Pickman's Secret Studio, Boston

A working studio Pickman kept apart from his respectable Back Bay address, chosen for a Colonial-era well in the cellar that connects, by his own account, to an older network of tunnels under the neighborhood. What used that well as a way in is the reason the studio's location stays deliberately vague.

Whereabouts: A condemned house in Boston's North End, rented under an assumed name and reachable only through an unmarked tangle of alleys off the old waterfront.

Access: By elevated train to Battery Street, then on foot through alleys deliberately too obscure to retrace — Thurber, the only outside visitor on record, admits he couldn't find the place again if he tried.