This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate De Mayo.

The man who built it called it the eighth wonder of the world, which, though it was not, was not an unheard of thing to call your grand new structure.

The Panama Canal, the Sydney Opera House,

the Empire State Building, the Oswan Dam,

and the Hoover Dam, and the Three Gorges Dam,

probably some other dams I'm forgetting, the Erie Canal, the George Washington

Bridge, the dome under which Major League Baseball's Houston Astros played during the

1965 season on dirt that had been spray painted green after the grass died, all of those

structures were tagged with the title at some point, for some period of time when people

would look up or out at it and feel wonder before it became just another thing in the world.

The wonder built by James V. Lafferty in 1885 wasn't a thing for very long, though I will get to the end later, a bit before

the end of the story.

But first, to the building's beginning, when Lafferty was trying to figure out how to turn a

profit on a bunch of land he bought out among a string of sandy islands cut off from the New Jersey coast in its them booming population center of Atlantic City by a pesky title creek.

The moon would do its thing and suddenly it would be too wide to cross and it was

hard to entice people to come out and even look at the land. So Lafferty came up with a way to help them look.

And I cannot tell you where the idea came from. What in his background might suggest that it, of all possible ideas,

took hold of him with such clarity of mind and necessary fervor to make it happen, such that

as he was talking to his friends or his wife laying out the problem, I've got all this great land

but people won't come out to see it and those friends or his wife

are offering suggestions hey maybe you put an ad in the paper maybe offer up some

incentive like the 1885 equivalent of a free toaster oven or four night stay at a resort in

...