Gatorland

This guide to Gatorland in Orlando traces the fifteen-foot alligator-mouth entrance back to a coffee table in the early 1960s, where Frank Godwin, son of founder Owen Godwin, studied a gator skull night after night with no formal blueprint. It follows the welder, two plasterers, and Frank himself as they built the jaws by eye over roughly six months, and reaches back further to 1949, when Owen turned a sixteen-acre borrow pit into a roadside park first called Snake Village and Alligator Farm. That park carried its original name for five years before the site became Gatorland in 1954.