22 Stairways That Lead Nowhere

22 Stairways That Lead Nowhere


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.


Photo: zappowbang


University of Cincinnati


Photo: srecd


Ocean stairs, San Sebastian, Spain.


Photo: Lauren Manning


Center of the World, Felicity, California (staircase salvaged from the Eiffel Tower in 1989).


Photo: Mike Towber


Knaresborough, Yorkshire.


Photo: SFB579 🙂


One of the famous stairs of Malta.


Photo: Mads Johansen


Galveston, Texas.


Photo: moleratsgotnofur


Waiting in Whitby, Great Britain.


Photo: gregwake


Wooden staircase of Tors Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.


Photo: ffreshness


Ancient stairs carved into rock. Petra, Jordan.


Photo: Neil and Kathy Carey


Leicester, Great Britain.


Photo: karlos of syston


Stairway on a house. Offenbach Marktplatz, Frankfurt, Germany.


Photo: vollefolklore


Alcatraz, San Francisco.


Photo: aquababe


Floating stairway over the Hudson River, New York.


Photo: twinxamot


Staircase of a demolished house. Looks like a dinosaur. Columbus, Ohio, US.


Photo: mikelietz


An old brewhouse, Philadelphia, US.


Photo: fish2000


Boston, Massachusetts, US.


Photo: Andrea Schwartz


Stairs on the bank of the River Danube. Budapest, Hungary.


Photo: Attila Nagy/Gizmodo


Michel De Broin’s mind bending sculpture: ‘Révolutions’. Parc Maisonneuve-Cartier, Montreal, Canada.


Photo: Evelyne Awaad/art_inthecity


Staircase sculpture at the KPMG Building in Munich, by Olafur Eliasson, entitled ‘Rewriting’.


Photo: Alaskan Dude


‘Winding stairs’ monument by Rudi van de Winton, dedicated to those who lost their lives in a 1977 air disaster. Tenerife, Spain.


Photo: Arturo Rodriguez/AP


‘Crouching Tiger and Turtle, Magic Mountain’, by sculptors Ulrich Genth and Heike Mutter in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.


Photo: Funny-Leo


Did we miss your favourite stairway? Post it in the comments!


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.