American Alligators in Roadside Zoo Pit, Southern United States, 1950s

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American Alligators in Roadside Zoo Pit, Southern United States, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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American Alligators in Roadside Zoo Pit, Southern United States, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-9B914B

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Somewhere in the American South in the 1950s, a roadside attraction had solved the problem of what to do with a dozen alligators by putting them all in the same concrete pit and charging families fifty cents to lean over the railing. The animals are piled on a sand shelf at the water's edge with the communal indifference of creatures that predate the concept of personal space by about two hundred million years, one of them facing the camera with its jaw open in the expression that tourists in this era reliably mistook for aggression and that is simply how an alligator sits. These pits were a fixture of the Florida and Gulf Coast tourist economy, operated on the confident theory that proximity to a large reptile was entertainment enough and that no further programming was required. The whole enterprise had a honesty to it: the alligators were not pretending to be happy, and the pit was not pretending to be a habitat, and everyone went home satisfied.

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