Do you remember when a safari theme park went fully feral?
Cars are, basically, under siege.
Like, that's the thrill.
They actually put this right in their logo.
Could you believe that the atomic bomb
was once a major tourist attraction?
They will literally sell you a ticket
to as close to that explosion
as the army will let you get.
Do you remember back when a barrel
was considered a safety device?
Come and watch these people
take their lives into their own hands
and catapult themselves over the falls.
Police do get called, but it's really just to make sure,
"Does everyone have a good view?"
These are the things we used to do,
for fun, for money, or maybe out of boredom,
that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous?
Certainly.
Deadly?
Occasionally.
But boy,
wasn't it exciting?
When I was little,
I used to love to go to the Central Park Zoo,
and one of the highlights was the pony ride.
Well, you might be surprised to learn
that a century ago in Los Angeles,
kids had the chance to ride an animal
that was far more exotic.
In the early 1900s, there are these three forms
of public attractions that are becoming huge:
zoos, circuses, and amusement parks.
People are lining up like crazy for them.
That's when a man named Hubert Campbell
decides that he can get rich
by combining all three into one attraction.
Hubert Campbell is a man on a mission.
He wants a visitor attraction
that has the feel of a nature preserve,
sort of an interactive zoo, and he hits on it.
He's gonna open an alligator park.
This guy's an out-there character.
He used to perform in the
"Buffalo Bill Wild West" show.
He has a lifelong passion for large reptiles,
and he's even earned the nickname Alligator Joe.
So he gets a business partner named Francis Earnest,
and together they decide to bring
alligators to Southern California.
They start the Los Angeles Alligator Farm.
Admission is a quarter, and for that low price,
visitors enter a world of reptilian wonder.
This is not some little sideshow attraction
where there's one alligator or two or even 20.
This is Alligator Nation.
They bring in 1,000 alligators
who just roam freely through this barely contained park
in the center of a residential L.A. neighborhood.
It's like Jurassic Park with worse fences.
Now, contrary to what you might be thinking,
gators are not super trainable,
but somehow Alligator Joe
works his Alligator Joe magic,
and he has them doing little tricks and stunts,
including going down water slides.
Which is pretty remarkable
when you think some of these alligators
are, like, 15 feet long.
They even have shows where you can watch
some of their trainers wrestling with the alligators.
You put that on a billboard,
yeah, that's gonna get people to come.
The farm even lets you handle baby alligators.
This is where Joe is really onto something.
He's creating his own lane, and people love it.
Families can just mingle with the animals,
pose freely with no barriers between them
and one of nature's most efficient, ruthless,
and deadly predators.
Parents are placing toddlers on alligators for photo ops,
and other kids are riding them.
As a kid, I would love to see the alligators,
but I really would like a fence.
The gift shop even sells baby alligators
to take home.
They tell parents,
"Don't worry, when they get too big
or bitey, you can come back
and trade them in for a smaller one."
It's unreal to imagine.
Normally, when you go to the zoo,
you might get a stuffed animal as a souvenir
to remind you of the animals that you saw at the zoo.
You don't usually get to take home
a live animal to keep in your bathtub.
There's also this educational angle
to the alligator farm.
You can go see, like,
the eggs and incubators.
You can see them being hatched.
There's even sort of a gator ER where they can see gators
recovering from injuries, which are pretty frequent
because alligators are wildly territorial.
Some of those injuries were incredibly brutal
because when they fight,
they're taking chunks out of each other.
Surprisingly enough, the barriers around the park
are so shoddy that alligators are escaping
and alligators are being found in people's pools
and backyards all the time.
Yet for decades, no one seems to bat an eye
at this horde of apex predators in the middle of L.A.,
but eventually disaster strikes.
In 1925,
Francis Earnest's seven-year-old son
climbs into the enclosure.
One of those gators leaps up
and grabs Francis Jr. by the hand.
It takes his uncle gouging out the eyes of that gator
to finally get the mouth to open.
