"In the '90s, Cartoon Network was new and lacked an archive vast enough to fill cable's round-the-clock schedule. From 1992 to 2001, Hanna-Barbera's vault of Boomer nostalgia trips — The Flinstones, Scooby-Doo, The Jetsons — plugged the gaps. These programs spanned millennia, but all shared at least one common trope: An episode, or multiple episodes, depicting a ride through a Tunnel of Love.
Credulous little idiot I was, I took these rides as established facts of life, was positive I'd one day ride through one. Two decades later, I've still never so much as seen one. I got to thinking: Do these things still exist? Did they ever?...
You'd have to go back a hundred years to find anything like a thriving romantic-boat-ride culture in the United States, according to Jim Futrell, historian of the National Amusement Park Historical Association. "The traditional Tunnel of Loves probably started fading out in the 20s," he said...
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."
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/city/214995-whatever-happened-to-the-tunnel-of-love
The author then goes on a field trip to one of the last two "tunnels of love". Quotes include: "It was like watching a film in a foreign language, or roaming the diseased mind-space of a 1920s gold prospector with an opium habit."
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