39 Peculiar Facts About US Cities You Probably Didn’t Know – Part 3

The Oakland Buddha was placed by a resident on a street corner to prevent illegal dumping, the statue has now become a shrine for the local Vietnamese population who leave offerings and have even built a shelter for the Buddha. Crime in the area also dropped 82%.

27. Philadelphia leads the nation in sweatpants purchases per capita.

28. The quietest place on Earth is in a small studio named Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At -13 dBA it’s so quiet you can hear the internal workings of your body.

29. There is a radio station in New Orleans for the blind. Volunteers every day read the local newspaper on the air, along best-sellers, grocery ads, stories for kids, mysteries, the Wall Street Journal, young adult novels and much more.

30. Based on the landmarks in the training scene of Rocky II, Rocky ran 30.61 miles before jumping around with a bunch of kids at the top of the stairs at The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Archbishop of New Orleans ruled that Alligator meat is classified as fish, so Catholics can eat it on Fridays during Lent.

32. The first ever aerial photograph of an American city is of Boston in 1860. The photo, made from a hot air balloon, is titled: “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It.”

33. Los Angeles was hit with a devastating and deadly series of intentionally set fires in the 1980s and 90s. They finally arrested the arsonist who turned out to be the Arson Inspector charged with investigating the fires.

34. 94% of people who live in Minneapolis are within a 10 minute walk to a park.

35. The infamous Great Seattle Fire of 1889 also killed 1 million rats, which completely eliminated the town’s major rodent problem.

In the mid-1990s homeless children in Miami developed a vast, elaborate, and consistent mythology that spread by oral tradition throughout the community as a coping mechanism.

37. In 1964 white business leaders in Atlanta refused to buy tickets to an event honoring recent Nobel Prize winner Martin Luther King. Coca-Cola recognized the potential PR disaster and threatened to leave the city unless people attended. The event sold out the next day.

38. Because of the number of low-hanging power lines in San Francisco, the city's fire department still uses handmade wooden ladders, made by on-staff master ladder makers.

39. In 1886 workers in Chicago went on general strike to rally for an 8-hour day. Later, it became International Workers' Day celebrated worldwide, except in the USA.