By some miracle, Francis Jr. survives this attack,
but no one's calling for the Gator Farm to be shut down.
Eventually, Alligator Joe's attraction
falls victim not to lawsuits or bad press,
but annoyed neighbors.
In the 1950s, this part of L.A.
starts becoming more densely populated,
and people have had it with the park.
They're sick of alligators roaming the neighborhood.
Today, alligator farms do still exist,
and you can still hold baby alligators,
but toddlers are not allowed to ride them,
and you definitely can't
take one home with you.
All right, so if alligators weren't your thing back then,
there was a place right across town
that gave kids a chance to hop on another exotic animal,
one that would give them an even wilder ride.
When the California Alligator Farm opens in 1907,
there's another attraction
that's been around for over a decade.
In the 1880s, a Brit named Edwin Cawston
imports a whole bunch of ostriches
to his farm in South Pasadena, California.
He's planning to get rich
selling the feathers of these birds
because they're really big in ladies' fashion at the time.
Most people in South Pasadena
have never seen an ostrich up close before.
They're like these dinosaurs running around.
Pretty soon, people are lining up to gawk at the ostriches,
and he realizes he has this entirely different business.
People will pay to see the ostriches on his farm.
Cawston's Ostrich Farm
opens in the city of South Pasadena in 1896.
Newspapers are soon raving about it
as one of the nation's most fascinating attractions.
I would go to an ostrich farm.
I mean,
the whole point of it is, like,
you're seeing something
that you would never see.
In no world am I running into an ostrich on Staten Island.
People are fascinated by how fast
they can move.
With a top speed of
over 40 miles an hour,
it's not long before Cawston realizes
that if people are going to pay to pet these things,
they will pay even more to ride them.
Cars aren't a thing.
So for the average person,
40 miles an hour on the back of a dinosaur with feathers
is the thrill of a lifetime.
Of course, if you can ride ostriches,
that also means you can race them.
Ostrich racing becomes a real thing on the farm,
but it's really hard.
You can't put a saddle on them,
only do your best to balance
and hang on for dear life while they take off.
Most ostrich races finish
with nobody actually on their bird anymore.
Ostriches, in many ways,
are the worst possible animal to pick
for a roadside attraction because they're very aggressive.
They're also very territorial.
That makes them unpredictable.
Ostriches are not really built to be ridden,
and they don't really like to be ridden,
so there tend to be injuries.
That's gonna happen when you have people interacting
with large wild animals.
There's one incident where a male ostrich
kicks a farm worker 15 feet and then corners him
and starts pecking at him and attacking him,
and other people have to come and pull the bird off of him
before he kills this man.
In 1913, in the Tournament of Roses, there was a race,
and one rider was actually
thrown off his ostrich
and kicked 20 feet.
Then this ostrich just
takes off into the crowd,
so people are dodging it left and right,
just having no idea what's happening.
The Cawston Ostrich Farm closes in 1935.
It doesn't go away
because they are endangering the public.
It goes away because the Great Depression comes along.
But for a brief time,
Cawston's Ostrich Farm provided the thrill of a lifetime.
You have to remember, there is no internet,
there's no TV, there's just experiences.
So when people went to this ostrich ranch, it was amazing.
It was getting to do this thing
that so few people got to do.
Today, you would be hard-pressed
to find any place in the United States of America
that would let you ride an ostrich,
not just for the animal's sake,
but nobody wants to be responsible
for you breaking your neck riding a wild bird.
Remember those scorching summer days when you were a kid,
and you'd give anything for a trip to a pool or the beach?
Well, in the '60s, there was a water park
where they would let you do anything you wanted
to beat the heat,
but you would take a beating in the process.
In the late 1950s, Bob Byers owns an alfalfa farm
along I-15 in the Mojave Desert.
He's struggling to make ends meet,
but inspiration strikes him when he sees all these cars
driving by on their way to Las Vegas.
It's a long, hot drive.
Temperatures can reach as high
as 110 degrees in the summer.
