There is something weird and mysterious about stairways that don’t go anywhere, and yet they’re surprisingly common: inside and outside old buildings, among demolished walls, in big cities and small villages or in artists’ imaginations. They get your mind going, spurring you to imagine secret places and invisible doors. Try climbing the next one you encounter, or just imagine climbing these.
Green stairs to nowhere, University of Vermont campus.
University of Cincinnati
Ocean stairs, San Sebastian, Spain.
Center of the World, Felicity, California (staircase salvaged from the Eiffel Tower in 1989).
Knaresborough, Yorkshire.
One of the famous stairs of Malta.
Galveston, Texas.
Waiting in Whitby, Great Britain.
Wooden staircase of Tors Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
Ancient stairs carved into rock. Petra, Jordan.
Leicester, Great Britain.
Stairway on a house. Offenbach Marktplatz, Frankfurt, Germany.
Alcatraz, San Francisco.
Floating stairway over the Hudson River, New York.
Staircase of a demolished house. Looks like a dinosaur. Columbus, Ohio, US.
An old brewhouse, Philadelphia, US.
Boston, Massachusetts, US.
Stairs on the bank of the River Danube. Budapest, Hungary.
Michel De Broin’s mind bending sculpture: ‘Révolutions’. Parc Maisonneuve-Cartier, Montreal, Canada.
Staircase sculpture at the KPMG Building in Munich, by Olafur Eliasson, entitled ‘Rewriting’.
‘Winding stairs’ monument by Rudi van de Winton, dedicated to those who lost their lives in a 1977 air disaster. Tenerife, Spain.
‘Crouching Tiger and Turtle, Magic Mountain’, by sculptors Ulrich Genth and Heike Mutter in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
Did we miss your favourite stairway? Post it in the comments!
Did we miss your favourite stairway?
WAT
Almost all of those have reasonable histories explaining where they once run (or at the very least, plausible reasoning).
This is pure awesome. I love weird unexplainable stuff like this.
"Access restricted until further notice." - I lolled.
Stairs on the bank of the River Danube. Budapest, Hungary. - This made my skin crawl
the stairs in san sebastian and budapest aren't going nowhere. they are going to the water. for swimming in san seb, and for boat access in budapest.
All of the water steps led to the water for boat access! Not exactly nowhere...
The stairs in San Sebastian lead around the rocks and allow the hordes of retirees to walk the full length of the beach every day.
http://maps.google.com.au/?ll=43.315676,-1.997857&spn=0.001162,0.002064&t=h&z=20
What no Stairway to Heaven joke? How disappointing.
Because, that's a stairway to somewhere
Well if you believe in heaven, I guess so.