Baby Alligators, Florida Roadside Attraction, 1950s

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Baby Alligators, Florida Roadside Attraction, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Baby Alligators, Florida Roadside Attraction, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-3BE2EC

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Somewhere along a Florida highway in the 1950s, a pen full of juvenile alligators served as both the admission price and the main event. The roadside alligator farm was a fixture of mid-century Florida tourism — a business model built on the reasonable assumption that a northerner who had driven two days to reach the Sunshine State was willing to pay a quarter to stand over a concrete enclosure and feel like an explorer.

These hatchlings, each about a foot long and carrying the full menace of the species in miniature form, were marketed as cuddly enough that tourists sometimes paid extra to hold one. The industry had no particular concern about what the alligators thought of this arrangement. In the 1950s, Florida's wild alligator population was in serious decline from hunting and habitat loss, which made the roadside farm both a symptom of the problem and, in a roundabout way, one of the few places a tourist could reliably see one.

The double exposure that ghosts the upper half of the frame — a second shot of the same enclosure superimposed over the first — records what happened when a tourist photographer tried to be thorough and forgot to advance the film. They captured the scene twice, which is one more time than the alligators required.

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