A weekly roundup of curious corners of the internet has turned up several stories worth a traveller's attention — from the workshop behind every New York street sign to a 1950s French barge on the market in Avignon.

The standout for design lovers: the Maspeth Central Shop in Queens, where nearly all of New York City's street signs are made. Part of the city's Department of Transportation, the shop cuts, prints and assembles more than 70,000 municipal signs a year — everything from street-cleaning placards to the big green highway markers. A staff of 46 keeps over a million signs in working order across the five boroughs, including seven letterers who still lay out signs by hand and a blacksmith who fabricates custom mounting brackets. When a stop sign gets damaged or a street gets renamed, this is where the replacement is born. It's a reminder that the city's visual identity is made by hand, in a Queens industrial building, right now.

Also in New York: the city maintains an interactive tree map that has catalogued roughly 890,000 trees street by street. If you've ever wondered why a particular block in Brooklyn or the Upper West Side smells extraordinary in May, you can now trace it to the exact linden or cherry responsible — a free tool that doubles as a self-guided walking-tour planner.

Elsewhere, a renovation story out of a 1930s Spanish Revival home reveals a hidden speakeasy tucked inside the house, restored and photographed in full. And history buffs get two treats: the tale of Victor Hugo writing Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831 explicitly to save the cathedral from demolition — worth remembering as the restored Paris landmark draws fresh crowds — plus the story of Charles Hatfield, the American "rainmaker" hired by San Diego in 1915 to fill the Morena reservoir. He apparently did his job rather too well, triggering one of the city's worst floods; the council refused to pay him and he took his secret chemical formula to the grave in 1958.

For anyone with real estate daydreams, a 1950s French péniche — a converted cargo barge — is listed for sale moored on the Rhône in Avignon, complete with a pool, at an asking price of €330,000 through specialist agent Patrice Besse. It's the kind of listing that turns a fantasy of living on the water into an actual price tag.

Why it matters: these are the small, odd, hyperlocal details that make trips richer. Whether it's appreciating the hand-lettered craft behind an NYC sign, plotting a walk around the city's tree map, factoring the Notre-Dame backstory into a Paris visit, or seriously eyeing that Avignon barge, each of these finds adds a layer to a destination you won't get from a guidebook.

First reported in Messy Nessy Chic's regular "Things I Found on the Internet" column.