So Byers looks at his huge plot of land,
and he thinks,
"What if I could create
some massive swimming pools,
a place for families to stop,
cool off, and break up this long drive?"
This guy gets a backhoe and a couple of his kids
and digs out this lake.
He digs out these ponds.
He creates an oasis in the middle of the desert.
He names it after his wife,
and Lake Dolores is born.
By the early '70s,
Lake Dolores grows from a roadside water oasis
into a full-on water park,
complete with their own commercials.
Good, clean, safe, fun.
A thrill a second.
Bring the kids.
Byers has built this
massive 300-acre complex
dedicated to ultimate summer fun.
But it's also very dangerous
because Bob is not an engineer.
It was slapped together.
Wherever he found cool junkyard scrap,
he made a ride out of it.
This place is basically spring break
meets a construction site.
He builds these 200-foot speed slides
where you go down headfirst
and then skip onto the water at 50 miles an hour.
Some people would actually overshoot the whole lake
and then tear up their chests
on the gravel on the other side.
The zip lines start from a 90-foot hill.
You basically just have to hold on for dear life.
If you let go too soon,
you're falling from a two-story height onto gravel.
And yet people love it.
They cannot get enough.
"These people can handle it.
These people won't drown.
Lifeguards, we got no need for you.
These people are making choices to come here
and have fun in a slightly dangerous manner."
People come all the way from Frisco down here.
Nothing like this around anywhere we live.
But one notorious attraction
truly stands out above the rest:
the stand-up slide.
The stand-up slide is as crazy as it sounds.
You slide down standing
at a 60-degree angle.
It's madness.
If you fall, you could get concussed
before you even hit the water.
And if you happen to make it
all the way to the bottom,
the slide spits you out 15 feet above the lake's surface.
Imagine hitting the water
with the force of a small car accident,
wearing nothing but a bathing suit.
If they didn't break a bone,
people were tearing skin off on the dry part
'cause the aluminum that didn't have the water on it
would get baking hot and you'd be like: .
And to make matters worse,
people aren't just standing.
People are pulling off 360-degree
spins as they go down.
They're cheating death,
and their friends are all just cheering them on.
There is not a place on Earth
that would let you do that today.
Bob had this famous quote where he said,
"It's a little bit country."
Which means what?
Which means you may die.
Despite their reputation,
or maybe because of it,
the stand-up slides are a huge draw,
until the risks finally catch up with them.
An off-duty employee decides
he's gonna have a little fun after hours,
and he goes down a slide into a partially-filled pool
and ends up paralyzed.
He gets a settlement of $4.4 million,
and that drives the park into bankruptcy.
Today, if you drive out to the site of Lake Dolores,
you'll find that it's really
a shell of its former self.
There's something in the American character
that must be admired.
This guy, Bob,
took American ingenuity.
He took American spirit.
He took American disregard for some safety rules,
and he turned it into something
that people loved for years and years.
I don't know, man, I think we need more Bobs.
Thousands of miles to the east,
there was another legendary park
where thrills came first and safety a distant second.
Action Park will always be remembered
as the most thrilling and dangerous,
and bonkers kids' park
in the tri-state area.
Nothing compares to it.
I can't wait to jump in the Tarzan pool.
How did Action Park
become known as the place for death-defying rides?
It all began with the very first attraction
when there was no park, just a struggling ski slope.
It's 1976,
and businessman Gene Mulvihill is in a bind.
He used to work on Wall Street,
but he got chased out by the SEC for breaking so many rules.
Now he is the owner of a big, risky investment
called the Vernon Valley
Great Gorge Ski Resort in New Jersey,
and he's bleeding money.
He can't use the ski resort in the summer months
'cause there's no snow,
but he comes up with a plan
to use his land all year round.
He comes up with a bobsled-type run,
a 2,700-foot twisting chute
made of the cheapest concrete you could find.
The bobsled would be a simple plastic seat on rollers.
A stick between your legs would be there to apply brakes
if you went too fast.
Maybe.
It's called an alpine slide,
a ride that's becoming popular
at ski areas around the world,
but this one is going to be unlike any other.
