The House With No Story
Atlas Obscura CEO Louise Story didn't have a plan in Bloomington. She just had the app, her kids, and an open afternoon — and ended up somewhere she never expected. We picked Bloomington because of friends. A couple we'd been close with in New York moved there four years ago when she got a professorship at IU. We wanted to see them. They didn't have an agenda for the day, so I pulled up the Atlas Obscura app and suggested two places: the Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection and the Captain Janeway statue. They'd never heard of either. Four years in Bloomington, and they didn't know their town held more than 30,000 antique puzzles or a bronze monument to a starship captain who won't be born for another three centuries. At Slocum, my kids worked through nearly every puzzle on display in the room—wooden geometries, trick boxes, ancient sliding-tile puzzles. My husband, the family brainiac, g
