A Blast From The Past: Episode 28

From the archives of Amusing Planet.

World's Littlest Skyscraper

Located at 701 LaSalle Street in downtown Wichita Falls, Texas, is the Newby-McMahon Building, a smallish structure 10 feet by 18 feet in area and four-story in height. Since 1920, this Neoclassical style red brick and cast stone building has been referred to as the ‘world’s littlest skyscraper’ –a sobriquet it received from Ripley's Ripley's Believe It or Not! because of the building’s amusing origins.

Lastel, The Corpse Hotel in Japan

At a country where the death rate is 1.6 million per year, death is a booming market in Japan, and one Yokohama businessman named Hisayoshi Teramura is trying to tap into it by offering a hotel exclusively for the dead. Mr Teramura who already has a business of graves and funeral homes opened up this bizarre inn opposite an innocent noodle shop in a Yokohama suburb in 2010.

The Art of Tree Shaping

Tree shaping is the practice of training living trees and woody plants into artistic shapes by carefully orchestrating how the tree and the branches grow. Techniques such as grafting, bending, creasing, framing, weaving, twisting, braiding, pruning and ring barking are employed to archive the unnatural shapes. A unique and distinguishing feature evident in many examples of the work is the purposeful inosculation of living trunks, branches, and roots to form artistic designs or functional structures.

Lena’s Stone Forest

Lena's Pillars, also called Lena’s Stone Forest, is a natural rock formation about 60 km upriver from Yakutsk, in Russia. The amazing stone structures towers over 150 meters in height and extends along the river for about 80km.

Lombard Street–World’s Most Crooked Street?

Lombard Street in San Francisco is best known for the one-way section on Russian Hill between Hyde and Leavenworth Streets, in which the roadway has eight sharp turns (or switchbacks) that have earned the street the distinction of being the most crooked street in the world. The switchback's design was born out of necessity in order to reduce the hill's natural 27% grade, which was too steep for most vehicles to climb. Curiously though, the street is reserved for one-way traffic traveling downhill.

The Disciples: Fans of Rock Concerts by James Mollison

For over three years photographer James Mollison photographed fans outside different concerts. His stunning panoramic portraits of pop concert fans emulating their idols are collected in an addictive volume called ‘The Disciples’. Featured bands and stars include Madonna, Marilyn Manson, 50 Cents, Sex Pistols, Spice Girls, Iron Maiden, Rod Stewart and more. Says James Mollison.

Volker Steger's Photos of Squashed Bugs

German science photographer Volker Steger, in his book BUZZ: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects, published microscopic photographs of insects that crashed into the windshield of his car. He collected the dead bugs from his car’s bonnet and ran them under a scanning electron microscope. Steger actually taped plastic foil to the hood of the car, so that fallen bugs didn’t stick to the hood, and drove his car hitting as many insects as possible.

Massive Wooden Rollercoaster in Abandoned Japanese Amusement Park

In Japan, there are many amusement parks that are lying in the state of neglect; their owners abandoned them because they became too expensive to run and tearing them down would cost them more. In one such park called "Nara Dreamland", located near the ancient city of Nara, is a massive rollercoaster made out of wood. Though significantly out of date by todays’ technical standards, the wooden roller coaster called Aska was one of the key attraction of the park. The park was opened in 1961 and closed in 2006.