1 Nashville
The remains of a saber tooth cat were found during excavation in downtown Nashville in 1971. This was the impetus for the hockey team name the Predators, and their mascot Gnash.
2. At 11 am every morning, a group of five ducks (led by a Duckmaster) descend from their penthouse suite to the lobby of the Peabody hotel in Memphis. After playing in the fountain, at 5 pm they leave and return to their rooms. This has been going on for over 70 years.
3. A San Diego park’s monorail was named the Wgasa Rail Line after managers requested an African-sounding name. WGASA is an acronym for “Who gives a s*** anyways?”
4. In the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, there was a mysterious detached leg found in the rubble of the destroyed building. Since all 168 victims’ legs have been accounted for, the left leg has perplexed investigators and has yet to be traced back to an owner.
5. The oldest “Mother Dough” in the USA can be found at the Boudin Bakery in San Francisco. Over 400 loaves of bread a day are made from a living yeast strain over 160 years old. The yeast/dough mixture doubles in size every day.
6 Austin Lake
Former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson repeatedly declined the dubious honor of having Austin Town Lake named after her, so the City Council waited until she died and named it after her anyway.
7. The “Sky Beam” that shoots out of the Luxor Hotel/Casino in Las Vegas attracts so many insects that it has established a new ecosystem of moths, bats, and owls.
8. Los Angeles consumes the same amount of water today as it did in 1970, with 1 million more residents. The city consumes approximately 123 gallons per capita, per day, which is the best in the entire nation.
9. In 1985, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore held a youth rap contest. The winner was 14-year-old Tupac Shakur.
10. A giant ”WELCOME TO CLEVELAND” sign on a rooftop in the flight path of a Milwaukee airport has been causing “panic and outrage” to passengers arriving by air for over 37 years. The creator’s reasoning is “Living in the world is not a dress rehearsal. You better have fun with it.”
11 Philadelphia
A Canadian hitchhiking robot that relied on the kindness of strangers to travel from place to place had its arms and head ripped off after one day in Philadelphia, having traveled peacefully around Canada for 26 days.
12. In 1958, as an experiment, Bank of America mailed 60,000 residents of Fresno, California a small plastic card with a $500 credit line. Bank of America figured if it failed, there’d be no media coverage because it was in Fresno. The experiment was hugely successful and the program became Visa.
13. The city of Chicago was raised over 4 feet with screw jacks in the 19th century in order to install the first sewer system in the US.
14. The Great California flood of 1862 submerged Sacramento under 10 feet of water and turned California’s Central Valley into a vast inland sea spanning 300 miles long, 20 miles wide and 30 feet deep. It killed thousands, bankrupted the state and this historically happens every 200 years.
15. In Boston, during a shortage of coffee and sugar in 1777, a crowd of over 100 angry women marched to a wealthy merchant’s warehouse, demanded the keys, and grabbed him by the neck when he refused. They opened the doors, loaded up carts with coffee, and left.
16 Atlanta Sheriff
In 2000, an Atlanta area sheriff named Sidney Dorsey ordered a hit on a rival (Derwin Brown in picture) that defeated him in an election. The hit was then carried out by two deputies who were promised promotions.
17. Downtown Seattle actually sits on top of the original city from the 1800s. It was rebuilt on top of approximately 20-foot high walled tunnels following a great fire, in order to prevent floods from high tide and sewage. You can go underground to see the original city remnants.
18. A Las Vegas mental hospital once used commercial buses to “dump” more than 1,500 psychiatric patients in 48 states over five years.
19. New York’s underground gay bars of the 1960s (including the Stonewall Inn) were actually created and supported by the Mafia. It was illegal to be gay. The mob paid off local precincts to keep them from doing raids.
20. Cartier sunglasses (which can go for $2650 and up) are a status symbol in Detroit. Detroit Police estimate 9 murders, 17 non-fatal shootings, and 2158 robberies related to the glasses between ’12 and ’16.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Kansas City
Kansas City blatantly ignored the alcohol prohibition. You could buy booze a few blocks down from the police station. They got away with it scot-free for all 13 years (1920 to 1933).
22. Nashville Zoo is located on property that was once a 300-acre slave holding farm. When construction for the zoo began in 1997, this graveyard was not disturbed. It was only in 2013 did the zoo petition to have the bodies exhumed, revealing 9 to 30 African-Americans buried there.
23. Philadelphia’s mayors were initially unpaid, and often strongly objected to being selected, sometimes opting to pay a large fine rather than serve.
24. In 1980, 4 FBI agents went to the Census Bureau’s Colorado Springs office with warrants but were forced to leave. Courts upheld that no agency, including the FBI, has access to Census data.
25. When it snowed for the first recorded time in Miami in 1977 a meteorologist initially thought it was a coke-drop that had gone wrong, until realizing that the flakes were indeed snow.