Typical alpine slides have a more gradual slope.
Mulvihill's is going to plummet
almost 1,000 vertical feet
in less than one minute.
You fly down a mountain
in your own little vehicle,
whipping around turns, winding, twisting.
It is pure exhilaration.
The ride is so popular,
Mulvihill builds Action Park around it,
attracting over a million visitors every year.
My kids love the rides.
But the alpine slide
remains its most popular attraction
and its most perilous.
I grew up around Action Park.
I had a T-shirt that had the alpine slide on it.
However, I never actually went on the alpine slide
because it was famous for people getting hurt on it.
There are so many problems,
starting with the handbrake.
First off, it's just a wooden stick,
and they're so poorly maintained.
It doesn't always work.
There's also the issue that the walls of the chute
are only about a foot high, so if anything happens,
you go completely flying off of this apparatus
at 40 miles an hour.
People would get hurt, it would flip,
people would get thrown out of it.
I saw all this firsthand.
Instead of the thrill of skiing without snow,
the alpine slide becomes the thrill of surgery
without anesthesia.
It looks cool and super fun,
but injuries keep piling up.
There's a 19-year-old employee of the facility
who gets onto one of the
sleds with a faulty brake.
It fails.
He goes flying,
his head hits a rock,
and he falls into a coma.
The family sues Action Park and wins,
but somehow the place keeps operating for another 16 years.
The place is earning its nicknames,
like "Accident Park," "Traction Park,"
and "Class Action Park,"
but nothing seems to be enough to earn it a shutdown.
Finally, by the mid-'90s,
Mulvihill has encountered
all of these lawsuits,
and he's in debt,
so he's finally forced to shut down Action Park,
and then it's converted to a real water park
with actual safety features and guidelines.
After Action Park was sold,
its new owners kept the alpine slide open
for a final season before demolishing it,
but riders had to wear helmets and pads.
Nowadays, if you go to any zoo or wildlife attraction,
you will see signs that say, "Don't feed the animals,"
but back in the mid-20th century at Yellowstone,
there could have been signs that said,
"The bears are hungry, and they hope you brought snacks."
In 1872, Yellowstone in Wyoming
becomes our first national park.
After the Civil War, we wanted something beautiful
that we could all take pride in.
It's a place of amazing natural beauty:
the hot springs, the geysers, the falls,
but it turns out to be a place
that's not really that easy to visit,
and it's not getting as much attendance as was hoped.
Yellowstone is looking like a flop.
So in 1919, a National Park Service bigwig
named Horace Albright has one big idea
to breathe life into Yellowstone.
Horace Albright decides
that the way to get crowds to Yellowstone
is to give them a show,
and the bears of Yellowstone are perfect to do just that.
And so Albright's idea is to provide
opportunities for people to feed the bears.
So he creates feeding stations.
People drive into the park, roll down their windows,
and offer food out the window to the bears,
and the bears love it.
Even President Warren G. Harding
and President Calvin Coolidge visit Yellowstone
and feed the bears.
At first, this seems like a win-win situation.
Park attendance is way up,
and of course, the bears are getting fed.
The problem is more and more garbage
is being produced within the park,
and the park administration needs
to get rid of that garbage,
and the bears will basically eat absolutely anything.
So they decide to dump all of the park's garbage
on a platform that the bears can approach.
They have this sign that says,
"Lunch counter for bears only,"
and then they build benches so it creates a little stadium
that people can watch just a few feet away.
But everyone keeps forgetting,
they're quite literally feeding a beast.
The safety issue is quite serious.
Grizzly bears at Yellowstone reach about 700 pounds.
They're the apex predator in the park.
In 1930, a Texas woman feeds a bear a candy bar,
and the bear says, "Thank you," by mauling her arm.
From the 1930s to the 1960s,
an average of 48 people per year
are injured by the bears at Yellowstone.
Cars are attacked, tents are ripped open,
campers get bitten and clawed.
In 1967, the park is forced to face
the increasing danger
when bears kill two people at another national park.
