Viewpoints – Placecloud (English)

Drawbridge historical United States Located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, Alviso is an old port town with a dried up marina.

Alcatraz United States Alcatraz Island, the notorious prison that once housed 260 federal offenders per year on average, is now visited by over one million people a year. Tourists are permitted to see the main prison areas, however much of the rambling old facility is off-limits.

Hancock historical United States The Alpine Tunnel is an abandoned railway tunnel, east of the old railway and mining town of Pitkin. It was a 1,772 feet long tunnel built for a narrow gauge rail line that ran from Denver to Gunnison.

Yuma United States This 80-mile-long canal brings water from the Colorado River to the citizens and agricultural industry of the Imperial Valley.

North Hero United States This official building is a shared Port of Entry, intentionally built on the boundary, allowing customs and immigrations officers from both countries to work in one structure.

Perea historical United States One of Intel's seven large manufacturing locations in the country, and one of the largest single employers in the state, this plant employs around 6,000 people at its peak, making memory chips for computers.

The Albany Research Center is a US Department of Energy research site with a few dozen buildings, covering 44 acres, near Salem, Oregon’s capital city. The center was founded in 1943 for metallurgical research by the Bureau of Mines, to study strategic mineral processing, including for national defense and, soon thereafter, nuclear weapons. The lab has been involved in a diverse array of innovatio...

Oakland United States The undeveloped Albany Dump peninsula (known as the Bulb) is composed of twisted metal, broken concrete, and other fragments of the urban landscape dumped into the Bay up until 1987. It has become a creative sculpture park and homeless campsite.

Anchorage United States An aviation museum for the state of Alaska, a state where small aircraft and bush piloting is especially important. Located next to the airport at Anchorage.

Oakland United States The U.S. Navy began building the 1,734-acre base on Alameda Island in the late 1930s, and for more than fifty years it was a repair and maintenance facility for Navy aircraft, including carrier-based planes and helicopters.

Crestview United States One of the largest and most diverse public displays of armament and military aircraft in the USA.

Carrollsburg historical United States The Agency for Global Media, which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio y TV Marti), Middle East Broadcasting Networks,  and other official US Government broadcasting entities, has its headquarters in the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building (the former Social Security Administratio...

El Nido Mobile Home Estates historical United States The AES power plant is the only major power plant in Orange County, which otherwise gets its power from outside the county. The plant can generate 450 MW of electricity, and is located in a coastal industrial area in Huntington Beach.

Hyperion historical United States This is a densely developed 41-acre compound near the Los Angeles International Airport, containing 23 office and industrial buildings belonging to the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit corporation formed in 1960, in order to provide missile, satellite, and space systems research and development services to the U.S. Air Force, becoming in effect the engineering a...

Ealing Broadway United Kingdom Once a beacon of London's vibrant dance and music scene, the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, later known simply as the Hammersmith Palais, was a place where generations swayed, rocked, and jived.

Walton Place historical United States The Adelanto Converter Station, located in the desert near Victorville, northeast of Los Angeles, is where the high voltage DC line from the Intermountain Power Plant makes its first stop on the 500 mile journey to Los Angeles from Utah.

Hot Sulphur Springs United States A 13-mile long ten-foot wide water tunnel runs under Rocky Mountain National Park, from one end to the other, crossing 3,700 feet under the Continental Divide. It is the fulcrum of a network of trans-basin, trans-divide reservoirs and pipelines known as the Colorado-Big Thompson project, built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and completed in 1947, at a cost of...

Buffalo United States Nicola Tesla is among the visionaries who conceived of harnessing the falls for electrical production, and the Adams Power Station was the first large-scale electrical generating station in the world to use alternating current, which Tesla had developed and proven as a superior technology to direct current.

Adamsville historical United States Two adjacent ancient houses in Quincy, south of Boston, stand out as anachronistic anomalies, battered and vacant, on a busy street across from a diner and a funeral home. The unoccupied houses, more than 350 years old, were the birthplaces and childhood homes of two presidents, John Adams, president #2, and John Quincy Adams, president #6.

A remote and barren outpost on an island in the middle of the Aleutian Chain, the Naval Air Facility in Adak had a community of 5,000 as recently as a few years ago, until its closure in 1997 as mandated by the Base Realignment and Closure Act.

Grants United States An ancient native pueblo atop tall mesa, Acoma is one of the longest continuously inhabited communities in the country, established over a thousand years ago. Acoma, today, is a most unusual-looking place, with thousand-year old buildings that have been updated with modern improvements, such as doors from Home Depot.

Newcastle United States The Accidental Oil Company operated this oil well attraction in eastern Wyoming starting in 1970. The primary draw was a hand dug 24 foot-deep oil well, an excavated underground cavity that visitors could walk into through a lighted tunnel, and admire from a 58 foot-long viewing gallery.  Topside was a pump with a crank so people could pump oil out by hand. There was also o...

Keith historical United States In 1808, Abraham Lincoln’s father bought a property called Sinking Spring Farm, and built a cabin next to the spring, where his son, Abraham was born a year later. The property is now a National Historical Park with a visitor center about the revered 16th president of the USA.

Blackdom historical United States Possibly the only school constructed entirely underground, simultaneously serving as a fallout shelter. Built in 1962, at the height of Cold War fears. Said to have a capacity of 2,000. An above ground school has been built adjacent to it.

La Cueva historical United States The Abiquiu Reservoir was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1963, primarily for flood control, originally. In the 1970s, with the new water coming into the system from the other side of the Continental Divide through the San Juan-Chama Project, downstream cities, including Albuquerque, successfully petitioned to have more water stored in the reservoir. In th...