The Infantorium

There’s an old apartment building in South Minneapolis that looks totally out of place. It’s in a residential neighborhood with small bungalows and some auto body shops. And in the early 1900s, it used to be part of an amusement park called Wonderland. The park’s biggest attraction wasn’t the roller coaster, or the dance hall...

Visitors would pay ten cents to enter a spacious room full of glass boxes that were incubators with tiny premature babies on display. But despite how weird this whole concept might seem today, this wasn’t the only place this was happening.

According to Lauren Rabinovitz, an amusement park historian, at the turn of the century, incubators for premature babies were widely available at fairs and amusement parks across America, rather than hospitals...