And the last thing Yellowstone wants is a repeat.
This is a huge wake-up call.
So the rangers begin a program
to return the bears to their natural feeding habits.
Now, instead of bear lunch counter signs,
you see signs that say, "Don't feed the bears."
So today, the park is much safer.
The bears are wild again,
but it's also difficult to see a bear in Yellowstone.
There's a part of me that knows
that this was irresponsible stewardship
of a natural resource, but then there's a part of me
that would be like, "Oh yeah, baby, sign me up."
I would love to have seen something like this.
So Yellowstone decided that tourists
and predators should be separated by safe distance.
But back in the '70s, there was a family amusement park
that chose the opposite path.
It's the 1970s,
and vacations are really considered a luxury,
and only really a privileged few
can afford trips to Disney World
or some faraway theme park.
So it becomes the age of the road trip.
Families pile into station wagons
and look for fun holiday ideas
that are within driving distance.
In 1972,
plans are announced for a new amusement park
in West Milford, New Jersey,
that promises to be wild, thrilling, and car-friendly.
It's a new kind of zoo
and radically different.
Here, the animals roam free,
but the people aren't in mobile cages,
they're in little family cars.
What's more American than, like,
"I don't even wanna experience nature
unless it's through the windshield of my car?"
This bold new attraction is dubbed
"Jungle Habitat,"
and it opens to great fanfare in July of 1972.
But this is not a petting zoo.
These are some of the most dangerous animals in the world.
Jungle Habitat brings in 70 lions.
The San Diego Zoo only has nine.
In all, over 1,500 animals
up close, unencumbered,
and, very importantly, unfenced.
Jungle Habitat becomes a success
almost off the bat.
It has 250,000 visitors in just its first three months.
Cars are lining up for up to seven miles just to get in.
But a real African safari,
you are with trained professionals
in vehicles especially designed for the purpose.
In this case,
you're just driving through in the family car.
Animals are walking around,
looking at you like you're lunch.
In this drive-through attraction,
a vehicle is not the safe space
visitors think it will be.
From day one, cars are basically under siege.
Baboons start to tear at cars.
Lions and tigers,
they're pawing and scratching
at the sides of your car.
But most people wanted the animals on their car.
That's the thrill.
They actually put this right in their logo.
You have to keep the windows rolled up,
but this is in the early '70s,
before air conditioning
came standard in most cars,
which means that on, like, an 85-degree day in the summer,
it's about 110 degrees in the car.
These cars are dangerously hot,
so people begin rolling
down their windows.
Just months after opening,
disaster strikes.
A man has rolled the window down to call and taunt,
and tease a lion.
Let me just let that sink in.
A human being is teasing a lion.
And the lion reaches in and mauls him from the front.
He turns around and gets him from the back,
and somehow they manage to escape.
Believe it or not, the guy doesn't sue the park.
He blames himself because, you know,
he taunted a lion.
Most park visitors are thrilled
by the wild interactive experience,
but Jungle Habitat's suburban neighbors
are not so happy with park security.
Two wolves dig out from under a fence,
baboons escape and send, like,
local schools into lockdown.
You got kangaroos and emus walking down the street.
Nobody thinks about the neighborhoods
around these animal parks.
If those fences aren't done the right way,
you got yourself a crocodile in your pool
and a lion in your driveway.
In addition to all of these obvious safety issues,
it actually turns out really expensive
to run a park like this.
Just to feed the lions alone
requires 1,400 pounds of horse meat per day.
Even though they've got lots of customers coming through,
they're actually hemorrhaging money.
After just four years of this death trap of a zoo,
Jungle Habitat finally closes.
Local legend has it
that there are still some exotic animals
in the Jersey woods today,
descended from the original baboons, kangaroos,
and ostriches that made a break for it back in the '70s.
One of childhood's greatest pleasures didn't cost a thing.
The public swimming pool.
Now looking back, okay, maybe it wasn't the cleanest
or the safest, but unless you grew up
in a certain part of Cleveland in the late '60s,
I can almost guarantee yours wasn't the dirtiest.
