If you're under 13, or somehow still sensitive to the phony pleasures of American roadside culture, or if you're drunk enough, you might still enjoy miniature golf. It could happen. If over 33 you might have a remembered favorite course, maybe in Florida, maybe in Colorado Springs or Wisconsin Dells or another place devoted to wasting leisure time, maybe a slowly grinding windmill in a night filled with crickets around you, maybe a remembered shock that the 18th hole was a bottomless cheat and your party had lost its balls and it was all over. Some mini-golf courses ascend to a Tex Avery level of sexy playfulness and Rube Goldberg complication. My own favorite was a genuinely dangerous course in Gatlinburg Tennessee, where I guess they don't have lawyers yet, or somehow keep them in check.

If you're at all grateful for, or thoughtful about, miniature golf's whimsical sense of humor, you have Frieda Carter to thank. Frieda is mini-golf's Lenny Bruce, the brave original, the secret source of many careers.

But since Frieda is no longer able to accept cards and pies, the best way to thank her is from a terrace on top of a Georgia mountaintop. It's Lookout Mountain. On the top of Lookout Mountain there's an ugly and misleading plaque dedicated to husband and wife, Garnet and Frieda Carter.

The plaque is ugly because…. it's ugly. Sorry. It just is. Otherwise Rock City is a deeply beautiful place. Based on their careers the Carters couldn't possibly have been as grim and beady as all that. It's misleading because the wording "Rock City Was Their Dream" is a tricky lie-by-summarization that efficiently implies a humble, working-class triumph of back-yard whimsy over cruel depression-era deprivation. Nice try, but it's not quite true.

Garnet Carter was a real estate developer in 1926, owner of the expansive and well-appointed 700-acre Holiday Resort on top of Lookout Mountain, and owner of the Fairyland Inn. To make a long story short (a story better covered in John Margolies' "Miniature Golf", Abbeville Press 1987), Garnet and Frieda Carter arguably invented miniature golf while experimenting with pipes in their front yard. Frieda brought her playful fairyland aesthetic, with garden gnomes and clever obstacles and hazards. Garnet licensed a prior patent for the matting surface, got his own 1929 patent for the design and franchised what they called "Tom Thumb Golf".

Tom Thumb Golf became a national sensation. Shooting mini golf became a genuine craze just after the Depression, a sort of a weird social fever comparable to the Dutch tulip craze, called "The Madness of 1930." Courses sprouted on rooftops and vacant lots and in the urban margins.

Garnet Carter rode this unlikely and unstable pop culture wave like the Big Kahuna. That year Americans had something between 25,000 and 50,000 courses to choose from, unreasonable coverage on the map, each more outrageous and complicated than the next. Garnet Carter had a lock on the preeminent Tom Thumb brand, but suddenly found himself with hundreds of competitors. He threw himself into mass-producing course hardware and fairyland ornament like tiny painted houses and fountains and pixilated ("drunk") gnomes, in fairyland factories that employed hundreds of people in Chattanooga. By 1931 Fairyland Manufacturing had installed three thousand courses, with an original investment of $4500 each. And each one of them with Frieda's playful garden-gnome design sensibility. The Carters were more like industrialists (on fairy scale) than struggling working-class gardeners with a crazy dream.

By 1931 the craze had fizzled. Garnet Carter had made and lost a sizable fortune by the time he sold the rights in 1932.

The whole miniature golf story is simply a backstory for Carter's next venture, Rock City, a tourist trap in a rock garden on the top of a mountain, a completely different business model.

Maybe Carter had observed the career of the tricky Missouri backwoodsman, Lester Dill, the man who invented American tourist exploitation, the guy who opened Meramec Caverns in 1935 and marketed with outlandish billboards on the original Route 66 and lied about the cave being 'Jesse James' hideout' and rode his property like a rocket for decades. He had enough Ozark Barnum to produce the 102-year-old Jesse James himself in 1949 for the cameras. Dill was smart. Meramec Caverns is still in business and doing very well, thank you.

So maybe Frieda and Garnet Carter developed Rock City as a roadside attraction with Lester Dill's success in mind. Maybe not. Certainly Dill shared ("stole") their clever barn-painting marketing strategy, which is why I remember as a child seeing and being teased by dozens of barns across the Midwest in falling-down condition, Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama, one painted with imperfect SEE ROCK CITY or SEE SEVEN STATES, the next painted MERAMEC CAVERNS. Those barns have a cult following of their own.

 

What is Rock City?

Rock City is an old-fashioned and surreal spatial entertainment. It's a tourist trap in a garden of boulders at the end of a winding steep road on the top of a mountain above Chattanooga, although legally it's across the state line in Georgia. That road is an experience in itself. The attraction is a pedestrian sequence, a structured experience of landscape, meant to be seen and felt in a certain order. You pay your money at the gift shop and you're given a sort of map, a chart, for a one-way path. You know what to expect. As as you walk down the Grand Corridor, past Needle's Eye, past the Deer Park (with deer), under Goblin's Underpass, under the 1,000-ton Balanced Rock, over the Swing-a-long Suspension Bridge, close to but not over Lover's Leap, and through Fat Man's Squeeze, you're something like a pinball in a pinball machine. These small experiences are meant to seen and felt in a certain order. And there are gnomes everywhere.

From their site:

Legend has it that gnomes and elves used to hold large seasonal gatherings in a clearing on the far side Fat Man's Squeeze, thinking they were safe from the curious eyes of humans. When they realized how many of us were able to wiggle our way through, the Little Ones retreated to a more private meeting place deep within the forest.

The amazing thing is that this is completely satisfying.

Unlike Wall Drug and Meramec Caverns, where part of the tourist trap experience is the cynical enjoyable displeasure of being taken, with fond hatred afterward, Rock City is absolutely on the level. It is the most gentle and sincere of tourist traps.

Part of the pleasure is in the ordering of the experience. In that way it's totally comparable to Frederick Law Olmsted's carefully engineered entry from Grand Army Plaza into Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where a series of natural features are framed and sequenced to create spatial effects of contrast and anticipation and discovery, so that simply taking a walk becomes an almost cinematic experience. And in that way it's something like mini golf too.

 

And part of the pleasure is spatial complexity. I'm convinced there's a human thirst for haptic complexity, ramping up, venturing across, squeezing through, negotiating curves, stooping under, judging your path, being channeled like a pinball.

 

 

On a high enough resolution you can see this vintage postcard describe Lovers' Leap as "A wonderful view into five states," dating it to before postwar inflation.