The Seattle Gum Wall
This doesn’t sound like anything you couldn’t find under a school desk, but for some reason, the Market Theater Gum Wall was a somewhat famous tourist attraction for those visiting Seattle. People added their gum to the wall for years to create this unique and iconic wall, but in November 2015 it was finally scraped clean.
The cleaning was not done for an aesthetic or hygienic reason, but due to the fact that the weight of all that gum was harmful to the integrity of the brick Pike Place wall. Visitors who come to check out the attraction will be faced with a plain blank wall. So prepare yourself in advance, this one isn’t coming back.
Berlin Wall
This doesn’t seem like much of a vacation, but apparently, people used to travel to Berlin in the ’60s and ’70s to check out the Berlin Wall. In this case, it is not a bad thing that the spot doesn’t exist anymore for us to visit. The Berlin Wall separated the two sides of the city after WWII, on one side lived the democratic Germans and on the other, the communists.
The wall was finally torn down in 1989 and millions of people were reunited with their family and friends.
Heritage USA
Heritage USA, in Fort Mill, South Carolina, played an unusual part in American history. It was a Christian theme park, water park and residential development. The park was founded by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker famous for their TV program the PTL Club (which stands for, wait for it, “Praise The Lord”).
Attendance suffered when Jim Bakker got in trouble with the law and the park lost its tax exemption, leading to its eventual closing in 1989.
The Nazca Lines
The arid climate of the Nazca Desert in Southern Peru helped maintain the Nazca Lines for over 2,500 years. Roughly 250 miles south of Peruvian capital city Lima, hundreds of drawings are etched into the ground. Some of the drawings are immense reaching 600 feet or more and can be best observed from the sky.
Most are simple lines or geometric shapes, but there are also shapes of flowers, trees and animals and even a human. The lines were declared as a Unesco World History Site in 1994, but they are threatened by changing weather patterns, squatters and mining operations in the area.
Luna Park
Coney Island’s original “Luna Park” was an enormous amusement park which opened in 1903 and was filled with attractions, rides and over 250,000 electric lights. The park was created by Frederic Thompson and Elmer “Skip” Dundy. The name is attributed either to the airship “Luna” from the park’s main attraction “A Trip to the Moon”, or for Dundy’s sister Luna. Luna Parks became a hit with the help of Frederick Ingersoll who was pioneering roller coaster design at the time and by 1905 they were popping up all over the world.
Sadly, not long after Ingersoll’s death in 1927, most of the parks shut down. The original Luna Park closed its doors in 1944 after a fire, but the name is alive and well and is used as a synonym for “amusement park” in many European languages.