American Lost & Found

On October 27, 1940, the New York World's Fair closed for the last time. The turnstiles counted 537,952 people that Sunday, and that was the end of a place built to show America what the future would…

On September 18, 2011, the last Borders stores in the United States closed their doors, ending a chain that had started forty years earlier as one used-book shop a few blocks from the University of Mi…

On January 1, 1984, the largest company in the world stopped existing. The Bell System — the phones in American houses, the wires under American streets, the trucks, the booths, the operators and the…

On February 8, 2008, Polaroid announced that it would stop making the instant film that had defined the company for six decades. The announcement came with a practical timetable: film manufactured to…

On May 23, 2022, New York City removed the last free-standing public pay telephone from its streets. The booth stood on Seventh Avenue near 50th Street, just south of Times Square, and was lifted away…

By the late 1980s, more than three-quarters of America's drive-in theaters had closed, and more than a thousand went dark between 1978 and 1988.

This episode explores “Quietly Gone — Ep 10: The Houses That Came in the Mail”. It is presented as a solo narration, and the source list lets you revisit the original material.

For fifty-six years, the United States Post Office ran a network of pressurized steel tubes beneath the streets of Lower Manhattan — moving close to a hundred thousand letters a day through twenty-sev…

On September 26, 1983, a fleet of dump trucks arrived at a municipal landfill on the eastern edge of Alamogordo, New Mexico, sometime before sunrise. They unloaded crates of Atari video game cartridge…

Pan American World Airways didn't slip away quietly over a long decline. It ended on a Wednesday — December 4, 1991 — when a bankruptcy court filed the paperwork and the doors simply locked. That morn…

There's a Howard Johnson's still standing in Lake George, New York. One building. Orange roof, turquoise trim, the old Simple Simon weather vane still up top. The restaurant closed in 2022, but the st…

On Valentine's Day, 1981, a twelve-year-old boy named Todd Domboski stepped into his grandmother's backyard in Centralia, Pennsylvania, and the ground opened up beneath him. He was pulled out by his t…