Holdout House

New York, New York

In the mid-1980s, a property developer couldn't get Jean Herman to move out of her rent-controlled walk-up apartment. So the developer shaved away all but her apartment and the front door of her former brownstone, leaving a runt-sized old building fused to a modern office tower. Every exterior surface of the Holdout House was painted the same drab gray as the skyscraper, trying to make it less visible.

Jean Herman died in 1992, but her house still stands, jutting out of the side of 750 Lexington Ave. It looks like a fake building, designed to hide a water tank or electrical substation, but it isn't.