In 1967,
Carl Stokes is elected as mayor in Cleveland,
which is a huge milestone because he's also
the first Black mayor in any major city in the U.S.
Riding the wave of optimism,
he sets his sights on an ambitious goal:
cleaning up Lake Erie so people can swim in it once again.
The problem is the river that feeds it is highly polluted.
Decades of industrial waste plus raw sewage
have flowed down the Cuyahoga River into the lake,
turning it completely toxic.
It was really this gigantic cesspool of pollution
and was sometimes catching on fire.
Yes, the water was catching on fire
because all of the pollutants that were in it.
The lake catches fire 13 times
between 1868 and 1969.
It's really not a particularly safe environment
to be swimming in.
So how do you turn a filthy, toxic lake
into a swimming pool?
Stokes hires an engineering firm to design this
elaborate holding tank.
By hanging weighted vinyl curtains from pontoons,
they create this designated swimming area
that's separate from Lake Erie.
It's kind of a crazy idea,
a pool that's a part of the lake,
but it's separate but connected.
Then they pump the area full of 350 pounds of chlorine.
That's 400 times the amount of chlorine
you put in your backyard pool,
and they're doing it every day before the grand opening.
On paper, this is a bad idea,
and yet people are like, "Cool, we'll do it."
On July 4th, 1969,
Mayor Stokes unveils his majestic new public pool.
Amazingly, it works.
This section of the lake is, in fact, clean.
The kids all go crazy.
They're excited.
People just start jumping in to go swimming.
Cleveland is proud of the success
of its latest attraction,
for one morning.
Just a few hours after the pool opens,
this massive storm rolls in from the northwest.
And the nasty, dirty water from Lake Erie
washes over into the safe swimming area,
and the waves start ripping open the vinyl curtains.
Suddenly, swimmers are scrambling to shore.
It's like something out of "Jaws,"
but instead of a giant shark,
they are fleeing
a century of toxic waste.
By the next day, the pool is totally gone.
Unfortunately, Mayor Stokes' vision is dead.
It's just too expensive to try again,
and it turns out that the chlorine
actually ended up killing a bunch of fish,
which doesn't help with the pollution.
But his efforts did force other factories
to stop polluting local waters,
and now you can actually swim in Lake Erie.
If swimming in Lake Erie wasn't your thing,
how about a trip to Hawaii?
With its serene beaches, lush jungles,
and enormous volcanoes, how could you resist?
In fact, there was one attraction
that was so alluring it would suck you right in.
After World War II,
Americans become absolutely
fascinated with Hawaii.
This was the era before statehood,
and the result is the visitor
is greeted by a wild, open,
naturally beautiful place.
You can climb up to sheer cliffs,
you can walk up to the edge of a volcano.
All of this is yours to explore with no restriction.
One of the must-see destinations is near Honolulu
on the island of Oahu, the Halona Blowhole.
The blowhole was created thousands of years ago
when lava formed a vertical tube
right there on the shoreline.
And when it's hit by a huge wave,
water just shoots up outta that sucker like a geyser,
going 30 feet in the air.
It's like nature's fireworks, only with water.
The Halona Blowhole is avidly promoted to tourists.
This is Hawaii's Old Faithful.
It has sort of all the ingredients
of a perfect tourist attraction.
But this isn't Old Faithful.
It doesn't go off every hour.
It goes off randomly,
and so that makes it all the more dangerous.
This is an era when cameras are just becoming huge.
Every consumer they're all getting dangerously close
to get that shot.
We see deadly things, and we're like,
"I gotta get a picture with that."
There's no fence, there's no barrier.
There's not even someone saying,
"Hey, step back a little bit."
People have to struggle to hold their footing
on very slippery but razor-sharp lava rock.
And once you're in position,
you're going to feel the
geyser before you can see it.
It will hit you with
the force of a small car.
It can launch you into the air
or suck you into the hole and kick you out into sea.
