5 Crazy Secrets Of Famous Places Around The World

This gave Cassiday an idea to set up his own little operation, and soon enough, he was running a bootlegging business from a basement office situated in the Old House Office Building. And business was good. According to Cassiday, he would open up shop in the morning and make upwards of 25 deliveries a day to the drunkenest, hypocriticalist politicians on the Hill, hiding the bottles in a leather briefcase that never left his side.

Cassiday was never given any problems by security, despite arriving for "work" every morning pulling two suitcases containing "35 to 40 quarts" of the hard stuff -- that is, until 1925, when he was busted for possession of alcohol and banned from the House. His newfound notoriety, however, meant that he immediately found work as bootlegger-in-chief for the Senate. One senator, Cassiday later recalled, would come to refer to him as "the librarian" -- a nickname borne from the fact that this particular senator hid his liquor on the top of a bookshelf. ("He never mentioned liquor to me, but occasionally he would say he could use some 'new reading matter.'")

Cassiday worked diligently in this role until 1930, when he was nabbed and jailed for 18 months. In an interview with The Washington Post, he estimated that he'd catered to 80 percent of the members of the House and Senate, although he never named names. Well, kinda. He kept a client list (as all good criminals do), but this was never made public (despite having been confiscated by the feds upon his arrest), and following his death in 1967, it was incinerated by his wife. Unless she was releasing the trapped souls of alcoholic political ghosts, that seems a tad like overkill to us.

You'd be wrong, though. In 1812, a campaign began among the state legislators to tear down the place and turn it into real estate lots for the benefit of would-be gentrifiers and whomever the old-timey equivalent of Starbucks was. (The bottom of Boston Harbor?)

It wasn't like these guys had a raging hard-on for pissing off Ben Franklin or anything. Understand that before Independence Hall became Independence Hall, it was nothing but a run-of-the-mill statehouse ... or rather, a run-of-the-mill abandoned statehouse. By 1812, the state legislature had moved a couple of miles down the road to Harrisburg, meaning that the old statehouse was playing host to rats and hobo orgies. It had a neat claim to fame, sure, but arguing for its continued upkeep on these grounds (especially considering the post-Revolutionary-War economy being what it was) is like if the local high school argued that no one could tear down their decrepit gym because McGruff the Crime Dog once gave a speech there.

And they would've gotten away with too, if it wasn't for the city's municipal leaders. After plans to raze the site went public, these 1800s Leslie Knopes retorted that not only was the site unsuitable for development, but also that its value to the public outweighed any financial value, and so they offered to buy it for $70,000. The state passed on this kind offer and responded with their own: $150,000 or go scratch.

After a long, protracted legal battle between the state (which represented Big Bulldozer) and city (which represented Big Civic Pride), the city eventually won, and in 1818 it took possession of the building as a place for the people to treasure, and later for despondent Phillies fans to grief-vomit cheesesteak all over.

From the 1700s onward, it was common for tourists visiting Stonehenge to hack off pieces of the stones. The strangest part, though? This was totally supported by the site's owners, to the point where they'd hand out chisels to any scatterbrained visitors who forgot theirs. Although the smash-happy vandals were frequently the target of vicious op-eds in The Times (which, by law, is the only way through which British people are allowed to drag each other), it wasn't until 1900 that the landowner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, worried about the possibility of the stones collapsing, introduced a visitor's charge, and banned people from taking home pieces of the stones.

Related: 6 Easter Eggs You Didn't Know Are Hidden In Famous Landmarks

OK, and now for the sad part. After the wall came down, the rabbit population of the death strip wasn't used to dealing with people and noise and bustle again, and so they froze up ... forever. As Bartosz Konopka, a filmmaker who produced a documentary about the colony tells it: "It was such a stress. They'd go through one street, look for the nearest bush and stay there. But they were so frightened that they stayed there for many days and died from hunger. It was such a stress that they wouldn't think about what to eat. They'd just stand in one position and die."

The rabbits weren't forgotten, however. In 1999, a local artist, Karla Sachse, unveiled Kaninchenfeld (basically "rabbit field"), an art project that resulted in dozens of brass rabbit-shaped plaques being installed into the pavement near where a checkpoint once stood, in honor of the rabbits who "were observed and loved by the people of both sides."

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