Hood Milk Bottle

The story

Arthur Gagner didn't construct a 40-foot-tall wooden milk bottle along Route 44 in Taunton, Massachusetts, in 1933 because he was an architect. He built it because he made homemade ice cream and needed passing motorists on the bank of the Three Mile River to slam on their brakes. Weighing 15,000 pounds and spanning 18 feet across, Gagner's giant bottle was an early experiment in mimetic novelty architecture—building a shop in the literal shape of what it sells—long before drive-thrus swept the country. The stand was sold to the Sankey family in 1943, but by 1967 it sat abandoned and rotting on the roadside, so dilapidated that legendary photographer Walker Evans captured Polaroid images of its ruin in 1974.

Its rescue was as theatrical as its construction. In 1977, dairy giant H.P. Hood bought the abandoned shell, paid $25,000 to restore it, and donated it to the Boston Children's Museum. On April 20, 1977, workers loaded the 15-ton wooden structure onto a barge and floated it up Boston Harbor to Fort Point Channel in an event marketed as the 'Great Bottle Sail.' When the museum expanded in 2006, construction crews literally sliced the bottle in half—uncapping its top—so the base could be shifted a few feet onto its current plaza without destroying the original 1930s frame.

If you were somehow able to fill the structure with actual liquid, it would hold 58,620 gallons of milk. Today it stands as one of the few surviving pieces of early American roadside architecture, operating not as a museum exhibit, but right back where it started: as a functional food and ice cream stand on the edge of the harbor.