Hole Museum that holds the accolade, where thousands of Trolls in various guises cover every wall and surface available.

The attraction’s Troll Hall of Fame features celebrities and other public figures reimagined as the bug-eyed, vibrant-haired toy creatures, while the Troll Cave allows visitors to step into a life-sized rendering of a whimsical Troll home.

It’s the American city that causes the most confusion – after all, why is there another place called Kansas City in a state that isn’t Kansas? Maybe we’ll explain that one another time. But it all could have been so much simpler if Kansas City, Missouri had been named differently, and it nearly was.

Owing to two furry animals the locals loved to barbecue at the time, Kansas City could have been called ‘Possum Trot’ or ‘Rabbitsville’ in 1853. We think Possum Trot definitely has a ring to it.

Things you’d expect to find in Denver might include mile-high altitude, craft breweries and the largest airport on the continent. But of all the things you probably wouldn’t anticipate, we’d wager fragments of the Greenlandic and Antarctic ice sheets didn’t even cross your mind.

Housed within the Denver Federal Center, the National Ice Core Laboratory stores miles of samples from the world’s last surviving ice sheets in a very, very chilly environment, maintained at -36°C (-32.8°F). By studying the ice cores, researchers can piece together information about the planet’s climate history.

The United States has a litany of weird and wonderful laws waiting to catch people out. It’s not entirely clear why, but those who happen to be carrying a violin through the streets of Salt Lake City would be breaking the law if it was in a paper bag. Aside from it being illegal, it also sounds like a downright inconvenient way of transporting your musical instrument, so we’d love to know what must have occurred in order for the mind-boggling legislation to be written in the first place.

In the cracks and gaps in the concrete holding up the road deck of Austin’s Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge (pictured), lives a thriving community of Mexican free-tailed bats. Each summer, the migratory creatures make their home underneath the bridge over Lady Bird Lake and perform captivating aerial displays for onlookers as the sun goes down.

Listed by the Guinness World Records as the largest urban bat colony on the planet, between 750,000 and 1.5 million individuals are thought to reside here from mid-March to as late as mid-October. 

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