The ride originated in London, where it was called 'The Canals of Venice.' It quickly became a staple of the American amusement park, an institution then at its apex. There were over seven hundred of them scattered across the country, according to Futtrels, and at least a third of these hosted some variant of the Tunnel of Love. These rides served a necessary social function; as Dave Samuelson writes in The American Amusement Park, "the darkness became a big draw for romantically inclined couples looking for a little intimacy in a time when any public display of affection was frowned upon."

Then came, among other things, war, the sexual revolution, and the rise of the modern roller coaster. Suddenly kids could pet each other openly, without the pretext of a frightening underground boat trip. Plus amusement parks had entered their ongoing BDSM phase: Kids went mostly to be whipped and spun by huge creaking machines designed to nearly kill them. By the 1960s only a few dozen Tunnels of Love survived, if that, and already these were throwbacks, emblems of some earlier, lost America.

These rides were not explicitly designed to foster underage tongue-kissing; it was more of a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge thing," says Futtrel. The nickname 'Tunnel of Love' derives from Palisades Park in New Jersey, which was the first to make romance the point of its Old Mill. ('Old Mill' being the proper designation for this genre of ride.) Soon most of these attractions were re-themed along similar lines, and for a time America was basically just a series of dank steam-propelled makeout chambers.

I didn't float my Cartoon Network theory by Futtrells, but I did ask why 'The Tunnel of Love' still means anything to anyone besides mid-career Bruce Springsteen fans. Futrell blames the media, too. "[Palisades Park] was right outside of New York. It was something where, if you needed to film an amusement park, you could go out to the Palisades," he says. "From a Hollywood perspective, a Tunnel of Love was something that you could work easily into the narrative of a movie or television show."

So, yes: The Tunnel of Love is pretty much just a media-fostered myth. But then, plenty of media-fostered myths have real-life counterparts. I bet you someone out there writes 'milkman' on their tax return (although that person probably works at a terrible milk-delivery start-up). And according to Futtrells, the systematic destruction of this country's slow-paced carnival rides has indeed spared two genuine Old Mills. One of them, located in Pennsylvania, is called Garfield's Nightmare, and may or may not be a long tour through a lasagna-less tunnel. The other is called--simply, authoritatively--The Old Mill, and can be found just one hour outside of New York City, in Rye, New York.

I live in New York City. I also have a girlfriend (we'll call her B.), who--though she's never explicitly complained about our usual MO of drinking and watching Netflix--has recently made a point of telling me about other couples she knows, who (for example) sometimes eat at the kind of restaurants that have more than one dollar sign on Yelp. I figured it was time for us to take a trip.

Together, we would role-play the mating rituals of our forefathers, and/or our forefathers preferred sitcom characters. We'd share a cotton candy. I'd win her a bear while winningly acknowledging the patriarchal structures inherent to heterosexual male bear-winning. And side by side we'd float through one of the few monuments left to the era when making out on subways was kind of transgressive, instead of just gross.