Either way, you're in for a bad ride.
The worst-case scenario actually happens
to an 18-year-old boy from California
who thought it would be funny
to stand directly over the blowhole.
When the geyser comes up,
he's launched into the air,
and then he comes down headfirst into the hole itself.
He's tossed around like a ragdoll,
and then he gets sucked out to sea.
Over the years, safety fences are added,
but tourists don't let that ruin the fun.
In the 2000s, a couple of people
make their way close to the blowhole
and get killed while doing it.
Ever since then, it's almost impossible to get close to it.
Today, we don't get to have that magnificent experience
of feeling the power of these things
when you're back 50 feet.
I would love to have seen it
before the bars were put in,
before the viewing platform,
shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of other tourists
who are jockeying for position,
to get the best possible selfie.
I would love to have experienced it
without all of that.
So today you don't get that same rush anymore,
but you also don't get sucked into the Pacific,
which feels like a fair trade.
We have spent billions building giant roller coasters
and other elaborate attractions,
but some of the most extreme thrills aren't man-made at all.
At the dawn of the 20th century,
one of the nation's most iconic natural wonders
was transformed into a stage
for a terrifying new attraction.
Niagara Falls is this amazing natural place.
It has 40 million gallons of water going over every minute.
That's two Olympic pools every second.
By the mid-1800s, it becomes a very popular attraction.
By 1850, attendance skyrockets
to over 80,000 visitors every year.
But to one woman, it's more than just a natural wonder.
She sees her chance to get rich and famous.
In 1901,
Annie Edson Taylor is a retired schoolteacher.
At 62, she recently lost her husband
and is facing abject poverty.
Desperate for money, she draws inspiration
from reading an article about daredevils
who ride the rapids at the bottom of the falls.
But what hasn't been done yet
is going over the falls in a barrel,
and she decides she's gonna be the first person to do it.
It sounds nuts, but Taylor spends
what little money she has left
on a custom-built pickle barrel of her own design.
But remember, she's not a structural engineer.
She's a music teacher.
She lines it with mattresses,
creates a harness to suspend her in the middle of it,
and then runs a tube into the inside to pump air in
so that she can breathe.
There's a lot that can go wrong here.
So she decides to conduct a test run,
but decides to use her cat.
She throws the cat down the falls,
and the cat makes it,
so she was just like, "All right,
that seemed to work."
But Annie needs one more thing
for a successful publicity stunt: lots of publicity.
Annie gets a promoter involved,
and the promoter acquires a barrel
and labels it "Queen of the Mist"
and puts it on display before the stunt takes place.
The local papers picked it up.
Anybody you could think of
was talking about this woman.
The place was absolutely packed.
On October 24th, 1901,
Taylor seals herself into the vessel.
The barrel is placed into the Niagara River,
where it bobs to the edge of the falls
and then vanishes.
When Annie goes over the falls,
it's a 167-foot drop,
and in that drop, she reaches 70 miles an hour at impact.
She hits the bottom with the force of a car accident.
Annie is thrown around inside
as the barrel makes contact with the rocks.
When the rescuers are able to fish out the barrel
and crack it open.
There's Annie.
She's beat up, bruised, and has a cut on her head,
but she's alive.
This is the wildest part.
She gets out of this barrel unscathed.
I mean, she's like the first stuntwoman.
After Taylor's maiden voyage,
many others are all too happy to follow her lead.
Niagara Falls is promoting this in their postcards.
"Come and watch these people
take their lives into their own hands
and catapult themselves over the falls."
Each time it's happening,
this is really keeping Niagara Falls
on the forefront of what
was then social media.
Police do get called, but it's really just to make sure,
"Does everyone have a good view?"
It becomes a phenomenon, but doesn't always work out.
One person goes over, the barrel crushes.
Another one, they found nothing left but one arm.
Other times, they get caught, and they roll,
and the person drowns.
It turns out that it's really not safe
to go over Niagara Falls in a pickle barrel.
Eventually, one high-profile tragedy finally
pushes U.S. and Canadian authorities over the edge.
In 1951, a beloved local stuntman named Red Hill
perishes in a barrel attempt of the falls.
Both countries impose fines
and even jail time for anyone
who tries this crazy stunt.
As for Annie,
she's buried in the Niagara Falls Cemetery
in a special section that's reserved for daredevils.
A thundering waterfall is a thrilling attraction,
but maybe the best souvenir was making it home in one piece.
At its best, tourism expands our horizons,
creates unforgettable memories that makes us feel alive.
But in the 1950s, one attraction flipped that script
by giving tourists an explosive preview
of how the world might end.
It's the mid-1950s, and people are partying hard
at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas,
but the real attraction comes just before dawn.
People have been drinking and gambling all night,
and now these boozed-up couples
shuffle on up to these rooftop bars and terraces,
they look to the northwest, this black sky.
Suddenly, the horizon pulses
and the sky is filled with a bright flash of light.
And the coup de grace is the shockwave.
This violent boom rattles windows
and hits people in the chest as they gasp,
and then they raise their glasses and cheer.
This hard-partying Las Vegas crowd has just witnessed
an atomic bomb explosion,
and they love it.
They're called dawn bomb parties,
and they're radioactive showstoppers
that help build Las Vegas.
It seems nuts now,
but atomic bomb tests were
the perfect opportunity
for this young city of Las Vegas to put itself on the map.
It's 1951, it's the height of the Cold War,
and the United States needs to
continue testing nuclear
weapons as they improve them
and make them more powerful.
The government chooses the Nevada Test Site,
about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas,
and they, of course, notify city officials.
Now, you'd assume they're gonna freak out
and say, "Not here," but the city government
and the casino owners, they think, "Hot damn!
We are gonna get rich."
They lean into it so hard,
they decide that Vegas is
gonna be Atomic City, USA.
And because the federal government
gives them a schedule
about when these tests are going to be conducted,
they realize they can stage events around each
and every test.
This is a massive hit.
People are piling in to witness
America's, like, incredible destructive power.
Casinos organize Miss Atom Bomb beauty pageants,
and you even have the atomic bomb cocktails at bars.
Each detonation is bringing
thousands of tourists to Vegas.
The owner of the iconic Horseshoe Casino
says that the best thing to happen to Vegas
was the atomic bomb.
Some people want to get closer,
and so they will literally sell you a ticket
to ride on a bus
to as close to that explosion
as the Army will let you get, which is 10 miles away.
So you get off the tour bus
with, like, your lawn chair and your sandwich,
you know, kind of like a day at the beach.
I like the lack of regulation.
I really do.
But, like, there is something bananas
about going to military-grade explosions.
Between 1951 and 1962,
over 100 tests are run at the Nevada Proving Ground.
Meanwhile, the city of Las Vegas
brings in nearly $200 million,
but it's not all fun and games.
The military schedules the detonations
where the wind pattern will carry the fallout
away from the city.
However, there are native
communities and lots of locals
who lived in the path of grave danger.
Homes and ranches are destroyed.
Farm animals die.
Tens of thousands of people develop cancer.
In 1954, John Wayne is shooting a film
called "The Conqueror" in nearby Utah,
and 25 years later, half the crew has cancer,
including John Wayne, which is what he dies of.
By 1963,
the deadly effects of the atomic bomb tests
are painfully clear,
and the government bans above-ground nuclear testing.
Believe it or not, nuclear testing continues
for the next three decades,
but it usually happens
in underground shafts,
and it's not until 1992 that the U.S. government
calls a moratorium on all nuclear tests.
And ever since then,
no atomic bomb has been detonated on American soil.
I think that life is long,
and I think that life is boring at times,
and I think we all need a sense of danger,
and they created the illusion of danger
while also including a little real danger in it.
Remembering the attractions that used to lure us in,
like riding gators, feeding bears,
or front-row seats at an atomic blast.
Some of our excursions might have been extreme,
but risk led to reward,
and that's why our Hazardous History was such a big draw.